Francis of Assisi is the usual, late fifties production. It's presented in 'scope, which is very nice. And it's shot on location in Italy, which is also nice. But we continually jump between location exteriors to tight quasi-exteriors and interiors with the unnaturally even, stage-bound lighting of the time. And the tone is hopelessly square, to meet the mindless, conformist hordes of the '50s without asking anything of them. 1961 is a great place to start marking the collapse of the Hollywood studio and star systems. Here an unlikely second banana (Bradford Dillman) is forced on viewers as a very poor leading man. If you ever wonder why unknowns are not asked to helm epics, Dillman is your answer.
I can accept that a saint's behavior might seem artificial, but the whole cast here is so cardboard it's like watching robots. And a convention in which morally good people are distinguishable by their continual, vacant smiles indicates the shallowness of the film. Can life possibly be this flat for anyone? It's bursting with phony good cheer and "official story" blandness. With enunciation replacing acting. None of the leads even attempts an accent, y'know, because a saint in Italy is pretty much indistinguishable from Joe Sixpack in Indiana. ...storybook costumes, blonde fair-skinned 'Italian' maidens? Blecch. It's the embodiment of shabby, unworldly 1961 values, that would soon be left behind. Jack Warner must have had this movie in mind when he concocted his disastrous production of Camelot.
I can accept that a saint's behavior might seem artificial, but the whole cast here is so cardboard it's like watching robots. And a convention in which morally good people are distinguishable by their continual, vacant smiles indicates the shallowness of the film. Can life possibly be this flat for anyone? It's bursting with phony good cheer and "official story" blandness. With enunciation replacing acting. None of the leads even attempts an accent, y'know, because a saint in Italy is pretty much indistinguishable from Joe Sixpack in Indiana. ...storybook costumes, blonde fair-skinned 'Italian' maidens? Blecch. It's the embodiment of shabby, unworldly 1961 values, that would soon be left behind. Jack Warner must have had this movie in mind when he concocted his disastrous production of Camelot.