Founder on Film

One night in 1709, a gang of bullies set fire to a thatched cottage in Epworth, England, where their censorious Anglican vicar lay sleeping. The Rev. Samuel Wesley and his family escaped in their nightshirts, but one small son got left behind in the rush. It took a valiant rescue effort to save five-year-old John Wesley from the flames, and when he was restored to his mother, she is supposed to have offered a prayer: "See--is not this a brand, plucked from the burning?"*

John Wesley never seemed to forget his mother's words. A spiritual fire burned within him. In a life that all but spanned the 18th century (he died in 1791, aged 87), the founder of Methodism traveled hundreds of thousands of miles (mostly on horseback), preached 42,000 sermons, wrote learned volumes on subjects as far apart as Hebrew grammar and the electrical treatment of rheumatism. Wesley's Methodist revival embraced all Britain, moved on to America, and today, in Methodist missions, reaches round the world.

To compress this vast story into a popular film biography involves a challenge that might well deter Hollywood. On a less ambitious scale--and aiming to teach as much as to entertain--the Radio and Film Commission of the U.S. Methodist Church has produced John Wesley, a 77-minute "semidocumentary" in color. Made at cost ($200,000) by Britain's J. Arthur Rank, a zealous Methodist himself, it is "for use in the churches."

The film tells the outlines of the Wesley story, and shows Wesley, in a series of episodic scenes, developing from a pious moppet learning to read Genesis to a black-robed Oxonian distributing bread to the poor. Wesley's adventures in the colony of Georgia, where he had a commission to instruct godless Indians, are ticked off in a snatch of dialogue, but his search for a divine revelation that would give him "the inward witness" which lies at the heart of Methodism gets serious and moving treatment.

British Actor Leonard Sachs, who, like Wesley, stands 5 ft. 2 in., bears an astonishing likeness to the many preserved portraits of his hero. But hero worship creeps in, and Evangelist Wesley is too often depicted as an 18th century version of Tough Guy James Cagney--deflating the dandies of Bath, puncturing the pomposities of the Anglican Bishop of Bristol, brushing off a highwayman, slicing through a murderous mob of Cornish fisherfolk. In general, the film lacks the dramatic effectiveness of the Lutherans' successful Martin Luther (TIME, Sept. 14), but it should be a popular and acceptable program piece for Methodist churches for months to come.

* An echo of Amos 4:11: "And ye were as a firebrand plucked out of the burning."

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