Found on YouTube: THE REDEEMER (El redentor, 1959/65)

Gilbert Roland and the children from THE MIRACLE OF OUR LADY OF FATIMA.

While I was a young boy obsessed with horror films, my mother had a similar obsession: religious movies. She wasn't much of a church-going person, except for the time before and after her own mother's death, but she loved the Biblical epics that would reliably turn up on television every Easter or Christmas season. They didn't have to be Biblical either; she also loved "miracle" pictures—THE MIRACLE OF OUR LADY OF FATIMA (1952), MIRACLE IN THE RAIN (1956), and THE MIRACLE (1959), to name a few. This latter group of pictures interested me far more than the Biblical ones because they reflected on what was magical and inexplicable in life, the mysteries of existence. They also had moments of eerieness and horror: THE MIRACLE OF OUR LADY OF FATIMA, directed by John Brahm (THE LODGER, HANGOVER SQUARE, THE MAD MAGICIAN) has a terrifying climax in which the Sun appears to be hurtling toward the Earth, and Irving Rapper's THE MIRACLE (which starred Carroll Baker and Roger Moore) was about a novice nun in the 19th century who nurses back to health a wounded British soldier and leaves with him, compelling the incandescent spirit within the convent's statue of the Virgin Mother to step down from her plinth to take her place during her absence. Of course, she eventually returns and her faith is renewed by realizing what took place. 

Carroll Baker and her Representative in THE MIRACLE.

My mother's interest in religious films had a somewhat fetishistic angle; I'll never forget the time when she was watching Jeffrey Hunter in KING OF KINGS (1961) delivering his sermon on the mount to a field full of followers. She suddenly exclaimed, "If I was around back then, I would have followed him too—that good-lookin' thang!" So she certainly derived something from them that wasn't entirely spiritual, but it wasn't simply erotic; it also had something to do with Christ's beauty and suffering (which, with her own hard life, she could identify) as well as a desire to somehow relieve that suffering as she wished her own suffering could have been relieved. The words I quoted are funny, but I don't repeat them to mock her connection to these pictures; we all have our reasons, and I'll likely never know the full depth of hers. 

Spanish poster.

All this back story is prelude to the movie I really want to discuss today, which is El redentor (1959, originally released as Un hombre tiene que morir, or "A Man Has to Die"), a Spanish film directed by Fernando Palacios. It was not a film I would have been drawn to see as a child, but somehow it became another of the films I saw at my sainted local Plaza Theater. Perhaps it was the co-feature to something I did want to see, something I had to sit through to see the film that really interested me a second time. For a large chunk of my life, it was impossible for me to find out anything about this film, even its title, which I had forgotten. I was nearly at the point of believing my memories of it had been no more than a dream, until the day when I suddenly found a single still photo in a slush pile of stills at Cincinnati's Ohio Book Store—I recognized the image, and the title on the still was THE REDEEMER. The actor in the photo resembled Italian actor Ivo Garrani, veteran of several Mario Bava films, so for awhile I thought it must have been an Italian picture—perhaps one featuring Bava's own secretive involvement. (Wouldn't this have been an interesting explanation for why this film stuck like a burr in my young memory?) This turned out to not be the case, of course.

 I've been able to find some information online about this English-dubbed version. It was "directed" by Joseph Breen Jr., the son of the infamous enforcer of the Motion Picture Production Code for many years, whose prolonged sanitation of American films gave this country such a distorted, delusional idea of itself. It was also "produced" by the Rev. Patrick J. Peyton, C.S.C. and was dubbed by some well-known actors, with Sebastian Cabot narrating the picture and the role of Jesus Christ voiced by THESE ARE THE DAMNED's MacDonald Carey. Just today, I found a copy of this elusive film's US poster on eBay, which identifies it as a 1965 release through Empire Pictures Distributing Company, Inc. The poster mentions neither Cabot or Carey in its fine print; the only credit mentioned is for its music by David Raksin (best-known for his LAURA theme), which implies that Reverend Peyton had the entire Spanish soundtrack—including its original score by José Muños Molleda—wiped to better accommodate the English dub. 

