Western Movie Churches -- San Francisco (1936)

Father Tim Mullin hasn't had much success in bringing Blackie Norton around around to the straight and narrow. Tim and Blackie grew up together in the Barbary Coast of San Francisco, skipping mass in order to get in trouble. Tim became a priest, and Blackie became a nightclub manager. If you grew up in a bad neighborhood in an MGM film in the thirties or forties, you pretty much had three career paths open to you: cop, priest, or shady operator of some kind.

Tim and Blackie are characters in this MGM drama directed by W. S. Van Dyke (The Thin Man) with a number of other directors collaborating. It’s set in the San Francisco of 1906 (you careful readers may have already guessed the location of the film). Father Tim is played by Spencer Tracy (the go to priest until Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald took up the cloth). Blackie (the name says, "rakish," doesn't it?) is played by Clark Gable. And Jeanette MacDonald plays the Gospel Bait*.

Mary is a spunky young woman who left her small town minister father to come to the big city. She goes to Blackie's place to get a job as a singer and knocks everyone out with her operatic voice, but Blackie is taken aback when she rejects his suggestion that she "show some leg."

Mary also quickly becomes involved at Father Tim's church, singing the hymn "Jerusalem" at a service with the boys' choir (all MGM churches have a boys' choir). It does seem rather strange that as a "minister's daughter" -- presumably Protestant -- she connects so quickly to a Catholic Church. But that Father Tim is so winning.

He isn't winning Blackie, though Father Tim’s been doing his best with boxing evangelism. Blackie and Tim spar in the ring, and the priest makes with the holy sucker punches. He also invites Blackie to an organ concert since Blackie gave the money for the organ and all. But nothing seems to be working. Blackie asks Tim why he "blew me for a bunch of plastic saints?"

Blackie thinks God is for the suckers at the mission, but a person should take care of himself.  So when Blackie shows an interest in Mary, Tim thinks this may be God's answer.

He tells Mary Blackie's "someone to be afraid of," but wishes he was a force for good rather than evil. He hopes Mary will be a good influence on Blackie. But when Tim feels Blackie’s exploiting Mary, he goes to tell Blackie off. Blackie slugs him and goes off to the opera with a solid San Francisco citizen.

Mary is going to marry that upright citizen. Tim goes to the engagement party and asks if Mary is happy. She says she's happy, but the audience can tell she's not Clark Gable happy. She discovers her fiance is a jerk who’s trying to ruin Blackie and his club, so she tries to help Blackie by singing (the title song) on behalf of Blackie's club at a talent contest. Blackie says he doesn't want her help and storms out.

Right after the talent contest, the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake hits. The real earthquake struck at 5:00 am. I guess they were quite the night owls in San Francisco back in the day, although this movie’s footage of the earthquake all seems to be in broad daylight, which is quite unusual in San Francisco at 5:00 on an April morning. We see everyone out on the streets, children playing on playgrounds, traffic on the street. I guess that makes for better earthquake footage than showing lots of people asleep in beds when the earthquake strikes.

Blackie is in the street during the earthquake, and he goes about helping people trapped under buildings. He finds Mary's fiance under a building, rather deceased. So he goes looking for Mary.

Blackie goes to Father Tim, who is working with other priests and nuns and Salvation Army workers at a hospital. He asks Father Tim if he knows where Mary is. Tim takes Blackie to a tent camp where she is leading a worship service, singing "Nearer My God to Thee."

Blackie is so relieved that Mary is alive that he tells Father Tim, "I want to thank God, what do I say?"

Tim answers, "Just say what's in your heart." Mary sees Blackie kneeling in prayer. Finally Mary and Blackie can be together, because they are together with God. Finally, romantic love and natural disaster accomplish what Tim's preaching and pugilism couldn't.

I'm giving the church in the film 3 Steeples for Father Tim's work with the survivors of the earthquake and for the way he leads the citizens of San Francisco in a rousing chorus of "Battle Hymn of the Republic" when the fires are put out.

*Tim despairs of winning Blackie to righteousness, but when Blackie falls for the good and pure Mary Blake he sees an opportunity.

They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970)

It's a human thing to want to see your heroes, even your fictional ones, share your likes and dislikes. Political candidates know this, so they wear the caps of teams the majority of their voters cheer. When I read about this film and learned that it was about Virgil Tibbs and the pastor of his church, I wanted to like his pastor, because Tibbs is a fictional hero of mine.

In the 1967 Academy Award Best Picture Winner, In the Heat of the Night, Sidney Poitier played a homicide detective from Philadelphia named Tibbs, who's caught up in a murder investigation in the deep South. When someone calls Tibbs, "Boy," he responds "They call me MISTER Tibbs!" with a confident cool in the realm of Steve McQueen's. I love the character of Tibbs, so I wanted to like his pastor and his church in this film. Just couldn't do it, though.

In this film, Tibbs is a detective in San Francisco and has been for years (in the Tibbs novels he works in Pasadena). He's called to assist in the investigation of a prostitute, and it soon becomes apparent that his pastor, Logan Sharpe (Martin Landau), is one of the suspects.

One of the most perplexing things in the film is how it handles race. Race is central in the Oscar winning film, but it's pointedly avoided in this film. Sharpe, a white man, seems to be the most prominent liberal pastor in San Francisco in a film made at the time African American pastor Cecil Williams was living that role. The congregation of Sharpe's church is decidedly multi-ethnic.

Sharpe, in the film, seems to be the only person preventing riots in the streets of San Francisco, multi-ethnic riots. (It is certainly possible there could be multi-ethnic riots. But at that time, there were a number of riots taking places. In Watts and other cities there were riots protesting the police and living conditions, but they were primarily African Americans involved. On the campuses, there were anti-war protests primarily involving Caucasians.) It seems MGM wanted to keep the question of race out the film (one assumes for box office reasons).

We get to hear one sermon by the Reverend Sharpe, which begins with a quote from Psalm 8 ("What is man that you are mindful of him?") and then turns into a campaign speech for "Proposition 4." He says people have said that you shouldn't listen to him because he is a politician, but what is politics but dealing with people? Surely a man of God should deal with people. He talks about not "fighting the establishment with anger but with votes." From what I remember of Paul's Spiritual Armor, there were such weapons as faith, truth, hope, the gospel and such, but votes were strangely omitted.

Actually, I kind of liked what I heard about Proposition 4. Something about turning more decision making over to the local communities. But a pastor's work is more important than mere politics, dealing with eternal rather than temporal issues. So, Sharpe loses my support right there.

Now the Rev. Sharpe has some other problems that fall into grand spoiler territory, so if you plan to see the film as a whodunit, you might want to quit right here.

(SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER! You see, we find out that, before she was murdered, the Reverend was sleeping with the prostitute, but didn't pay her in money. He paid her in political and spiritual books! So he's not just a philanderer, he's a cheap philanderer. And bigger SPOILER:  The Reverend Logan Sharpe is the killer. And when Tibbs tells Sharpe he is going to arrest him for the murder, Shape asks Tibbs to hold off on the arrest until after the election. When Tibbs tells him no, Sharpe steps in front of a bus.)

So, as much as I like Detective Virgil Tibbs, the Reverend Logan Sharpe and his church gets one steeple.