Welcome back to Registering the Registry, where we consider and review the films inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry by merit of their cultural, historical, and aesthetic qualities! Shipping out to my backyard this week, we are! Out amongst the desert and mountains around Tucson Arizona, faith and the power of people come together to make miracles in Ralph Nelson’s 1963 Oscar contender Lilies of the Field! Read on and find out just why I get so weird about religiosity this week!
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William E. Barrett’s 1962 novella Lilies of the Field makes ideal raw material for a filmic adaptation. The story of Homer Smith, a black ex-GI who agrees to help a group of German nuns build a chapel in the Arizona desert, is presented up-front as a modern day fable, one of those local legends about a man who blew into town, did great deeds, and was gone down the highway next day, leaving only tales which can never measure to the man. Except rather than the superhuman feats of a John Henry or a Pecos Bill, Homer Smith’s story is one of simple feats and pleasures: the ease of communication amongst those who understand manner and intent before words, the internal conflict of pride and duty, the transformative power of a single stubborn individual to make a whole community band together for a single cause. A question of where God lies, whether in heaven or Earth or a person or the people, is asked through simple narrative descriptions and simpler dialogue, the easy words of folklore rendering shared music and placed adobe bricks larger than life pictures. There is just enough on the page to inspire the imagination, just enough not to give a filmmaker plenty let for their own interpretation.
When it comes to Ralph Nelson and James Poe’s 1963 adaptation of Lilies of the Field, we look at an interpretation produced on impressively mean means. Officially budgeted at only $250,000 through United Artists, director/producer Nelson so believed in the book’s potential to work on the screen that he put his own house up for additional collateral, and convinced star Sidney Poitier to forego a normal salary in favor of profit sharing to keep costs down. Filmed at the Old Tucson Studios and in the Catalina and Tucson Mountains, it’s not a production aiming for the usual brand of Hollywood glamor despite the presence of an audience-favorite star entering his second decade in the spotlight. This here’s a cheap, honest production, one whose biggest expenditure is the legit construction of an actual, functional adobe brick chapel atop the ruins of an old, a taxing, shoot-long task upon the crew only properly appreciable in the final act. The fable of a man who so believed in his task he brought a disparate people not his own together to make their mark, realized by a crew helmed by a man believing the same. Main point being, we find the same humbleness of intent and form in the picture’s production as we do in its literary inspiration, and such a picture was able to earn three Academy Award nominations, including a Best Actor win for Poitier, only the second for an African-American in the show’s history following Hattie McDaniel’s for Gone with the Wind.
I’m not entirely certain this was the performance to earn Poitier his Oscar across a career of such triumphant appearances — Blackboard Jungle, The Defiant Ones, A Raisin in the Sun, A Patch of Blue, and In the Heat of the Night all spring to mind as obvious contenders. If his Homer Smith is not what I would judge an award-winning performance, however, it is a performance marked by a broad, easy-to-grok appeal. In Poitier’s hands, Smith wears his heart on his sleeve, making quite obvious his feelings towards the prospect of a life on the open road judged and dictated all by his lonesome compared against the job foisted upon his shoulders by overly-eager nuns. He’s a handyman who works hard, laughs hearty, values his freedom and independence, and holds his pride on a high, high pedestal. You’re inclined to like and side with the guy as he navigates a foreign tongue, plays at quoting Bible verses to make his point, stands in exasperation above the overgrown pit he’s supposed to make into a house of God. There’s a stubbornness about him as he takes on tasks the nuns don’t ask of him like grocery shopping to stock their bare cabinets, or else wonders pointedly aloud why he bothers with such back-breaking work for Germanic taskmasters on no pay and only the faintest promise of new materials on the morrow God willing. Every so often, he’ll step over the line and go too far, yet one is never pushed to the point of leaving his side, for there’s a sense he knows a man ought to stick by his word and apologize where necessary, only needing a little time to cool his head and come to his senses again. Otherwise, you’re watching a free spirit come to realize the value in rooting himself to one spot for longer than a day’s board, and making meaning from it all the way.
