Tom Tryon in the title role of The Cardinal. During the shooting, Tryon himself felt he was being crucified by Preminger.
When the nearly four-month shoot finally wrapped on May 10, Tom Tryon was profoundly relieved. But he was also disappointed in himself and furious with his director:
I never did anything in my life I regretted more. Otto Preminger never allowed me to characterize the part. I had to play that boring priest just straight out, like he was Jack Armstrong. It was a badly written part, because the guy never acted, he was acted upon: he was a Boy Scout with a collar. Preminger wouldn’t let me wear glasses; he wouldn’t let me find little things to do. So what contribution could I make as an actor? If I had felt the performance he was getting out of me was valid, that would have been one thing; but I stank, and I knew it. I don’t think Preminger is a good moviemaker. His great claim to fame, Laura, is an invalid claim because that is not a Preminger film; it was mounted by Mamoulian [sic]. And yes, Anatomy of a Murder holds up, although it’s a cold film. But I think the rest of his films have been disastrous going all the way back to Betty Grable movies [sic] and A Royal Scandal: that is a royal bore. He has no sense of humor, and it shows in his work. It’s all plodding; there is no rhythm, no sense of change, nothing symphonic or musical. Dreary, boring, like endless, endless rain.
In my heart I forgave Otto for every cruelty and unkindness he ever performed against me. I just ended up feeling sorry for the man. It was a tough school, but I learned because I never again let anybody ride roughshod over me. No one. Ever. The last image I have of him was from a taxi coming down Park Avenue. We stopped at a light and here came this figure trudging across the street. I thought, Holy God, that’s Otto Preminger. I remember looking at him and I thought, “Tom, that’s the man who destroyed your life.”42
“Otto did not treat Tom well,” Hope conceded.
Jean Seberg, whom he also did not treat well, was a lot tougher than Tom, however, who was like a whipped puppy. Tom was fine in the simple scenes, but when his character had to think complexly he had trouble, and Otto would get impatient because he felt Tom had more to give. Poor Tom was very hurt, I know that; and in later years he had vicious things to say about Otto. I think of all the people Otto yelled at, Tom was the one who was the angriest and who held on to his anger the longest. He was so bitter about the experience, and I don’t think he ever got over it. Tom Tryon was a very nice man—he and I always got on beautifully—and to this day I’m very sorry he felt the way he did about Otto.43
After Preminger completed editing The Cardinal at Shepperton Studios during Ascot week, he called a press conference to defend himself against accusations that he had become the ringleader of “runaway productions” that were taking jobs away from Americans. “Building sets in Hollywood would have been vastly more costly,” Preminger admitted, but denied that he was robbing American workers of jobs. “At each location during the filming of The Cardinal we had a hard core of 38 Hollywood technicians,” he said, adding that he supplemented the basic crew with indigenous labor as needed.44
In September, as a favor to a friend, Alexander Paal, who had worked as a still photographer on Exodus, Preminger performed a short role as a butler in a virtually unseen comedy called Millie Goes to Budapest, starring Peter Sellers and directed by James Hill. Preminger’s only salary was an all-expense-paid trip to Budapest, a city he loved. On his return he began pre-production on The Genius, a comic novel by Patrick Dennis about an egocentric movie director who terrorizes underlings. Preminger had bought the rights a year earlier, in September 1962; in February 1963, just as he was beginning to film The Cardinal, he had hired Ring Lardner Jr. to write the screenplay. Because Lardner, like Dalton Trumbo, had been blacklisted, Otto’s choice once again enflamed the American Legion, who “demand[ed] to know why he couldn’t find a ‘patriotic writer’ for the job,” as Lardner recalled. “Just as it was their right to boycott the movie when it was released, Otto replied, so it was his right to pick a screenwriter.”45
Otto planned to shoot on location in Mexico in December, where the “genius” with a swollen ego is shooting a film, but by the end of October he abandoned the project. Perhaps after the state-of-siege atmosphere on The Cardinal the prospect of directing a movie about a temperamental director no longer seemed amusing.
