Reviewed By: Hal Astell
I recorded The Keys of the Kingdom because it's one of those
intriguing opportunities to watch Vincent Price in something other than a
horror movie. One of the icons of the genre who's never less than magnetic, he
came to it after a surprising number of other films which are a varied and
fascinating bunch to work through. He was an important name at this point, this
film released a mere month after his excellent showing in Otto Preminger's
Laura and a year after The Song of Bernadette, which may explain why he's third
credited amongst a strong cast, even though we don't get to see much of him:
one brief early scene and he's gone for over an hour and a half. What I soon
found was that he's one of the least reasons to watch this film, as a Roman
Catholic bishop called Angus Mealey, who knew Fr Francis Chisholm as a young
Scots lad. Fr Chisholm is who the film is all about and while we first meet him
as an old man, this is the story of his life.
As the film begins in 1938, Fr Chisholm has recently
returned to Tweedside, his home parish in Scotland. The monsignor has been
checking him out and decides that he should retire, though the good father has
different ideas. He sounds just like Gregory Peck but doesn't look remotely
like him because he's plastered with some capable aging make up. I should add
that nobody at the time would have recognised him anyway because he was new in
Hollywood, with only a single film six months behind him, a Jacques Tourneur
war picture called Days of Glory in which he played a Russian fighting the
Nazis, hardly how we might imagine the typical Gregory Peck role. He's a little
unlike Peck here too, with despair in his voice as he asks the monsignor to
talk to Bishop Angus. Of course the monsignor has already made up his mind, at
least until he heads up to bed and picks up Fr Chisholm's journal, a huge
volume that goes all the way back to 1878.
It really doesn't have a pleasant beginning. The young
Francie Chisholm, played by 16 year old Roddy McDowall, already on his 27th
picture and riding high after Lassie Come Home and My Friend Flicka the year
before, is quickly orphaned. His fisherman father gets mugged for being a dirty
papist and when his mother goes looking for him, the pair are washed from a
rope bridge to their deaths in a raging torrent. It's enough to test your faith
in the Lord, but Roman Catholicism was something of a Hollywood fad in the mid
forties, perhaps as a hopeful counter to the horror of war, and so young
Francie ends up in the church. Ned's daughter Nora wants him to come home from
college to marry her but her mother Polly is all set on him becoming a priest.
Nora believes she's going to lose the battle but it's only when she dies just
before he graduates, a full year since he's seen her but with a newborn
daughter, that he chooses the priesthood.
Thus far it's been all Gregory Peck's show, this being
precisely the sort of part we expect him to shine in. Perhaps the most
believably sincere of all the classic Hollywood actors, his image was born out
of honesty and vulnerability. Never a tough guy in the way that many screen
heroes of the time were tough guys, he forged his own brand of toughness by
relentlessly standing up for what was right, regardless of the danger it would
bring him. We don't believe John Wayne's characters were scared, because he was
frickin' John Wayne. Yet we believe Peck's were, all the time, but he did the
right thing anyway. That conviction is totally apparent here and the role set
his career in motion, earning him an Oscar nod as Best Actor, though Ray
Milland deservedly won for The Lost Weekend. The obvious comparison is to
Robert Donat for Goodbye, Mr Chips, but that film flowed more evenly and while
Peck is excellent here, Donat was amazing there.
We do get to meet a few key players though, all of whom are
capable. Edmund Gwenn is Hamish McNabb, who runs Holywell College and becomes a
father figure to Francis. Sir Cedric Hardwicke is the Tweedside monsignor who
narrates the story in flashback. Vincent Price is briefly seen on a train, but
most obviously there's Thomas Mitchell as Chisholm's oldest friend, a devout
atheist called Willie Tulloch. Mitchell never saw a film he couldn't try to
steal and he has a good go here only to be forced into accepting defeat to a
surprising set of actors. You see, this film is primarily set in China and
Twentieth Century Fox chose to cast a selection of ethnic American actors as
the Chinese characters. Beyond Peck, who has by far the largest role, the
actors who dominate are people like Benson Fong, Leonard Strong, Philip Ahn and
Richard Loo, all American born but all of obvious Chinese or Korean heritage.