I’d go so far to say, of the two Oscar-nominated performances in Lilies of the Field, the one deserving the win was Lilia Skalla as Mother Maria Marthe, the nuns’ leader and visionary. With the other four women of the cloth effectively a collective body who function as the (to an English-as-first-language audience) unintelligible good natured souls deigned to react against the bigger personalities, Skalla has the job of making Maria Marthe an equally personable figure as Homer despite the readily-dislikable qualities of a quick temper, an insistence on never saying please or thank you, and a mind ready to praise and glorify God while actively and proudly dismissing the hands that actually accomplished her prayers. In my estimate, her managing this trick is a matter of balance. She drives Smith hard and constantly gets his name wrong (pronounced Schmidt on every occasion), yet when Poitier sits down to give the nuns a rhythmic lesson in English or lead a rousing round of “Amen” to unite their musical interests, Skalla integrates enough tics and bobs to indicate the Mother too appreciates and enjoys these displays of community, even as she maintains a stony countenance by necessity of role. Scenes original to the film placed away from Smith’s perspective as the nuns tend their affairs and rally for more brick shipments too aid the character’s appeal, with her actress effectively communicating a frustration with the ways of the world, the needy and often selfish temperaments of those who cannot see beyond Friday’s paycheck on to the good of action for a higher purpose, be they contractors or Smith himself during a particularly strained late act two beat. She’s the one who quotes Matthew 6:27–33 to convince Smith he ought to stay and help on no pay, and though she deploys the verse in a somewhat self-satisfied manner, the film in total makes clear she truly believes its meaning. One toils not for gain of coin, but for the being with people, the opportunity to work and see further than eyes and know those around you see so far too.
Fact, to talk of Lilies of the Field simply in terms of individual performances is to rather miss the real joys on offer. It’s not just Stanley Adams and Juan Acalito, a local diner worker who cautions Smith against getting too close to the nuns before becoming his staunchest supporter in building the chapel and breaking down Smith’s self-imposed ideas about needing to do it all on his lonesome. It’s not just Dan Frazer as Father Murphy, a fairly exhausted priest who travels the American highways just as Smith does, offering consecration and feeling no particular ties to these sun-blistered places until he finds one offering a holy man such as he a house of worship to share. It’s not just Nelson’s uncredited part as Mr. Ashton, a local contractor whose brash, dismissive manner and tinges of racist goading cement Smith’s prideful decision to build the chapel against his misgivings, only to be turned true (if not entirely helpful) believer at the sight of what his patronage made possible. You can’t even simply isolate contributions from the crew and capture the whole of what makes the magic in this picture sparkle, be it the cinematography from Ernest Haller (of Gone with the Wind and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?) that renders the desert and mountains around Tucson a rich, hardscrabble backdrop to the story’s movements beneath its open skies and mesquite trees, or Jerry Goldsmith’s enlivening early score built around the strains of spiritual expert Jester Hairston’s original composition “Amen” (dubbed over Poitier in post), or the wonderful little visual compositional habit of positioning Homer at casual, relaxed angles in the frame compared to the firm and rigid shots of the nuns in their habits. It is all good stuff, and it is all insufficient to describe what makes the movie work.
As in the best works of art, there’s a happy unity between form and function, between what the movie means to say and how the movie means to say it. We have here a film at heart about just where you find and house God — Mother Maria Marthe finds him in heaven, Homer regards him at a respectful distance, the people of the town take him wherever they can get him, a few have no use for the holy whatsoever. The building of the chapel is initially only something Maria Marthe undertakes because she believes it necessary, while Homer only agrees because her conniving and knowledge of scripture wounds his pride too deep, and so grows strain and eventually verbal blows, complete with accusations of behaving like Hitler. Homer’s resistance to any outside help from the townsfolk beyond their providing brick and tools eventually leaves him exhausted, and then bitter as the people take over his work, his refusal to lay another stone if any other hand will touch HIS chapel almost dooming the project to forever incompletion. Only with the realization that this all actually MEANS something — something beyond the completion of a nun’s divine directive, or proving a point against those who say he can’t do it, or fulfilling a long-dormant dream — does everything click for Homer and the real work of small miracles begin. It’s about the man who does not believe paying his insurance, the many hands guided by a singular voice who works for the sake of those hands rather than his own satisfaction or enrichment. What matters most of all is not if I built the chapel, or you built the chapel, or He built the chapel, though all are perfectly free to ascribe credit and celebrate in their own modes to their heart’s content. WE built the chapel is the important thing, and in building we found something beyond ourselves.
