New Movies: Pope Opera

"It is the test of a good religion," G. K. Chesterton once said, "whether you can make a joke about it." Judging by The Shoes of the Fisherman, Roman Catholicism is an excellent faith indeed. This saccharine Pope opera is sober-faced and straitlaced, but it would be hard to imagine a parochial-school sixth-grader taking it seriously.

Where Morris L. West's bestseller merely strained credulity, the movie shatters it beyond repair. In Siberia, a political prisoner has been pardoned by Russia's Premier (Laurence Olivier) after 20 years in a slave-labor camp. The freed man is no ordinary convict: he is Kiril Lakota, a tough, Mindszenty-like Slavic archbishop. Lakota has been sprung because Russia and China stand ready to trigger an atomic holocaust. The premier, who just happens to be La-kota's former inquisitor, is desperately gambling that the prelate can somehow persuade the world that the Soviet Union wants peace.

The long shot pays astonishing dividends. In Rome, Lakota is named a cardinal, and then, against his will, chosen Pope at a deadlocked consistory of the sacred college. Imprisoned anew, this time in an office that removes him from his fellow man, Pope Kiril walks incognito in the streets of the city. In the space of an hour, he proves that he is still a regular guy by hobnobbing with the ragazzi of Rome, exhibits his ecumenism by reciting the Shema Yisrael in the house of a dying Jew, and outdoes Dear Abby by cementing a broken marriage. His ex-cathedra advice: Love one another. In his spare time, Pope Kiril befriends a radical theologian, Father Telemond (Oskar Werner), soothes the internecine squabbles of the Roman Curia, and ends the possibility of World War III by giving away the wealth of the church to the starving Chinese.

The real star of the film is the Vatican itself, with its time-encrusted rituals and ancient, artistic treasures all faithfully reproduced in Panavision. But it has a respectable supporting cast. Quinn is an effective rough-and-humble Zorba the Pope. For a change, his fellow actors—notably Vittorio De Sica as a volatile Italian cardinal and Leo McKern as a jealous one—do not look embarrassed by their clerical robes. As Father Telemond, Werner appears uncommonly youthful for his 46 years; he seems fresher in each new movie, as if, like Merlin in The Once and Future King, he were living his life backwards. His role, unfortunately, requires him to do some pseudo-lofty philosophizing that sounds very much like a parody of Teilhard de Chardin—as it did in West's novel.

Some sort of plausible ecclesiastical drama might have been made from The Shoes of the Fisherman; but too much of the script and too many of the characterizations are comic-book distortions.