Throughout the fall Preminger worked on the publicity campaign for the mid-December opening of The Cardinal. He asked for reactions from prominent Catholic churchmen, and in the September 14 issue of The Pilot, a diocesan paper, Cardinal Cushing gave the film a ringing endorsement. His praise may have been sincere, but it may also have been prompted by Preminger’s promise that if the cardinal liked the film the American premiere in Boston would be arranged as a benefit for the Cardinal Cushing Charity Fund. On November 7, Otto returned to Rome, where in a ceremony as impressive as any in his film he was awarded the Grand Cross of Merit by the Vatican Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. Before an audience of five thousand prelates gathered for the Ecumenical Council, Preminger, looking appropriately somber, was escorted by seven footmen in white uniforms trimmed with gold buttons into the chamber of the order. Another footman carried a silver tray on which rested the red-and-white Maltese Grand Cross that a 250-pound marchese dressed in a floor-length white cloak pinned on Otto, “thus conferring the highest honor of an order that bestows favors on those who buy their way in,” a reporter for Show Business claimed on November 8, puncturing the pomp. “In Otto’s case he had promised to split the proceeds of the Roman premiere of the movie.” (“Otto did not pay for the honor, which was the highest that could be given to a non-Catholic,” Hope said.)46 About the ceremony, Otto commented that “the Church likes show business. Historically, it has always been in show business.”47
On Friday and Saturday during his visit Preminger screened his film for the cardinals of the Roman Curia of the church and the bishops attending the Ecumenical Council. “Because there is no theater at the Vatican, we screened it at the College of Cardinals, where everyone sat on wooden benches,” Hope said. “I was the only woman present. The audience loved it—they did not feel the film was at all anti-Catholic.” Mr. and Mrs. Preminger were granted a private audience with Pope Paul VI, “a very cold man, but very learned,” Hope noted.48
As he had for Saint Joan, Preminger arranged a world premiere in Paris at the Palais Garnier. “The opening in Paris—indescribable,” Josef Meinrad recalled. “The French premier was there, and members of the French government along with distinguished actors from the Comédie Française. It was everything you could ask for.”49 “It was the only picture ever sponsored by de Gaulle, and that was because he was Catholic,” Hope pointed out. “Jean Seberg sat in the box with us, looking so poised, and more beautiful than ever. Otto and I were delighted to see her and she seemed happy to see us, or at least she didn’t seem to be mad at Otto any longer; I certainly hope she wasn’t. We both liked Jean and wished for her nothing but the best.”50 “The music was piped in from the organ at Notre-Dame,” as Tom Tryon remembered. “ Tout Paris was in the orchestra and we were seated in the horseshoe.”
After the premiere—The Cardinal was more warmly received than Saint Joan had been—Otto hosted what Tryon described as “an incredibly lavish party” at Maxim’s. “There were huge floral arrangements on every table and expensive champagne flowed freely and in great quantities. Otto, in his element, was in top form, with a jovial greeting for everyone. Jean Seberg, whom I had never met before, grabbed me and we commiserated with each other at the bar. Our cases, after all, were very similar: we were landsmen who had undergone a similar experience with Otto Preminger.”51
As he had with Exodus, Preminger opened The Cardinal in reserved-seat, two-performances-a-day advanced-price engagements in a handful of deluxe first-run theaters. Reviews were mixed, although Tom Tryon earned some praise of a kind he did not expect or feel that he deserved. “Tryon, who has had a mediocre career in the movies, suddenly looms up,” wrote Kat
e Cameron in the New York Daily News on December 13, 1963. “He gives a sensitive characterization and comports himself with humility as the young man and as he grows older, with the dignity of an old churchman.” “The story of a man, rather than a priest, played with true humility by Tom Tryon, is pictorially exquisite, intelligently cast, and painstakingly, if not thrillingly directed,” Irene Thirer wrote in the New York Post. Bosley Crowther, however, felt that “the young man is no more than a callow cliché, a stick around which several fictions of a melodramatic nature are dropped. As colorless as is the hero, however, that colorful is the film.” In the New York Herald Tribune, Judith Crist, a confirmed Preminger adversary, grumbled that the picture is “a mélange of meandering melodrama, mouthed pieties, and pretentious irrelevance… . For all its pomp and circumstance, The Cardinal serves only to demonstrate the length (175 minutes) to which cynicism can go.” The most sustained diatribe was issued by Esquire critic Dwight Macdonald, a personal friend who enjoyed Otto’s company but not his movies. “How could such a bright fellow make such corny drivel?” he inquired, dismissing The Cardinal as “100% insincere kitsch.” Preminger, he concluded, was “a great showman” with “a genius for publicity” who was without an equal for seeming to deal “with large ‘controversial’ themes in a ‘bold’ way without making the tactical mistake of doing so.”52
The Cardinal, to be sure, is middlebrow, and to the uninitiated it might seem to be interchangeable with impersonal, expensively produced reserved-seat epics of the period. To the sympathetic Preminger viewer, however—to all those who “get” Preminger—The Cardinal reveals the nontransferable touch of its stubborn impresario. No one but Otto Preminger could have produced and directed this square, ponderous, magnificent film.
