Francis of Assisi (1961)

Very boring film about the father of the Franciscan Order, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant who renounced all his worldly possessions for a life of austere devotion to God, and became the patorn saint of animals, the environment, and Italy (along with Catherine of Siena). The usually capable director Micheal Curtiz manages to drain this story of anything that would make it interesting and gives us a dry, earnest, very Catholic non-spectacle populated by a no-name cast with Bradford Dillman particularly dull in the lead. Curtiz does attempt to inject some story life into the film through use of a contrived seeming quasi-romantic subplot between Dillman and the generically pretty Dolores Hart as an acolyte. Obviously Saint Francis has some appeal or he wouldn't be such a significant figure in Catholic tradition, but this film simply doesn't capture that. This movie is bad, it felt pointless, and particularly towards the end it loses all semblance of coherent structure and character motivations. Ugh, what a waste of time, this movie is crap.