God in a Gas Chamber

The Hoodlum Priest (Murray-Wood; United Artists). The divine spark often burns in trash, and it burns with a still and terrible loveliness in this loud, crude, violent and sentimental cops-and-robbers picture, the work of an energetic actor-producer named Don Murray and a talented televeteran named Irvin Kershner.

The priest (Murray) of the title is the well-known St. Louis Jesuit, Father Charles Dismas Clark, who for 25 years has lived and served as the friend and confessor of convicts. The story starts like any old half-hour on TV. A baby-faced sidewalk bully (Keir Dullea), who has done two years in state prison for an armed robbery that netted him exactly $19, emerges from the tank still wet behind the ears. The priest awakens a hope in the boy that he can actually make it the hard way. The boy works like a demon, impresses his boss. Then, fired for a theft he did not commit, he bitterly resolves on revenge. While trying to blow the boss's safe, he is surprised by a foreman, who attacks him with a crowbar. The boy panics, shoots his assailant dead, runs wildly through the streets till he is cornered in an empty house.

At this point something remarkable begins to happen on the screen. The priest reaches the boy before the police move in, finds him cowering bug-eyed with terror, hardly able to hold the .38 in his quivering hands. All at once the rifles, the tear-gas bombs, the fortressed cells--all the immense impersonal machinery of justice begins to seem absurdly excessive and inappropriate. All at once the spectator understands, vaguely and perhaps a little guiltily, that the young punk he has been sneering at for an hour or so is after all a human being. Gently, the priest shows him that the situation is hopeless, leads him sobbing to the waiting van.

Will justice be merciful to this weak and deluded but not essentially evil young man? With appalling speed the verdict is reached, the sentence pronounced, the appeal denied. The condemned object is swiftly, efficiently prepared for the gas chamber. In the boy's eyes, wide with horror the spectator reads the incredulous realization: in a few short minutes his life, the only life he has or will ever have, is with absolute certainty going to end, for what can possibly save him now?

Quietly the priest begins to tell him the story of the thief on the cross, of how he believed in Christ, of how Christ loved him and promised him that in death he would find eternal life--"And he was a convict just like you." Suddenly, wonderfully, a new dimension of reality surrounds and penetrates the scene: the dimension of divine love. Like an impossible hope it flickers in his heart. In this hope the condemned man and his audience are so intensely interfused and mutually identified --thanks to the bone-honest, heartfelt playing of Dullea and Murray--that the spectator not only shares the victim's agony in the gas chamber but may even, at one transcendent moment in this film, feel himself dead in the dead man, feel the dead man living in himself. The experience is extraordinary -- nothing less than an illusion of immortality.

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