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Quote from: Matthew

I know buying Catholic movies is a sort of land mine. Anyone here have experience (good or bad) with the following movies?

I'm not sure there is or could ever be such a thing as a "Catholic movie" if the presumption is that a film's essential purpose is to entertain (in other words, the correct presumption). So if the purpose of showing a film to one's kids is to entertain them whilst avoiding the insinuation of an outlook hostile to the Catholic faith and subtly inculcating its opposite, one could do far worse than Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Peter Pan, all of which are genuinely entertaining and embody the art-concealing art that every soi-disant artist claims to aspire to but seldom produces.They are thus among the rarest of commodities in film, which here in the States has never been meant to be anything but a vehicle for making its owners wealthy and its audiences brainwashed.

Along with Nadir, Roman Catholic1953, and a handful of other commenters, I am enough of an old fogy to recall vividly what an urban parish was really like before the Council of Doom changed everything. But neither your friends nor their kids, especially the latter, are equipped by similar experience to see in an instant the root-and-branch Americanism that infects virtually every frame of those Bing Crosby movies from the forties—and that's by no means the worst form of subversion they can effect! At the very least, through those films the kids will inevitably acquire an intentionally distorted image of how things were then.*

From a similar perspective, The Song of Bernadette is in some ways a bit better, in some ways rather worse. Opinions will and do differ. Hollywood's inevitable good guy / bad guy approach to everything, however, would need to be explained, in some way or other, to the kids, lest they come away with a subliminal tendency (or worse) to think that the resistance to buying into, say, Medjugorje parallels Bernadette and Lourdes. Yet despite the often offensive corniness of the screenplay and the direction, many of the actors do far better with their roles than a hardheaded, battle-scarred moviegoing Catholic might reasonably expect.**

Monsieur Vincent stands apart from all the other films you list in that it is not just sterling entertainment with laudable and thoroughly Catholic underlying values but a film with genuinely life-altering potential, in that it is truly a work of high art. Virtually ipso facto, alas, it is thus going to bore the pants off kids, even if it's shown to them in the absolutely terrible dubbed edition, which in most sentient adults produces the irresistible desire to close the eyes or turn complately away from the screen. (No child I have ever encountered has come to delight in the taste of "medicine" just because Mom and Dad insist "this is good for you, dear.") But for an adult or for someone in late adolescence who has learned to adjust to black-and-white films and the sound of a foreign tongue on the screen, few movies will ever be as edifying and entertaining as Monsieur Vincent.***
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* The only exceptions to these strictures—yet exceptions hardly overwhelming enough to redress the imbalances!—are to be found in those few minutes when Risë Stevens or, to a lesser extent, Bing himself sings. Exposure to the wonders that dedicated training and strict discipline can yield for a performer and his audience can be more effective than a thousand stern parental lectures on the importance of perseverance in one's studies.

** Indeed, this film may contain the only bearable performance that the tiresome old ham Vincent Price ever gave.

*** A decade or so ago, during a chat I had with the late Joseph Sobran, we discovered that we both thought that Monsieur Vincent wasn't simply the finest "Catholic" film ever made but quite simply the only one. Being a film that imparts a sense of what sanctity looks like in the flesh, it has no peer.