Peter MacLean | Through the Shattered Lens

The 1963 film, The Cardinal, opens with an Irish-American priest named Stephen Fermoyle (Tom Tyron) being instituted as a cardinal.

In a series of flashbacks, we see everything that led to this moment. Stephen starts out as an overly ambitious and somewhat didactic priest who, over the years, is taught to be humble by a series of tragedies and mentors. It’s a sprawling story, one that encompasses the first half of the 20th Century and, as he did with both Exodus and Advice and Consent, Preminger tells his story through the presence of several familiar faces. Director John Huston plays the cardinal who takes an early interest in Stephen’s career. Burgess Meredith plays a priest with MS who teaches Stephen about the importance of remaining humble and thankful. When Stephen is in Europe, Romy Schneider plays the woman for whom he momentarily considers abandoning his vows. When Stephen is assigned to the American South, Ossie Davis plays the priest and civil rights activist who teaches Stephen about the importance of standing up for those being oppressed. In the days leading up to World War II, Stephen is sent to Austria to try to keep the local clergy from allying with the invading Nazis. Stephen also deals with his own family drama, as his sister (Carol Lynley) runs away from home after Stephen counsels her not to marry a good Jewish man named Benny (John Saxon) unless Benny can be convinced the convert to Catholicism. Later, when his sister becomes pregnant and Stephen is told that she’ll die unless she has an abortion, Stephen is forced to choose between his own feelings and teachings of the Church. Along the way, performers like Dorothy Gish, Cecil Kellaway, Chill Wills, Raf Vallone, Jill Haworth, Maggie McNamara, Arthur Hunnicut, and Robert Morse all make appearances.

All of the familiar faces in the cast are used to support Tom Tryon and Tryon needs all the support that he can get. Despite Otto Preminger’s attempts to make Tom Tyron into a star, Tryon eventually retired from acting and found far more success as a writer of the type of fiction that Stephen Fermoyle probably would have condemned as blasphemous. Tryon gives a stiff and unconvincing performance in The Cardinal. The entire film depends on Tryon’s ability to get us to like Stephen, even when he’s being self-righteous or when he’s full of self-pity and, unfortunately, Tryon’s stiff performance makes him into the epitome of the type of priest that everyone dreads having to deal with. Tryon gives such a boring performance that he’s overshadowed by the rest of the cast. I spent the movie wishing that it would have spent more time with John Saxon and Burgess Meredith, both of whom give interesting and lively performances.

The Cardinal is a long and rather self-important film. The same can be said of many of Preminger’s films in the 60s but Exodus benefitted from the movie star glamour of Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint and Advice and Consent was saved by an intelligent script. The Cardinal, on the other hand, is a bit draggy and makes many of the same mistakes that many secular films make when they try to portray Catholicism. Oddly enough, The Cardinal received more Oscar nominations than either Exodus or Advice and Consent. Indeed, Preminger was even nominated for Best Director for his rather uninspired work here. Considering the number of good films for which Preminger was not nominated (Anatomy of a Murder comes to mind), it’s a bit odd that The Cardinal was the film for which he was nominated. (Of course, in 1944, the Academy got it right by nominating Preminger for his direction of Laura.) The Cardinal is largely forgettable, though interesting as a type of self-consciously “big” films that the studios were churning out in the 60s in order to compete with television and the counterculture.

Worms are creepy and you don’t want to get them in your hair.

I think that, more than anything, explains the continuing appeal of this lightly satirical Southern shocker from 1976. The film’s plot is a simple one, as the plots of the best horror films often are. There’s a storm. The power lines over Fly Creek, Georgia get knocked down. The power line lands in the mud and soon, you’ve got thousands of electrified worms crawling all over the place. These worms are angry and noisy and they like to eat people’s faces and take control of their bodies. Of course, since the power lines are all down, you’re can/t exactly call for help and even worse, you’re thrown into darkness once the sun goes down. Squirm gets at some very basic fears.

Squirm has a welcome sense of humor, as any film about killer worms should. It’s obvious that Lieberman knew that the audience would be demanding that the worms get revenge on at least a few fisherman and those scenes are tossed in there. The film’s nominal hero is Mick (Don Scardino), a visitor from New York City, and he’s so out-of-place in rural Georgia that it becomes funny watching him try to do simple things like order food or have a simple conversation. Even when he tries to warn people about the worms, you can tell they’re thinking, “He might be right but do I want to listen to a yankee?” As we say down here in Texas, you can always spot the yankee because they’re the ones sweating profusely and talking about killer worms. The scenes of Mick trying to order something at the local diner reminded me of the great “We don’t got no goddamn trout” scene from Hell or High Water.

Mick is in Georgia to visit his girlfriend, Geri (Patricia Pearcy). Almost everyone who Mick meets seems like they could have come out of an overheated first draft of a Tennessee Williams play. Once the worm attack starts in earnest, Geri’s mother sinks into a state of denial that would have impressed Blanche DuBois. Meanwhile, Squirm has its own wannaba Stanley Kowalski in the form of Roger (R.A. Dow), who obviously can’t understand why Geri would want a boyfriend from New York when she could have him. Roger is a creep but he’s a familiar creep. Anyone who has ever lived in the country will immediately recognize Roger and know everything that they need to know about him.

That said, the worms are the real stars of Squirm and they certainly do manage to get everywhere. On the one hand, it’s funny to see the worms emerging from a shower head but, on the other hand, it’s actually really terrifying because, when you’re standing naked in a shower, the last thing you want is to get about a thousand worms dumped on your head. Seriously, that would freak me out even more than threat of getting killed by Norman Bates’s mother. The film is also full of close-ups of the worms and, to be honest, worms are really freaky to look at. The opening and closing of that little mouth is like pure nightmare fuel.

Squirm is a classic of Southern horror. You’ll never look at a worm the same way again.