Word: assisi
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FRANCO ZEFFIRELLI has fallen victim to the youth movement. In an attempt to tell the story of St. Francis of Assisi as a medieval eccentiric. Zeffirelli runs the risk of presenting the saint as a progenitor of Woodstock nation. His film succeeds in tracing a parallel between then and now, and thereby fails to become an acceptable work of art. At a time when hard-boiled movies are derigeur, a film on a religious theme can appear embarrassingly sentimental. Zeffirelli's has personal interpretation of the St. Francis legend does just that. And at a time when "Godspell" has recently...
...BROTHER SUN, SISTER MOON, I seldom see you, seldom hear your tune," warbles Donovan, the unseen balladeer whom Franco Zeffirelli has enlisted to lend a whiff of flower power to this over ripe version of the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Zeffirelli's work looks like a Sun day-school coloring book: everything is glowingly photogenic, including poverty, and leprosy. His St. Francis (Graham Faulkner) is a dewy, light-stepping youth who recruits the young men of Assisi the way a rock singer might round up a band. Their rebellion against the opulent hypocrisy they...
Parental abduction is, to be sure, not novel in the annals of religion. St. Clare's family tried to retrieve her bodily after she ran ,away from home to join St. Francis of Assisi and his band of pious mendicants. Legend has it that St. Thomas Aquinas' family locked him in a room with a whore to dissuade him from joining the Dominican order. But the deprogramming practiced by to day's soul snatchers seems suspiciously like a religious version of the Ludovico technique - that brain-blowing treatment administered to Alex, the anti-hero in Anthony Burgess...
...Wooden is a graying, sober-sided eminence who imparts what one player calls the "respect factor." Who, after all, could doubt a man who is a friend of Lawrence Welk, who admires the writings of Zane Grey and St. Francis of Assisi? Wooden is also a deacon in the First Christian Church of Santa Monica. He reads the Bible daily. He neither smokes nor drinks and will not tolerate profanity. On occasion, he will partake of a "Pat Boone Special" (ginger ale with a dash of grape juice). His strongest expletive is "Goodness gracious sakes alive!" And after a tough...
...survive, Wills believes, the church must be "resurrected from the feet up." New forms of life have come from outside the hierarchy: "from Athanasius at local councils, Benedict in the monasteries, Francis of Assisi in the roads." Reformers of the past-from Savonarola to John Henry Newman-suffered or were silenced in their time but eventually prevailed. "It has always been the task of the prophetic church to redeem the kingly church," Wills concludes. "As Pope Innocent needed St. Francis, Paul VI needs Dan Berrigan...