Word: kerrs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Admittedly, the legion and Catholic moviegoers have hiked up the moral tone of Hollywood productions. But this week Drama Critic Walter Kerr, writing in the Catholic lay weekly, the Commonweal, asked his fellow Catholics an embarrassing question: Are they censoring the art out of movies, as well as the immorality...
Purity with Popcorn. Writes Critic Kerr: "The Church in this country has . . . seemed to say, 'I don't care what the quality of the art work is, so long as its content is innocuous, or perhaps favorably disposed in our direction . . .' A film featuring a saint is a film of majestic technical excellence. A film showing a nun driving a jeep is a superbly made comedy. A film embracing a jolly priest, a self-sacrificing Catholic mother and an anti-Communist message must be defended in the diocesan press from those irresponsible esthetes . . . who have...
...Kerr argues that the pat identification of good art with characters who behave in a manner morally irreproachable has discredited the Catholic intellectual position in the arts, and almost nullified Catholic intellectual influence therein. As for "the influence which Catholicism has had" on the screen: "We forget that this influence has been wholly of one kind: the influence of the pressure group...
...morally simpleminded" standards of the legion, Kerr continues, would automatically ban the filming of much of Nobel Prizewinner François Mauriac's work, or that of English Novelist Graham Greene, both Catholics. Concludes Kerr, after recalling a maxim quoted by French Catholic Paul Claudel ("God writes straight with crooked lines"): "Art without crooked lines is unnatural art-inevitably inferior art. And in its production not only the creative mind is betrayed; the Catholic mind, in its fullness, in its scope, in its centricity, is betrayed as well . . . We are moving closer and closer to the sort of stand...
While Sergeant Kerr chain-smoked and watched nervously on a TV set in the hospital basement, the cameras showed his wife Lillian on the operating table, virtually obscured by doctors and nurses in close-order formation. There was a short explanation of what was going to happen and the fetal heartbeat pounded over the air. Then the cameras switched to the hospital's up-to-the-minute facilities for care of premature babies. Only the TV crew and newsmen saw the actual incision in Mrs. Kerr's abdomen and the quick, dramatic extraction of the full-term baby...