I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

How sad is this?

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I am 75 years of age and I remember seeing the movie sometime when it came to TV. It was not my sort of movie then or now. I could not recommend this movie to anyone today. I do think however that Don Murray, as Father Clark, did some great acting in this movie.I started my freshman year at a Catholic high school, De La Salle Military Academy, in 1955. The entire first week was a Catholic retreat (religion). I can not remember now if Father Clark did one day of the retreat or the entire week. I seem to think he did the entire week.I was 14 years old and a Catholic and had gone to only Catholic schools. I had never heard of Father Clark.As soon as I saw and heard Father Clark I was thinking this guy is crazy. I was thinking why are the Christian Brothers allowing a crazy man to be around a bunch of kids? Later they had confession and I was sent into a room, alone, with Father Clark to hear my confession. He grabbed me and started to wail or say something about it will be OK or something like that. I did the confession thing and got the hell out of there.I think the movie got a lot correct about Father Clark. But if they had shown the real Father Clark it would have been a much different movie and I do not think it would have been shown.But if you want to get a little bit of an idea about what Father Clark was like then the movie and Don Murray do a pretty good job of it.

While a very good film, the picture falls into the trap of trying to depict the horrors of capital punishment. This has been shown so much in the past and present.Don Murray's performance, while good, could make you easily forget that he was a priest. To say that he was sympathetic to convicts is to put it mildly. This was definitely his calling. The first scene of the film, he appears to be a gangster himself; especially, when he is offered a 1/3 in a proposed heist.Keir Dulleas was excellent here and was robbed of a best supporting Oscar nomination here. His death-row scene with his girlfriend was so reminiscent of Monty Clift with Elizabeth Taylor in "A Place in the Sun," 10 years before. Are the Dullea character and others victims of society, rather than perpetrators of crime?

The true story of Jesuit priest Father Charles Dismas Clark and his struggles in opening a halfway house for recently-paroled convicts in '50s-era St. Louis. Lead actor Don Murray (who also co-produced the film and co-wrote the screenplay under a pseudonym) was reportedly inspired to tackle this project after meeting the real Father Dismas Clark, who is credited as technical adviser; still, one can see right away how this production got funded, what with a violent police standoff in the third act, capped with a dramatic gas chamber sequence. Despite talented Irvin Kershner as director and Haskell Wexler as cinematographer, the picture isn't any more weighty or profound than the juvenile delinquent programmers of the previous decade. Keir Dullea makes a strong debut as a troubled youth, but Murray and the other cast members generally fail to impress. *1/2 from ****

Irv Kerschner, who was George Lucas' teacher at USC and later directed one of his pupil's Star Trek features, made this glossy well-meaning melodrama released by United Artists in 1961. Shot on location in St. Louis and featuring the semi-documentary but often overly self-conscious B&W cinematography of Haskell Wekler, the story is based on the real life story of a Jesuit priest --perhaps the first man in America to set up a half-way house for ex-cons. Although its heart is in the right place, and the film makes the plea that the criminal justice system in the United States only serves to criminalize young offenders rather than reform them, Kershner cannot resist all the obvious opportunities to be arty: chases through railroad yards and into abandoned buildings with broken furniture and boarded-up windows providing the right shadows on the wall. He also hammers home his point by squeezing out the last drop of melodrama from the shaky plot, including a totally implausible electric chair sequence with the priest admitted into the chamber as his hoodlum friend is about to be electrocuted. The film tries to have its cake and eat it, too. In real life the Irish priest was helped to build his halfway house by a Russian-Jewish immigrant attorney, Morris Shenker, but the film homogenizes their relationship; the young offenders somehow feel as if they dropped out of "West Side Story," made the same year, because they were unable to sing and dance.