I saw it again recently myself. It’s an interesting film, based on Henry Morton Robinson’s 1950 roman-a-clef bestseller, said to be loosely based on the career of Francis Joseph Cardinal Spellman, THE CARDINAL follows the career of Father Fermoyle (Tryon), an ambitious and intellectual young priest in his rise through the Church hierarchy.
Promoted as a lush, beautifully photographed, star-studded epic of the Catholic Church in the post Vatican II era, the film’s Father Stephen Fermoyle traces his episodic rose from Boston to the College of the Cardinals. Father Fermoyle struggles with nearly every crisis of the modern Church in his rise - clericalism and politics within the Church, interfaith marriage, family turmoil, abortion, bioethics, priestly celibacy, segregation and racism, and finally the rise of the Nazis…nearly every controversy but homosexuality (although the lead actor, Tryon, was himself openly homosexual in his later life.)
I thought Tryon was likable but perhaps a little vapid as the lead. Although his character is admittedly full of clerical ambition, it is tempered with a genuine desire for charity and social justice.
The supporting cast is excellent, and included director John Huston returning to film as an actor as the wily archbishop who assigns Father Fermoyle to a remote parish to cure him of his clerical ambition (a role which won him a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor); silent screen legend Dorothy Gish as father Fermoyle’s mother; Carol Lynley as his sister whose life spins out of control in conflict with her brother’s dictates of faith; Burgess Meredith as the gentle, dying pastor to whom he is assigned; John Saxon (of ENTER THE DRAGON and a lot of early 1960s teen romances my sister dragged me to see) as his sister’s Jewish fiancee, even a cameo by Bobby Morse (star of “How to Suceed in Business Without Really Trying,” and later the TV series “Mad Men”) as a vaudeville performer; Ossie Davis as an African-American priest in Georgia; and Romy Schneider as an Austrian who falls in love with Father Fermoyle. The locations in America, Italy, and Austria are breathtaking and showcase the Casamari Abbey in Veroli, the Stana Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome and St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna.
Some interesting (I think) background to the film:
Tom Tryon’s humiliating experiences with the dictatorial Otto Preminger (who fired him on set in front of his visiting parents, then rehired him) on this film led him to quit acting and begin a second career as a horror genre novelist. His books include “The Other” and “Harvest Home,” both later adapted as films. Tryon later said that he found writing more enjoyable and more lucrative than acting. It was probably also more pleasant than working with Otto Preminger.
If the voice of Cameron Prud’homme, who was cast as the father of Tom Tryon’s character sounds familiar, it is because he was dubbed by an uncredited Carroll O’Connor (later to achieve fame as Archie Bunker in the TV series “All in the Family,”) as Prud’homme was so terrorized by Preminger that he could barely speak.
The film was largely made on location. The scenes in the Vatican were coordinated through a young priest named Joseph Ratzinger, who would later become Pope Benedict XIII.
Cardinal Spellman was not happy with his fictional representation in either the novel nor the film adaptation and pressured Hollywood to prevent the filmic adaptation and the Church to avoid cooperation in the filming. Donald Hayne, a former priest who had also served as the technical advisor for THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, was able to persuade a Connecticut bishop to offer St. John’s Church for filming.
An uncredited Glenn Strange (a beloved character actor whose performances include the bartender in the “Gunsmoke” television series as well as Frankenstein’s monster in THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN) plays an uncredited cameo performance as one of the Klansmen.