I am not, you should understand, a particularly religious body. Never came up under any faith, not much convinced the body of evidence supports a God or the soul, had a few bad encounters with those of faith as a child. However, across these last few years, I have come to appreciate what religion and its attendant practices can do for the collective, how a unifying ability to look up and see more than sky and space can bring about a togetherness and a healthy sense of belonging, even for those who doubt or do not believe but can appreciate and understand the exercise. It is too too often used as a vector for hate and discrimination and othering by those with power who profess a faith only to assert power, or worse walk with an understanding of God and the grander state of Things built on so individualistic a foundation as to demand cruelty and separation as necessities from the faithful. For this, despite this even, I come to regard living as if there is a greater game at play for which endeavoring to make a better, kinder, loving life for all concerned as a noble and righteous thing to do. An agnostic’s approach to faith, you might say, the doubter looking on all the trappings and intentions and effects of the better parts to religion and thinking, “This is worth something no matter whether I can see quite as they do.”
And with this in mind, this notion of faith as a kind of unifying collective action towards bettering through work and common purpose regardless said purpose’s ties to printed scripture, I call Lilies of the Field a magical film because it makes the above-outlined points with a similar collective power. It’s in everything about the film, between the performances of immense charm and broad yet powerful emotive power, the beautiful sense of place in a land of dryness where life and people flourish all the same, the swelling music derived from the spiritual tradition without being an exact duplicate of any specific source, the way it offers delights on wholly individual and collected total measures on a regular basis, the capacity to argue its points about the necessity of common goals and a place for every voice to the believer and atheist alike. This last especially for how it can generalize to more than just the particular matter of belief in God, and function as rallying cry to endeavor towards any noble goal, or else against any unjust practice. Lilies of the Field is a movie I find worthy because it speaks a plain truth so well, because it makes me smile as easily as its protagonist in the doing, because it convinces me of its supporting players’ contrary perspectives all in one, and because it plays as simply and humbly as you’d hope from its origins on page and behind the camera. Cinema as religious expression in construction and purpose one, you might say.
Though Nelson and Poe do not identify their picture as a modern day fable in so many words compared to Barret’s source material, I fully believe it accomplishes the traits and value of such with great ease. An American fable, a Biblical fable, a cinematic fable, a fable on the power of faith and honest work to make all see with fresh eyes and live with good hearts. It is, by my estimate, a healing, heartfelt, humanist story. Such stories are always welcome amongst the Registry’s halls, which are hallowed by their presence. May Homer Smith’s celluloid chapel stand forever and ever, amen.
(Funny little note: Nelson directed a made-for-TV sequel sixteen years later, Christmas Lilies of the Field, starring Billy Dee Williams as Homer and Cannes winner Maria Schell as Mother Maria Marthe. Can’t speak to its quality as I couldn’t squeeze it into the schedule, but I’m sure it’s worth a curiosity look!)
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Got a touch personal this week, didn’t we? Hopefully it reads well to everyone! Leave your comments below as always, and look forward to the next installment. It’s time to dust off the old Nadsat-to-English dictionary, because we’ll be listening to Malcolm McDowell speak Anthony Burgess’ conslang quite a bit in Stanley Kubrick’s highly controversial 1971 adaptation of A Clockwork Orange! Netflix and HBO Max have it up for streaming, while rental and purchase is possible through YouTube, Amazon, AMC, Vudu, Google… just a whole host of places. Viddy your sinny well, and I promise I won’t use too much Nadsat next time!
Gargus also writes plenty more reviews over on Letterboxd, rambles about this and that from time to time over on twitter, and accepts donations on ko-fi.