CATHOLICS VS. TRUMP'S BFF'S........BQ PREYS UPON "THE CARDINAL"

The Cardinal (1963)    I'll admit the BQ has had fun at the expense of some of Otto Preminger's Big Bloat Bestseller movies........2 & 1/2 to 3 hour heavy-handed epics derived from 700 page doorstop tomes that everybody was reading on airplanes.........("Exodus", "Advise And Consent", etc, etc)

                 I landed on this one because in the course of its indigestible length, it pits the Catholic priesthood against  Dear Leader Trump's two favorite support groups.......foaming-at-the-mouth racists and rampaging Nazis.........

                    Even before the film chooses to wander into those two snake pits, it dips itself into the pro-life firestorm.......... the plot forces our young, self righteous priest Father Fermoyle (Tom Tryon) to decide who's going to live or die - his wayward, unwed pregnant sister (Carol Lynely) or her distressed-in-labor baby......

                    Guess which one of he picks for the  the Great Beyond......heh, heh heh........but don't feel too bad - the rescued infant grows up as the spitting image of her dead mom.....(cause she's also played by Carol Lynley....)

                    But enough of these trivial matters........as Father Fermoyle slowly ascends through the church hierarchy (til he attain's the film's tittle), it's off to the racist horrors of the 1930's Deep South.......where he and a young black priest (Ossie Davis) defy an army of drawling, drooling KKKers.......(or you could say, the ancestors of Make America Great Again Trumpanzees.....)

                     Both priests get roundly whipped by the Klansmen..........but since Fermoyle's white, when he wakes up, he's aided by a kindly Ku Kluxer with a jar of salve and a harmonica to play 'Dixie'.......(If you think I'm kidding about this, treat yourself to Preminger's 1967 full blown loony Southern Fried epic "Hurry Sundown", so ridiculed and reviled, it put a definitive end to his Big Bloat Bestseller epics...)

                     As opposed to the rest of the film's expansive European locations, "The Cardinal"s Deep South foray comes off as low-budget backlot cheapjack, filmed on sets left over by old TV westerns.  But we're soon quickly off to pre-World War 2 Austria......with our plucky ambitious Fermoyle coping with the rise of Hitler and his Make Germany Great Again minions.....)

                    Here's where Preminger indulges in the kind of pageant-like spectacle that juices up the movie's trailers.......hordes of rampaging brownshirts plowing through Catholics and priests like a human buzzsaw.

                    Or in Trump's words.......'very fine people'............

                    Not much left to say about the movie itself........other than random odd stuff that pops up in it.....Carol Lynely declaring her slutty lifestyle by becoming a....Oh My God....tango dancer......Broadway star Robert Morse madly twitching in a vaudeville number.......and Tom Tryon.

                      Tryon, a jouneyman hunk 'o beefcake in the Rock Hudson mold was born too late.....there was no longer the kind of studio system that could have nurtured him into a real actor. Tyrannized and humiliated by Preminger in both this film and "In Harm's Way", he left acting to become a best-selling author of scary novels, ("The Other", "Harvest Home")

                      His stolid, uninteresting performance doesn't do the film any favors.....but then neither does Preminger's languid pedestrian direction. 1 & 1/2 stars......and that's primarily for Jerome Moross's memorable main title theme........