Father Charles Dismas Clark was by all accounts an extraordinary man and at least 30 years older than Don Murray who played him in The Hoodlum Priest. He came from a working class coal mining background in Pennsylvania, his ancestors were Molly Maguires. Not the kind to rise in the Catholic Church and he didn't. He died only two years after The Hoodlum Priest came out. But two years before Clark founded Dismas House, the first halfway house for newly released criminals from prison. Though I'm sure each state has its different standards, Dismas House became the prototype for such programs.Murray plays the jive talking priest who speaks the language of the streets and gains the trust of the hoodlum element by doing so. It's the portrayal of a deeply dedicated man to his cause of ministering to a class of people not usually thought of as Christian material. Murray also produced this independent film released by United Artists on a shoe string budget that went way overboard for clearly a B picture.In an article I read about the film Murray was in St. Louis promoting one of his films when a priest literally accosted him at the premiere and it was Father Clark. Fascinated by the man Murray agreed to do the film and set about to find the cast and financing for Hoodlum Priest.Larry Gates plays a criminal attorney who helps Murray with setting up and financing Dismas House. In helping Murray realize his dream Gates' role is not all that different from Henry Hull's in Boystown.Another plot thread is taken from the Pat O'Brien film Fighting Father Dunne where O'Brien is also trying found a home for orphans like Spencer Tracy in Boystown. Keir Dullea plays a troubled youth in his breakthrough role and Darryl Hickman plays the same kind of part in Fighting Father Dunne. In both films it was the failure here that contrasts the overall success. Both Hickman and Dullea have tragic and identical ends. Murray's facial reactions at Dullea's death is a priceless bit of acting without dialog.Hoodlum Priest is a fine film a great example of what just a few dollars will get you with the right script, direction, and playing. Even if it put a few gray hairs in Murray's head when it went over budget.

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?

I was 13 when this film came out and while I don't know for sure why I never got to see this. I'm guessing, morals being what they were at the time; this was probably judged to rough a movie for a boy my age. It probably would have been a R rated movie in it's day. So when I saw it listed on Turner Classic Movies I thought great, I finally get a chance to see this old film. Well now that I've seen it I'm amazed this film gets so much buzz. I found it to be way to melodramatic, over acted and just plain hammy. I'm not sure how this could have ever been relevant. I know that Father Clark did great work in his time; but this seems a poor way to tell his story. Almost everyone in this movie is over acting. I'm guessing that's the fault of the director, but that doesn't make it any easier to sit through. I'm sure many will be drawn to this film by Keir Dullea's name in the cast. Dullea's fame comes from 2001 a film whose uniqueness at the time; pulled along most of the actors who happened to be in it. Like the Hoodlum Priest there were no great performances in that film either. A film for film school students, theater majors, and nostalgia buffs. A corny waste of time.

The Jesuit priest, Charles Dismus Clark, must have been an interesting guy. He went about doing good, or trying to, and hung with thieves and other young criminals, trying to reform them with kindness. He himself came from a terrible background, poverty, coals mines, and union conflicts.This movie leaves you wondering what he was like. Hardly any of it, outside the fleshless skeleton of narrative facts, is believable. The story is mostly a tract in favor of humanism. It was co-written by Don Murray, the actor who plays Father Clark. The priest is shown as, perhaps a little naive and socially clumsy, but otherwise without flaws, unshakable in his faith in God and in his boys.But even Mother Teresa had her unpleasant traits. Reporters who tried to interview her might find themselves scrubbing pots and pans while talking to a stern and demanding subject. Father Clark died in 1963, having devoted most of his life to helping reform recently released prisoners in what would now be called a Halfway House but was at the time a new concept. But he was a man, not a saint.The real story is probably fascinating but the movie is awkwardly written. Clark gets to give a couple of speeches along the lines of Father Flanagan in "Boy's Town." Some speeches are also given to Larry Gates as Louis Rosen, a high-end Jewish lawyer who discovered that his interests were parallel to those of Clark. Clark is close to many of his released inmates and was evidently told of some of their criminal plans before they were carried out -- not during confession, so privilege doesn't apply. But if Clark mentioned this to the police, he'd lose the trust of his wards and be unable to talk them out of other illegal enterprises. That makes him particeps criminis, doesn't it? Of course, undercover policemen are in the same bind. The moral conundrum is mentioned in passing but not explored.On the plus side, neither Clark nor Rosen are shown as sanctimonious or sentimental in any blubbering kind of way. And the other side of the argument is presented concisely. Clark may be opposed to capital punishment and so are Rosen and the governor of Missouri, but the governor can't pardon the condemned kid (Kier Dullea) because the voters elected him to uphold the law, and the law requires that Dullea be gassed.There's an awful scene on death row. First, Dullea is visited by the rich girl he was getting to know before he committed homicide. Then we are taken in graphic detail through the process of the execution itself. The camera remains in the chamber with the terrified Dullea as the gas is released and Dullea struggles and dies. There weren't many execution scenes in the movies when this one was released but now they've become almost de riguer. It's a pretty sickening tendency. Some of us get a thrill out of seeing others of us destroyed. There's a name for that in psychology.Murray, for all his good intentions, isn't the right actor for the part of Father Charles Dismus Clark. Don Murray is a middle-class urbanite burdened with problems, as in "The Bachelor Party" and "Hatful of Rain." Here, his grammatical transgressions aren't really convincing and his secular sermons are mannered.For its time it was something of a shocker. The seedy neighborhoods of St. Louis are niftily captured by photographer Haskell Wexler. The released inmates, however, look very 1950-ish. They all seem so clean, so neat, so white. The moral position of the movie anticipates the 1960s, which converts the perp into the vic. The villain is society, as represented by a skanky reporter who fights every move Clark tries to make. It was a necessary corrective to the prevailing notions of causality at the time -- bad blood, willfulness, the devil. What's needed now is the synthesis. At the moment we can't seem to find it. Political debates are interrupted by wild applause, by cheers, when capital punishment is brought up. Maybe the whole dialectic is misguided. We never find the synthesis, just swing from pole to pole like brachiating apes.