The Flowers of St. Francis (1950)
On a recent trip to New York City I had the great pleasure of recording two in-person appearances with Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast. As October is the month of St. Francis of Assisi (whose feast is celebrated on Oct. 4), our discussions focused on the two films about St. Francis which reside on the 1995 Vatican Film List.
First up we have Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis (1950). Famous for its use of non-actors (St. Francis and his companions are all played by real Franciscan friars) and its simple, direct, neorealism-derived approach to adapting episodes from the saint’s life, the film remains a threefold landmark of Italian cinema, auteurist cinema, and ‘saint cinema.’
Second, we have Francesco (1989) by Liliana Cavani. In every way that Rossellini’s film remains a perennial favourite of cinephiles and faithful alike, here we have its exact opposite - a film which is so obscure and forgotten that the only thing anyone knows about it is that it is somehow inexplicably on the 1995 list. While it is indeed a frequently clunky and discomfiting work anchored by a deeply (and historically-inaccurate) melancholic performance by Mickey Rourke as St. Francis, it is not without its own strange charms.
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