DVD Reviews: Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, The Prisoner, Guilty of Treason - Page 6

In the Cardinal's first exchanges with his Interrogator and his Jailer, Guinness stylizes his performance with stately-slow reactions. His eyes and eyelids move heavily, as if with the weight of moral contempt, and the Cardinal seems too fastidious to be caught out by the Stalinists' coarse machinations. (He's merely amused when they challenge him with their first crudely forged documents and altered recordings; he points out the flaws with the ease of Christ among the doctors.) But Guinness keeps us aware of the morphing outlines of the Cardinal's character as the man genuinely responds to cynical manipulation and your feelings about his experience end up being much less resolved than you'd expect from an unabashedly anti-Stalinist movie.

This irony gives The Prisoner what Sophie Scholl lacks - a dramatic motif shaping the face-off between the prisoner and the totalitarian interrogator. The two men actually defeat each other. The Cardinal, a national hero thought to be unbreakable, confirms his confession in open court and is sentenced to death. There's something worse than death, however: a last-minute reprieve and release, which means that the Cardinal has to re-enter a society in which he has lost his standing, his power to do good. The Interrogator, for his part, has had to get so close to the Cardinal to find his weak spot that he actually feels compassion for the man, which puts an end to his career as a torturer.

In addition, there's the structural irony arising from the fact that it is the fanatical, impersonally ruthless Interrogator, rather than the Cardinal, who has a quest. That quest, i.e., to destroy the Cardinal before a deadline set by the military, gives the movie its suspense and a focus for our reactions. We're in the disheartening position of hoping the Interrogator will fail, though we know he won't. It's an inverted melodrama, ending with the triumph of a false accusation and the unjust public shaming of an innocent heroic figure.

Boland's is a talky, histrionic approach to a subject of enormous moment, but by focusing on the way the Cardinal and Interrogator outwit each other, the containment of the piece within an implied proscenium feels somewhat justified. And Mindszenty's trial was a staged spectacle. (Mindszenty, too, had a sense of theater: when the Arrow Cross arrested him in 1944, he dressed in his full Episcopal robes and followed the police cars on foot, accompanied by sixteen theological students and their three instructors. This procession drew throngs who kneeled at the side of the road and asked for his blessing.) Boland also gives the exchanges a certain amount of wit, not all of it on the side of the mordant Cardinal. The Interrogator, too, has his high comic moments, such as when he affably says to his prisoner, "Stop thinking of me as the inquisitor," as if the two of them were equals engaged in an arbitration.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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