All four are a delight with every scene and every line.
To illustrate how surprising and how welcome a choice that
was, I should provide a comparison to another 1944 film in which Hollywood did
the precise opposite. This picture is something of an amalgam of two other
prominent 1944 pictures, taking the Roman Catholic background and the concept
of a priest as the lead character from Paramount's Going My Way, the big Oscar
winner of the year, and the poor Chinese setting from MGM's Dragon Seed, one of
the most ridiculously cast films of all time. When you think of Katharine
Hepburn I'm guessing you don't tend to think 'Chinese peasant', but that's
Dragon Seed: Kate and her pristine Bryn Mawr accent as Jade Tan, submissive
wife of a poor Chinese farmer. Also in yellowface were Walter Huston, J Carrol
Naish, Agnes Moorehead, Henry Travers, Aline MacMahon, even Akim Tamiroff and
Turhan Bey. Philip Ahn and Benson Fong were there too but in meaningless parts,
not real ones like here.
What's most embarrasing is that that sort of thing was
commonplace, capable actors like Anna May Wong ignored in favour of white
actors in yellowface, like Myrna Loy, Luise Rainer or Renée Adorée. So it's
totally refreshing to see what appears to be all the Chinese characters played
by ethnic actors, not just the bad guys but the good guys too and it's truly
joyous to see them do such a great job. In their company, Peck looks like the
outsider he would have been, a Catholic priest from the States sent to the city
of Pai Tan in Chekhow Province as a volunteer minister, perhaps the only white
man in town. He finds a wrecked mission and a congregation of two, Hosannah and
Philomena Wong, the ones who stayed behind to meet him in the hope that they'll
give him money. They're rice Christians, those who convert because they're paid
to do so, with rice left in their prayerbooks, only to convert back when the
rice runs out.
Fr Chisholm takes lodgings in the city and puts up a sign,
the Mission of St Andrew. The locals egg it and, when he goes to swap out the
sign, they egg him too. There isn't much hope until Joseph arrives. Born Tao
Ming but baptised in Pai Tan by the previous minister, he's played by Benson
Fong, which means that Charlie Chan's #3 son becomes Fr Chisholm's #1
assistant. He's a great character, an overzealous converter, multilinguist and
a grounding for the father. More arrive when Willie Tulloch sends him medical
books, instruments and medicines and so he adds a second sign that he'll treat
the sick for free. The big change arrives with Mr Pao who invites Fr Chisholm
to the house of his cousin, the mandarin Mr Chia. Mr Chia's son has a serious
infection and the constant attendance of three doctors and a Taoist priest
aren't helping in the slightest. The good father gives him ether, drains the
wound and prays he hasn't signed his death warrant.
While the family initially seem ungrateful, given that he
saves the boy's life, Mr Chia soon turns up at the mission offering to become a
Christian. He doesn't believe in God, of course. 'In time, no doubt, I will
accustom myself to it,' he says with fatalism. He's just returning an honour,
but Fr Chisholm turns him down. That just impresses Mr Chia even more so he
donates the Hill of the Brilliant Green Jade with water rights, a clay pit and
twenty workmen to build whatever he needs. Two years later he has a real
mission and Mr Chia is a firm friend. Leonard Strong is wonderful as Mr Chia
and Philip Ahn is just as wonderful as his haughty envoy, Mr Pao. Watching them
here, I can't help but imagine what the Charlie Chan films would have been like
had someone like Philip Ahn been given the role over Warner Oland, a Swede, and
Americans Sidney Toler and Roland Winters. Both Strong and Ahn had long
Hollywood careers but were consistently marginalised.
No comments:
Post a Comment