A Man Called Peter (1955)

Bio-pic of Peter Marshall, the Scottish born Presbyterian minister who long held the pulpit of Washington D.C.'s historic New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, and twice served as Chaplin to the U.S. Senate. Richard Todd does an excellent job of conveying the strong personality and charisma of Marshall, and there are several sequences where he preforms lengthy extracts from the ministers sermons, and these prove to be quite arresting. Jean Peters (a future Mrs. Howard Hugh's) does a good job as Marshall's wife Catherine, who wrote the book upon which this film was based and would go on to write the popular novel Christy on which a mid-90's CBS television series was based (it was also called Christy). The reset of the cast is no-names, but they did a sufficiently good job, I especially liked Senator Harvey (Les Tremayne) and that thing Marjorie Rambeau would do with her eyes.

I didn't expect to like this film, and its presented with no particular directorial flourish, but Todd's rendering of Peter Marshall wins you over as he's quite likable. I enjoyed how little quarks of Peter's personality like his fondness for cheap mystery novels and the ocean provid extra rounding for the character. He's saintly, but particularly near the beginning of the film you can see how Peter is a little bit arrogant and obtuse at times. Cathrine's speech to the youth rally in Georgia was almost shockingly anti-feminist, and the couples relationship as depicted in the film had a nonchalantnes about its patriarchy that's kind of striking now. In many ways nothing really happens in this film, but it drew me in and kept me fully engaged throughout the whole thing, and I'm really rather surprised that it did that. I think I'll give it a B-