Luther (American Film Theatre, Ely Landau Organization, American Express Films, 1974)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I had a hard time finding a movie to show my husband Charles and I last night, and I ended up going back into the archives for a package I had ordered nearly 20 years ago but had not screened anything from, largely because just as I ordered it Charles was getting heavily involved in the Liberal Catholic Church and I didn’t know how he’d react when I screened him what I thought was the most interesting item in the box: a film about Martin Luther. (Charles said last night that he wouldn’t have minded.) This 1974 film of John Osborne’s play Luther was part of package of 15 movies made by producer Eiy Landau for something called the American Film Theatre, which was an attempt to do low-budget adaptations of famous plays and present them like a theatrical season: you would buy a subscription ticket to the whole series and attend them one after the other, albeit in a conventional movie theatre instead of a theatrical house. The project lasted three seasons, from 1973 to 1975, and was a flop, though it was done cheaply enough Landau and his backers (including, of all companies, American Express,who got a production credit), and given that the company had made special low-ball deals with the talent both before and behind the cameras to get the films made at all, there were legal complications that prevented the AFT films from being revived until the early 21st century. (One of them, Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, had starred Katharine Hepburn, and by chance the legal complications got resolved and allowed for a general release of A Delicate Balance right around the time Hepburn died – so a “new” performance of hers was suddenly available as an unintended memorial.)

Luther was scripted by Edward Anhalt from Osborne’s play and directed by Guy Green, with cinematography by Freddie Young – both far more identified with the early James Bond movies than fare like this. It’s not really an attempt to present Martin Luther’s life, let alone the overall context of the Reformation he set in motion, and certain of Luther’s nastier beliefs and actions – including his hysterical denunciations of Jews and his giving approval to one of the Protestant church’s most important political and military allies, Prince John of Swabia, who wanted to marry wife number two without divorcing wife number one first, so Luther conveniently gave him a quasi-religious justification for bigamy. Even if you didn’t know this film was based on a stage play, you’d soon figure that out: it’s basically a series of three confrontations between Martin Luther and various intellectual and theological opponents. In act one, Luther (played by Stacy Keach, which “threw” Charles a little bit because he’s used to seeing Keach in situation comedies on TV) is being inducted into a monastery. The script makes a big deal about the irrevocability of his ordination and in particular that he has to renounce forever all ties to his previous life, including all desires of the flesh. The scene makes monastic life seem so dreary and such a continual ordeal of self-punishment one gets the impression you’d have to be crazy to want to live this way – and though I’m no longer the hard-core atheist I was in my younger days, I’m still skeptical enough of religion to wonder how anyone could believe in a God that demanded so much out of you and tortured you, psychologically if not physically, to this ridiculous extent. We get a breath of fresh air when Luther’s father (Patrick Magee) shows up at the monastery to watch Luther celebrate his first Mass (during which Luther, apparently overcome by his own sense of unworthiness, keeps forgetting the lines and we get to ponder the absurdity of a movie in which a German priest presides over a Latin mass … in English), and we finally get to see someone normal in this movie, someone who drinks alcohol (though he can’t stand the taste of the ceremonial wine that’s the only intoxicating beverage the monastery has) and obviously has sex, otherwise Martin Luther wouldn’t exist.

The second act (there’s actually an “Intermission” title in this Kino pre-Lorber DVD at this point) dramatizes the famous Diet of Worms (“diet” simply meant a council and “Worms” was the city in Germany in which it took place) at which Luther, having already nailed his famous 95 theses to the door of the church in Württemburg and thereby kicked off his open rebellion against the sale of indulgences (which were really documents knocking off part of your sentence in Purgatory for certain sins in exchange for a contribution to the Church, but here they’re presented as total get-out-of-jail-free cards for just about any transgression) and the other scummy things the Catholic hierarchy was doing just then to raise money and impoverish the people of Europe even more than the feudal landlords were already doing. The church leaders – including Cardinal Catejan del Vio, played by Alan Badel, who’d been Richard Wagner in the 1956 Republic biopic Magic Fire – demand that he renounce the supposedly heretical ideas contained in his books, including the one that was the key difference between Catholicism and Protestantism in the early days: Catholics believed that only priests could tell lay people what the Bible meant, while Protestants thought people should be allowed to read the Bible and decide for themselves what it meant and how to apply its lessons to their lives. (I remember encountering this in the 1960’s when I read Oscar Lewis’s The Children of Sanchez, about a poor family in Mexico, and one of the things that surprised me was that the kids were told it would be a sin for them to read the Bible for themselves. It seemed to me odd, to say the least, for a church to tell its members it was literally a sin for them to read a book the church regards as the Revealed Word of God.) Luther, of course, declines, and as the rather odd narrator who wanders through this movie dressed in an armored military uniform explains, news of Luther’s defiance of the Catholic hierarchy spread throughout Germany and started a series of popular revolutions – which Luther opposed and encouraged the princes and military chiefs running Germany at the time (remember that in Luther’s time “Germany” was a network of principalities with little in common but the German language and culture) to suppress, even though this meant mass slaughter of the revolutionaries.

The last act takes place with the narrator and an aging Luther debating his legacy, and the narrator making fun of Luther for living conjugally with a former nun – who’s played by Judi Dench, a name that means a lot more now than it did in 1973. (Dench seems the great exception to the rule that women in movies generally don’t sustain stardom after their early 30’s: she’s actually become a more important and prominent actress as she’s aged.) In fact, Dench’s character is the only woman we see in the entire film. Luther might have been a better movie if Landau and company had had the budget (and the inclination) to make a real movie out of it, dramatizing instead of merely narrating the public unrest Luther’s teachings touched off and the violent repression of them which Luther supported – but that would have required a considerably bigger budget than the AFT had available. Luther comes off more as a PBS-style video of a stage play than an actual film, and even there it has its problems: Stacy Keach is a powerful actor and he’s completely right for the part, but even so he gets awfully overbearing and one gets the impression we’re being preached to for two hours by a character whose self-righteousness gets awfully annoying at the time. (Maybe the people who knew the real Martin Luther had the same reaction to him.) I give Osborne and Anhalt a surprising amount of credit for managing the interesting and challenging feat of dramatizing intellectual arguments on screen, especially when Luther challenges the Catholic hierarchs who are cross-examining him to show him whatever passage in the Bible they think contradicts him – but I can also see why some of the imdb.com reviewers thought this film was dull, including noe who wrote, “Movies don't come duller than this stiff filmed stage play that revolves around the sexy topic of the Reformation, to the accompaniment of the always pulse-beating Gregorian chant.”