To appreciate the showman’s achievement in The Cardinal it’s necessary first to take a close look at his leading man, who in all the ways that count is exactly the right actor for a Preminger epic. Stephen Fermoyle is not the monochromatic character that Tryon complained about, but neither is the evolving drama of Stephen’s faith overcoming his doubt Preminger’s primary concern. The filmmaker’s focus, rather, is to present, in a pageantlike way, the social and political issues—abortion, fake miracles, interfaith marriage, racism, fascism, power struggles within the church—against which the character’s spiritual history is enacted. As in Exodus, Preminger is engaged more by the narrative’s panoramic backgrounds than by the travails of its leading character. Tryon’s smooth minimalism helps Preminger to make the kind of objective epic that is his forte, whereas a “brilliant” or overinventive actor playing Stephen would have interfered with the filmmaker’s intention.
Preminger does not secure his command over the project at the expense of his star, however. Tryon’s modest, thoughtful presence—reviewers who cited the actor’s humility were correct—anchors the film. He is adept in all the external elements of the role, no small matter. He moves with dignity, speaks in a resonant voice, and wears the costumes and vestments of Catholic ritual with ease. If you were Catholic, you would want this man to be your priest and you would be justified in having faith in him. Tryon also delivers in the moments where he is called on to suggest a sense of Stephen’s inner life. The story is presented as a series of flashbacks, and periodic close-ups in which Tryon stares raptly into off-screen space are effective segues into the past. Tryon plays with genuine power the climactic scene just before intermission in which Stephen announces his decision to leave the priesthood. Preminger’s artful mise-en-scène—shadowy lighting, Stephen’s placement against a wall on which hangs a painting of Christ on the cross—helps, but Tryon palpably conveys the drama of his character’s spiritual struggle. In romantic scenes with Annemarie (Romy Schneider), a Viennese student who falls for Stephen, Tryon suggests the emotional scars that will prevent Stephen from ever being a fully committed lover. Looking at himself in a mirror after having been out with Annemarie, Tryon with a lovely simplicity reveals Stephen’s confusion about his increasing worldliness. Preminger thought Tryon was not reacting in the scene in which the character faces the choice of which life to save, his unmarried sister’s or that of the child she is carrying. But Tryon’s understated response is apt—overwrought emoting would have been false to the character as well as the film.
In the final scene, set in a Roman monastery on the eve of Stephen’s becoming a cardinal, Tryon had to deliver a long speech on the urgency of
Tom Tryon in The Cardinal, a convincing man of the cloth.
fighting all totalitarian systems. There was no possible margin for error, since Preminger wanted to shoot the speech in a single uninterrupted take in which Tryon was to remain virtually motionless, while to his right, like a figure frozen in time and listening to his words with total stillness, stands his mother (Dorothy Gish). Intent on getting the tableau exactly as he had envisioned it, Preminger was prepared to keep his cast and crew working through the night. After dozens of takes, Otto remained vibrant, while his actor, on the verge of a complete emotional and physical breakdown and having difficulty remembering his lines, was becoming increasingly weary. Finally, around 2 a.m., a take satisfied Preminger. For a similar kind of aria that ends Exodus, Paul Newman let down his director and the film, while Tom Tryon prevails, delivering Stephen’s oration with a gravitas that matches the precision of the mise-en-scène. After the speech, as he makes a slow processional through the monastery, Tryon, smiling softly, holds his hand to his heart in a gesture of modesty. In its subdued masculinity and grace, his comportment suits the moment of his character’s ascension and also fully reveals the actor’s own charm.
