Throughout the Month of March TCM will be risking damnation by airing “condemned” films every Thursday night beginning this evening with The Story of Temple Drake (1933) followed by Black Narcissus (1947), Design For Living (1933), The Outlaw (1943), Baby Face (1933) and Wild Boys of the Road (1933). These movies all have one thing in common: they were condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency. According to TCM’s monthly Now Playing guide, the CLOD was founded in 1933 and dedicated itself to “combating objectionable content in motion pictures (often of a sexual nature) from the viewpoint of the Catholic Church.” The program will be hosted by Sister Rose Pacatte, a member of the Daughters of Saint Paul and founding director of the Pauline Center for Media Studies. She is also the author of several books about film and has served as a juror at the Venice, Berlin, Locarno and Newport Beach film festivals.
It’s probably not surprising that TCM’s Condemned Film Festival has come under scrutiny from some sources and individuals who find the programming objectionable and Sister Rose Pacatte’s involvement unacceptable, particularly during Lent and the run-up to Easter Sunday. To provide more insight on this upcoming series I decided to contact TCM programmer Millie De Chirico, who kindly answered my questions and Director of Program Production Scott McGee, who allowed me to quote from an insightful interview he did with Sister Rose. I hope it might encourage viewers of all types and stripes to tune in, no matter what their religious affiliation may or may not be.
The Condemned Film Festival was the bright idea of Scott McGee and Millie De Chirico selected the 27 films scheduled to air March 3 through March 31. Millie, who grew up Catholic, was happy she got the opportunity to program the festival because she hopes it will provide an “Interesting and fresh lens with which to view these films.” I suspect that some viewers might tune in just to see some titillating and taboo entertainment but the programming has a lot more to offer besides a few cheap thrills. Anyone remotely interested in film history and censorship should find it fascinating. When I asked Millie about the festival’s goals she explained, “I hope it gives people a look into the relationship between religion and the arts.”
The films scheduled to air are loosely arranged by the decades they were released beginning with the 1930s into the 1970s and run the gamut from a smoldering Jane Russell seductively pouting, sneering and jiggling her way through The Outlaw (pictured above) to the surreal and sexually suggestive horror-infused fable, Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1973). The exception is the last day of the festival, which features “Special Circumstance” films that make up their own unique category and include Baby Doll (1956), Strange Cargo (1940) and Rififi (1954). I’m particularly looking forward to seeing Sister Rose introduce Black Narcissus tonight and I am curious how she’ll represent two of my long-time favorite films, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), both airing on March 10. When I asked Millie if she was looking forward to any of the films scheduled she added, “I really like the last night of the festival, which is all the ‘Special Circumstance’ films. And personally, I love that we’re showing Ice Castles (1978) as part of the festival.”
When asked about her programming choices and the difficulties the festival presented, Millie explained that, “It was not that hard to find films . . . It was more about figuring out what we could get access to play on the network. I got most of what I wanted but there were some titles that I would’ve loved to play, but because of content issues, we couldn’t . . . The biggest challenge was just finding the actual rating and verbiage from the Legion itself. When Sister Rose came to the studio she actually brought an old copy of the Ratings Book, which was essentially distributed in the church but wasn’t something a pedestrian could go out and buy.”
It’s surprising that Sister Rose Pacette agreed to host the event, especially in light of some of the negative attention she’s received. In an interview with TCM’s Scott McGee, Sister Rose explained how she reacted to being asked to participate in the festival joking that, “Maybe there’s some kind of divine irony in this? I really don’t know. It is funny and it isn’t. Especially because of some of the reactions that I’ve been getting, the push back, people think I’m endorsing movies that were condemned between 1933 and 1965, and then a little beyond that. It’s not an endorsement to be able to talk about these things and it’s unfortunate I think that people get scared by a willingness to explore and to be educated, and to be fascinated, and to be interested. But be that as it may, my first reaction was, ‘Sure. I’ll do it.’”
She went on to say that films such as The Song of Bernadette (1943) and The Trouble with Angels (1966) had buoyed her desire to become a nun explaining that, “Saint Ignatius says that God is present everywhere. We can find God everywhere and I think that we can find God at the movies. There’s a sacramental quality to film . . . Film is an outward manifestation of inner realities and we see the inner realities of these characters played out before us. It’s someone else’s imagining but our imagination can engage as well, especially if the story is meaningful to us. If something in the characters, the hero’s journey if you will, touches us in some way.” She also acknowledged that films impact us all differently expounding on the idea by saying, “Nobody sees the same film the same way so there’s no way to generalize how a person will respond or how an audience will respond . . . There’s no way to predict that because a human person is a universe and we all have different experiences, different educations, different expectations of the movie. And because of that, that’s what we bring to our movie watching experience.”
After quoting the renowned French film critic and fellow Catholic André Bazin who once said “The cinema has always been interested in God,” Sister Rose added “We see the face of humanity in cinema and it’s in the face of humanity that we find God, we find that divine spark. So if a film is truly human it’s truly of the divine, and if it’s about the divine then it’s truly human. They’re mutually inclusive, they’re not exclusive . . . Some people deem some of these condemned films as difficult. Well, maybe they were for the times and maybe it was just so overwhelming for audiences to see their imaginations played out in front of them in sight and sound? But I think that if we appraise these stories calmly, we’ll see much deeper than how they were evaluated 80 years ago.”
I don’t align myself with any particular religion but I appreciated Sister Rose’s thoughtful contemplation on cinema during her interview with Scott MacGee. I think she’ll bring a distinct voice and an interesting perspective on the films she introduces, whether she approves of them or not, so I hope you’ll tune in.
Below you’ll find a link to the TCM Podcast with Sister Rose along with a full schedule of the films being shown and links to other articles about TCM’s month-long Festival of Condemned Films.
Further reading & listening:
- TCM Podcast: Interview with Sister Rose Pacatte
- Official schedule for TCM’s Festival of Condemned Films
- CatholicPhilly.com (digital successor to The Catholic Standard and Times, official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia) on TCM’s Festival of Condemned Films
- Film Censorship in Focus – This Month on TCM by Will McKinley