Word: shepherd
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Something is wrong with the crucifix. Hanging in the tiny church in a Virginia country town, it distresses the new pastor. The wooden corpus, Monsignor Vincent Shepherd observes, has "square, unsuffering eyes" that symbolize to the priest so much that is wrong with his church and his world. The sense of crucifixion is gone. Instead, he reflects, "it was as if Christ had never really suffered and died, but had only had the Last Supper, with twelve smiling men of social commitment and three folk guitarists, and then knocked the stone away from the tomb...
...something is wrong with the priest too. Shepherd has suffered a heart attack, and he is preoccupied with his own mortality. He clings to time as if to fend off eternity, but does little with it. He sits for hours in front of the rectory television set, resentful of parishioners who disturb him with their problems, unmindful that their private griefs are real wounds...
...ACTORS seem entirely in tune with Belgrader's approach. Standouts in the almost uniformly excellent company include Thomas Derrah's lightning-tongued Touchstone and Richard Spore as the older shepherd Corin, with a voice as flat as Indiana. Jeremy Geidt takes the roles of both dukes, usurper and sylvan exile, by storm: he gives the former a spoiled-child bossiness and, right before the intermission, some stage business that is genius; the latter becomes a flabby, affected patriarch who can't pronounce his "r"s and who jigs off in a trance like some elderly discohopper...
Ward 8, Precinct 5--Residents of 29 Garden St., 20 Walker St., Shepherd House, 60 Walker St. and Coggeshall vote at the Harvard-Epworth Methodist Church...
...uniformly excellent performances. But bad editing also diminishes the impact their talents have on the film. These problems riddle the scenes between O'Keefe and Stan Shaw, who plays Toomer, a stuttering Black "boy" who, together with his mother, the Meechum's maid, and 14 or so large German shepherd dogs trained to attack white folks, lives in a trailer on the outskirts of the town...