Word: pastorate
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Even King's name is meaningful: he was baptized Michael Luther King, son of the Rev. Michael Luther King Sr., then and now pastor of Atlanta's big (4,000 members) Ebenezer Baptist Church. He was six when King Sr. decided to take on, for himself and his son, the full name of the Protestant reformer. Says young King: "Both father and I have fought all our lives for reform, and perhaps we've earned our right to the name...
Though the movie is not seen through the veil of the pastor's judgments, it includes them. So perhaps it runs closer than the recit to Gide's first-imagined tale, which may have been quite simple. The pastor discovers the blind girl when he is called to the bedside of her dying grandmother. The pastor believes it is not by accident that he has come upon the girl, and understands it as his holy obligation to take her home and rescue...
...girl's presence in the home, and the pastor's growing affection for her, is not easy for his family to bear. This uneasiness lasts throughout the movie. The subsequent events are not embroidery, but deepen the sketch. As an act of charity the pastor had rescued the girl, and when he has come to depend on her presence, it is still charity that he invokes to keep her with him. The pastor, his wife, Amelie, and his son, Jacques, realize all the possibilities of the first uneasiness in the brutal things they eventually say to each other...
...useless to talk too much about the movie because it explains itself, so clearly that it would be difficult to see twice. It is unlike Gide's book in which the pastor's assumptions--of his inexhaustible love, or simply of his own correctness--corrupt the world he gives to the blind girl...
This kind of assumption underlies the structure of the book. But in the movie it is arrived at, perhaps too directly, as the blind girl's discovery. The director, Jean Delannoy, seems to conjure up the desert he finds in the pastor's heart, in a way that comes near being brutal, especially in the last scenes...