It's impossible to imagine
"Saved!" (the story of a high school girl impregnated when she tries
to "cure" her gay boyfriend) being made in 1938. But it's almost as
difficult to imagine "Boys Town" (the earnest story of a Catholic priest
who founds a ministry to care for abandoned and troubled boys) being made in the 21st
century.
American Eagles Christian High
School in "Saved!" is run by Pastor Skip. Pastor Skip makes a great
effort to be hip and happening for the kids of his school. We see him at the
opening assembly of the school year being introduced by Mandy Moore's Christian
Jewels worship band. He encourages the kids to "Get our Christ on... Kick
it Jesus style" and to follow "Jesus the ultimate rebel and God, the
universe's CEO." The school's board
worries that the Christian bands he brings to the school might sound too much
like secular rock bands, but he says that's the point, looking to lure kids in
with the music and then convert them.
But all is not well in the
minister's private life. Pastor Skip is married, but his wife has been off in
the mission field for an extended time (their son spent the summer with her,
but returns for his senior year at Skip's school). Pastor Skip has regular
"counseling" sessions with a student's widowed mother -- which morph into an affair. So perhaps he isn't the best person to be teaching the students
sex education.
The film is almost a remake of
"Mean Girls," but in this film the mean girls call themselves
Christians. Christians in the film all are trying to imitate the world but
baptize it at the same time. The Christians are hypocrites, all trying to
gather other people's eye lumber with optic log cabins of their own aplenty
(this awful sentence is a reworking of Matthew 7: 1 - 5).
This satire of Christians as
sexually obsessed, culturally clueless and at times downright mean might not be
fair or accurate, but it's good for Christians to see how others see them.
Father Flanagan in "Boys
Town" runs a quite different kind of institution. He establishes a school
for boys who are orphaned or are in trouble with the law. The film opens with
the priest visiting a man on death row who says everything might been different
if someone had cared for him when he was a young boy.
Boys Town is, of course, a real
institution. The real Father Flanagan, portrayed in the film by Spencer Tracy,
borrowed $90.00 to rent a house
for a few boys. This eventually became a number of institutions that housed and
schooled thousands of boys (and now girls too). Father Flanagan in the film
fights for his school, insisting that "there is no such thing as a bad
boy." (For believers in original sin or for parents who have observed
their own children, this is a very questionable statement but that doesn't take
away from the fact that Boys Town has done very valuable work through the
years.)
Not atypical for films of the era,
there are moments we'd consider racist or anti-Semitic, but there is a
surprising scene in the film where we see Father Flanagan explaining that the
boys do not need to become Catholic but are free to honor the "supreme
being" however they wish. The school encourages hard work, cleanliness and
unabashed patriotism for these United States.
It's hard to imagine that a film
about Father Flanagan's good work would make it to the big screen these days
(perhaps it could be a made-for-TV feature on Hallmark or the Lifetime Channel).
At the time it was made, studios assumed their audiences appreciated the Church
and its work.
Perceptions of the church have
changed quite a bit in the last three quarters of a century; probably for the
worse. At the end of "Saved!" the teen Mary (with child, but not a
virgin) says we're all still trying to figure out what Jesus would do. We do
know that Jesus wanted the little children brought to Him so he could bless
them. Let's keep doing that.
"Boys Town" 3 steeples
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