Fred Schepisi's semi-autobiographical first feature, a surprisingly tender and even-handed account of life in a Catholic seminary. The Catholic-seminary aspect is not as big a restriction or distraction as might be imagined. It even has some unforeseen advantages. Because of it (and perhaps also because of the early-Fifties era), the students, as compared with those we encounter in movies of Animal House lineage, seem almost spookily serious and mannerly. To be sure, the itemized manifestations of male puberty -- the arrival of hair in places previously bald, the unwanted erection, the wet dream, the "self-abuse,' the outsized fascination of off-color jokes or magazine brassiere ads -- must be of special concern for boys studying for the priesthood, but few grown males, of whatever upbringing, could watch this movie without frequent twinges of recognition, and few females without twinges of curiosity or revelation. What distinguishes the movie most of all is Schepisi's treatment of the priests, his clear-eyed perception that they and the boys are in the same boat, his ability, off that fact, to infer that priests must be human beings too, and his considerably greater ability to look at all of them as individuals, varied, many-sided, unstereotyped. With Simon Burke, Arthur Dignam, and Thomas Keneally. (1976) — Duncan Shepherd
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