dolphinfish

I give what could have been a ten star documentary series only five because excellent production values and direction is destroyed in the second episode when the agenda is revealed -- Orange Man Bad. A brilliant opening episode suckers you in with new insights on the end of the Second World War, something I didn't think possible after nearly eighty years of research and study. You're set up and ready for more, and then comes episode two, the fifties, the cold war and the demagoguery of Joseph McCarthy. Incredibly, they manage to smear Trump with the execution of the Rosenbergs and the House Unamerican Activities Committee, notwithstanding that he was literally in short trousers at the time. An absolute criminal waste of talent and a contamination of history.

This was supposed to be actor Tom Tryon's breakout role, but the movie bombed at the time, and while Tryon went on to make a few more films, he ultimately left acting and became quite a successful writer. Based on a bestselling book of the time, the Cardinal is less about the titular character, but rather about the nature of the Catholic Church, particularly as it presented itself to the world in the first half of the twentieth century. This was the high noon of imperial Catholicism, the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, outside of which there was no salvation. Once exposed to it, you'll die a Catholic, even if you never step foot inside a church again after you grow up. That's really what the movie is about, and the life of the fictional cardinal of the title -- supposedly based on Cardinal Spellman, late archbishop of New York, whose reputation has not fared well since his death -- is merely the vehicle to display this. Despite the cosmetic changes since Vatican II, and the civil war that's currently going on within the Church, what Otto Preminger presented here is actually a good, if somewhat romanticised, picture of the true nature of Catholicism. If you watch with that in mind, you'll get more out of the movie than if you watch just to see a film. It's long, and maybe seven stars is generous, but it's a movie that perhaps deserved to do better at the box office than it did.

Having watched this movie twice now over the space of two years, I think I can say it's a missed opportunity. D'sousa's central premise -- that fascism is a thing of the left, not the right -- is certainly tenable, unarguable even, but this movie is not what's going to wake people up to that fact. Much of its hour and three quarters running time is given over to lingering shots of death camps and Nazi rallies and nowhere near enough time is given to arguing the case. It'll reinforce those of us who were already aware of the inherent instability of the left and its tendency to accelerate towards destruction, but the emotionalism of it will only solidify the left in their groundless assumptions of superior intellect. That's a shame.