Because Preminger does not allow Stephen’s spiritual odyssey to overtake a subject of more pressing interest to him, power relations within the church, The Cardinal is not a religious film, nor strictly speaking is it even a film about religion. By and large Preminger’s prelates are as cunning as the solons in the American Senate in Advise and Consent. And in their readiness
In The Cardinal, Preminger presents a tourist’s view of Vienna as a wonderland of Baroque architecture. Stephen Fermoyle (Tom Tryon), who has left the priesthood for the time being to pursue a worldly life, bicycles on the grounds of Schoenbrunn Palace and visits a church with his student (Romy Schneider).
to debate as well as in their rhetorical skills, they often sound like the dueling lawyers in Anatomy of a Murder. As contrast to the priestly “players,” Preminger includes two (beautifully acted) characters whose holiness remains untouched by worldly considerations. Burgess Meredith’s Father Ned Halley a failure in any worldly sense, is a true man of God, and his assistant (Jill Haworth) is a saint in the making whose dedication to a life of service causes Stephen to examine his own imperfect spirituality.
Introducing topics for further discussion, Preminger wants The Cardinal to be thoughtful as well as thought-provoking. But in the end it is no more a Shavian drama of ideas than it is a work of Catholic piety. The film has a moral center—of course it is against Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan—but it’s hard to tell where it lands on more controversial issues such as abortion. On potentially divisive topics, Preminger, ever aware of himself as a purveyor of popular entertainment, treads cautiously. Typical of the film’s approach to “difficult” subject matter is its vacillating treatment of Cardinal Innitzer, who at first is blind to the evils of fascism, but then undergoes a rapid, unconvincing change of heart. Despite his avowed animus toward Viennese collaboration with the Nazis, Preminger seems to be pulling his punches here. “In a dramatic medium, you show all sides,” he said, as if providing an alibi for his evasiveness.53
Presenting the rituals of religion as a form of show business, the filmmaker’s ultimate commitment—and why not—is to visual spectacle. The Cardinal is an album of painterly compositions arranged by Preminger and his cinematographer Leon Shamroy that has the aura (if not the substance) of an elaborate Christian pageant. Jerome Moross’s lush score, slow-moving, exalted, and containing echoes throughout of liturgical
music, helps to sustain the ceremonial mood, as does the processional leitmotif, familiar from Exodus and Advise and Consent, of characters opening and closing massive doors and entering and exiting a series of monumental public spaces. Preminger’s attraction to the picturesque is especially apparent in his treatment of Vienna, presented as a tourist’s paradise. Stephen goes for a boat ride on the Danube; has coffee at the elegant Café Landtmann; and bikes through the gardens of Schoenbrunn Palace, with a view of the Gloriette in the distance. Photographed from the perspective of an outsider entranced by the city’s superficial charm, Vienna, made up to look its best, becomes “Vienna,” a royal city of strudel, Baroque architecture, and fancy-dress balls. In The Cardinal, even where it shouldn’t be, the pictorial is Preminger’s essential métier.
The director’s attraction here to surface rather than depth, to spectacle as opposed to substance, is underscored in the places where the film literally comes to a stop for performances. When Stephen enters a vaudeville theater looking for his sister, who has become a dancer, he and the film take the time to watch musical theater star Bobby Morse (under contract to Preminger) and the Adora-Belles perform an entire musical number, “They Haven’t Got the Girls in the U.S.A.” The song has only a tangential connection to the story and Morse performs it with a Broadway flair that outclasses the setting, but only a sourpuss would complain. When Nazi brownshirts surround St. Stephens, Preminger converts dark history into entertainment. Churchgoers ordered by the hastily reformed Cardinal Innitzer to stand up to the Nazi menace begin to sing the Hallelujah chorus, and their resistance is staged as a performance with the singers perfectly placed on a ladder with the lead singer (Wilma Lipp, a well-known opera star) standing at the top.
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