Why my abiding fascination with this particular movie, you ask? I remember watching it in an unexpected grip of terror. THE REDEEMER was unusual in that it told the story of the Christ and his resurrection using the visual vocabulary of a horror film. The film's most outstanding trait is that, while Christ himself figures prominently in the story and we hear his comforting voice, his face is never shown. He is always viewed from behind. All we know of his face is that, when the others onscreen see it, they suddenly look awestruck, as if enthralled by a vision far outside human experience; they succumb to its spell and cannot look away. For a child who, at that time, would have just recently seen the classic TWILIGHT ZONE episode "Eye of the Beholder," I must have watched the film with that traumatic memory firmly in place, which kept the faces of the entire cast averted until a climactic shocking revelation. So I watched the entire film in the grip of dread and desire, waiting for the inevitable "unmasking" scene. However, such revelation never comes; we never do see his face, and the accumulation of this suspense is therefore resolved in divine mystery. 

The film both captivated and haunted me. I remember later telling my mother about it (she had never seen it) and asking her why a film about Jesus would shy away from showing his face. She thought it was peculiar, but she felt obliged to give me a reason and ended up telling me that maybe the filmmakers thought it would be a sin to depict the son of God with an actor's face. This opened a whole other can of worms concerning the movies that were her religion ("Then why do we see get to see his face in the movies you watch on TV?"), but I let the matter drop.

Last week I was surprised and very pleased to find the film in its Spanish version on YouTube, available from a few different uploads. I was disappointed that none of those copies included English subtitles, but—I thought—we all know the story, and perhaps the relief from the distractions of language will let me focus all the more readily on what the film depicts visually. Seeing it again, from an adult vantage, it still plays for me like an Ancient Roman sword-and-sandal picture with steady currents of dark fantasy running through it. It opens with images of outer space, then brings us down to Earth—much like the opening of Philip Kaufman's INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS remake; the scenes of the disciples meeting with Jesus at night have an eerie quality, and when they come upon him standing atop the crest of a hill in flowing white robes, I can't help but find the cinematic effect like the flip-side of a vampire sequence. I don't say this to be sacrilegious; I'm saying the inferences are there in the film itself. The scene of the crucifixion is perhaps the most brutal of any version filmed up to that time, and after Jesus exclaims his final words in the hope of placating his Holy Father's anger, the skies darken and thunder forebodingly—as if the actions of men have placed all of mankind under a heavy curse. And when the torch-bearing Centurion enters Christ's tomb and finds it abandoned, I see a remarkable similarity to scenes in Terence Fisher's first Dracula film. This shouldn't be surprising, as Fisher himself was a religious man, and it seems to me less blasphemous than a case of a director investing his character with a perverse resonance—the ultimate in Good mirroring the ultimate in Evil. Without a resemblance between the two, we would be deprived of a choice. There would be no free will.

I'm not aware of the English version of THE REDEEMER appearing anywhere since its brief theatrical release almost 60 years ago. I would very much like to see that version again because, of all the religious epics I absorbed while growing up, this is the only one that meant anything to me—that is, until I saw Pier Paolo Pasolini's and Franco Zefferelli's versions later in life. I can now see this is largely due to its refusal to fetishize the suffering or the sufferer, focusing instead on the best and worst in men as events conspire to make Evil triumphant, while Good abides. Its use of horror tropes (possibly unconscious) in the telling of its story clouds the viewer's own ability to interpret familiar scenes in the way they are commonly accepted, making it easier to understand why Jesus' mission was regarded warily by so many, even as some lives received him eagerly as a solution to their troubles. While the film guides us to a final port in which the followers of the Christ are sustained by his word and his promise, it also seems—in this Spanish version, anyway—to show us a world that had its chance and rejected Paradise in favor of damnation. This may seem harsh (and shouldn't it be?) but, from where I stand, THE REDEEMER offers a more meaningful depiction of faith (a candle in the darkness, if you will) than any I ever found in the homogenized, proud, spoon-feedings so often presented to us in Hollywood's Christian epics.

Of all this long-sought-after film's revelations, the biggest surprise (at least for me) was seeing that the credits of El redentor were reserved for the very end of the picture. Included with the names of the Spanish cast members are several of the credits from the English versions, which must mean that El redentor is actually a post-1965 Spanish reissue of the original film, featuring the Raksin score and possibly other tinkering, as well. This means that Fernando Palacios' Un hombre tiene que morir (whatever it may have been) no longer exists as such, and leaves us with the open question of why it was changed and replaced with what Hollywood had done with it.

   

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