A Glimpse of Hell

Everybody knows that Billy Graham is a great showman who can fill arenas in most cities of the world, but few realize that the evangelist is also something of a movie mogul. His Burbank studio, World Wide Pictures, has turned out 101 films over the past 25 years, many of them pedestrian one-reelers, some of higher quality. Graham's latest, The Hiding Place, which is being previewed in eleven cities this spring, is a totally new departure. A 145-minute color spectacular with two award-whining stars, Julie Harris and Eileen Heckart, it boasts 2,000 extras and a production cost of $1.7 million.

Earlier Graham feature films were generally fictional sagas of personal conversion, complete with an inserted sermon delivered by Billy. By contrast, The Hiding Place is the true story of two pious Dutch Protestant spinsters who hid Jews from the Nazis in their Haarlem home during World War II, and were imprisoned in Ravensbrueck concentration camp as a result. The film is drawn from a fast-selling 1971 autobiography of the same title by Corrie ten Boom, one of the sisters. Now 83, she is currently on a speaking tour of the U.S. and Canada.

In the film, an accomplished but little-known Houston actress, Jeannette Clift, plays Corrie, Harris portrays her sister Betsie ten Boom and Heckart a prison trusty. The film was shot last year on location in Haarlem and at an unused army camp in England, which was turned into the hell of Ravensbrueck, the women's camp where 96,000 lost their lives.

The story is a significant Christian indictment of antiSemitism, which Graham thinks is currently on the rise and is one reason he wanted to make The Hiding Place. "This film shows that some Christians stood up for persons in a minority group, even at the cost of their lives," Graham says. In addition, he forecasts the "possibility of great suffering coming to Christians within a generation. The film shows how God's grace and love can sustain believers in the worst of times."

Ovens' Stench. The Hiding Place plunges Into perplexing religious issues, such as whether Christians should disobey the state and whether they should lie or steal to further a good cause. Most important is the age-old quandary of the existence of evil. One Ravensbrueck inmate taunts Corrie by saying that a God who did nothing after smelling the stench from the extermination ovens must be either powerless or cruel. Corrie's reply is that "the same God that you are accusing came and lived in the midst of our world. He was beaten, he was mocked, and he died on the cross, and he did it for love, for us." But hers is no glib story of faith. Later she prays privately: "Jesus, there are many things I do not understand. Do not let me go mad." Graham has often been criticized for emphasizing personal conversion and avoiding the difficult problems in the Christian life. Few will carp at shallowness in The Hiding Place.

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