Volume > Issue > A Truly "Eerie" Film?

A Truly “Eerie” Film?

GUEST COLUMN

By Francis Canavan | September 1996
The Rev. Francis Canavan, S.J., is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Fordham. His latest book is The Pluralist Game.

A film entitled The Spitfire Grill has just been released. We have a fascinating insight into the secular liberal mind in two reports on the film after it was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. Both reports were written by Caryn James and published in The New York Times on Saturday, February 3, and in that paper’s “Arts & Leisure” section on the following day.

The big news, according to the headline on the first report, was “Film Financed by a Religious Group.” The Spitfire Grill won the festival’s Audience Award for drama. But few in the audience knew that the film had been financed by a religious group. Worse yet, the group was a Catholic religious order, the Priests of the Sacred Heart. But Ms. James knew, and she dutifully sounded the alarm.

Gregory Productions is the name of the company that financed, produced, and marketed the film, and it is wholly owned by the religious order. “Some executives in Hollywood are uneasy about the church’s connection with the film and what they see as Gregory’s religious agenda,” says Ms. James.

Enjoyed reading this?

READ MORE! REGISTER TODAY

SUBSCRIBE

You May Also Enjoy

The Panoramic & the Personal

With Forster’s A Passage to India Lean reached for something a bit deeper: to film the specifically spiritual against the background of the clash between English and Indian cultures.

In Case You Didn't Get to See The Passion of the Christ a Second Time

As a work of aesthetic beauty, of historical and biblical simplicity, and of theological profundity, the film ranks high as a great piece of Christian art.

The Vatican’s Filthy Lucre

Peter’s Pence doesn’t solicit funds for financial speculation that fattens the Vatican’s investment portfolios; the fund shouldn’t be used that way.