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.