A MAN CALLED PETER

I have a weakness for films of the sword and sandal/Biblical epic/religious genre and I make no apologies for this. It has certainly lead to my preoccupation with Chinese/Korean wuxia drama.

So, during this weekend completing Holy Week and the day before Easter Sunday, I indulge in a truly weird film, A Man Called Peter. I bought this 1955 Cinemascope classic DVD on the cheap at Costco, bundled with Luther, which I recently watched via Netflix (and which was a pretty fine movie). I suppose this package was designed to appeal to mainstream Protestants. I also wanted to buy The Greatest Story Ever Told with the truly magnificent Max Von Sydow, but it came with Mel Gibson's old-Catholic version of Passion of the Christ, the bloody Good Friday epic I already own. I'll probably pick that set up next time I need cat litter and toilet paper and pass on the Gibson epic to someone who has a taste for attractive half-naked bloodied men.

I vaguely remember A Man Called Peter when it came out. I would have been seven or eight years old, probably the film was playing at one of the three movie palaces in our provincial town: the State, the Capitol, or the Rivoli. (No multiplexes then.) Set in the late 30s/early 40s, it has an ambiance of Gone with the Wind meets It's A Wonderful Life. But now watching it, I have never seen a film more worthy of MST3K parody. (Maybe my blogging compatriot, with whom I frequently argue the value and meaning of religion, should establish this as a channel...a "critique" of spiritual/religious films, MTT3K. Mysterium Tremendum Theatre 3000. With little commenting robots who are parodies of Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and perhaps, me as a stand-in for Gypsy. Note to blogger compatriot: if you do this, and you could, the idea is mine and I get some of the proceeds to be negotiated!)

Peter is not St. Peter (though the reference is obvious) but a pious Presbyterian who somehow is "called" to be the pastor of the Church of the Presidents and the U.S. Senate Chaplain. (Wow, the alliteration here was totally random! I would have said Parish, but they're Presbyterian, and this was a decade before we had a Catholic president.) His wife hotly (though she might not have recognized her own heat, this is pre-My Body, My Self) pursued him after a sermon of his she heard about women's emancipation. "What man wants a woman whose hair stinks of cigarette smoke? A woman who can drink like his buddies?" The feminist in me is slightly enraged. Need I mention that there was no mention of equal pay for equal work? This was 1955. (Although in this post-feminist world, I am struck by the new feminine mystique, the focus on the divine feminine. Pretty much what Mrs. Peter was talking about.)

Still, the movie is compelling. Maybe the whole point is summed up in the line:

"Most people get just enough of an exposure to Christianity in childhood to give them a lifetime immunity to ever catching the real thing."