The Keys of the Kingdom (20th Century-Fox), a handsome and heartfelt screen version of A. J. Cronin's bestseller, lacks the parochial authenticity, the comic pathos and the sagacious acting which made Going My Way the best of all movies about priests. But it is rather more attentive to religion, and its religiousness is not only free of pomp and sanctimony but is also human, dramatic and moving.
Francis Chisolm (Gregory Peck), the hero of this moral saga, is that rare sort of great man, humble, slow-minded, naive and brave, who never realizes his own greatness. At the beginning, in a Scottish village, he has no desire to take holy orders. He is brought to it by his sweetheart's death and by a benign old Monsignor (Edmund Gwenn) who talks, not too urgently, about the will of God. It is this same mentor who sends the young priest, when he has come to regard himself as a hopeless failure, a thousand miles deep into 19th-Century China, to install himself in a leaky stable near a ruined church, and to endure as he may the insults of the anti-Christians who defile his Mission signs and of the "rice Christians" who cynically fawn on him.
By the time Joseph (Benson Fong) appears, Father Chisolm has so bitterly lost hope and faith in humankind that he is all but incapable of realizing that he has met his first true friend in China. From then on, with many ups & downs of heroism, sacrifice, friendship, war and death, things go a little better.
In 2 hours and 17 minutes of unassailable if rather pedestrian sincerity, The Keys of the Kingdom never grows tedious. Toward the end it produces two very moving scenes of farewell—one, beautifully and quietly acted, between the priest and a nun (Rosa Stradner), the other, the priest's simple and eloquent farewell to his congregation and to the whole of his remote, triumphant life.
There are many good performances in The Keys—notably the sharply etched ecclesiastical portraits of Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Vincent Price and Edmund Gwenn, and the disciplined, powerful performance of Austrian Rosa Stradner, a screen newcomer, as the nun. But the picture's biggest, toughest role is remarkably handled by 28-year-old Gregory Peck. He combines a bearing and demeanor that a matinee idol might envy (rather suggesting a sandpapered Lincoln) with a dominant naturalness. It is not surprising that he has no theatrical ancestry—his father is a San Diego druggist.
Bored with high school, truck driving and college, Peck discovered in University of California's Little Theater what he really liked to do. Journeying swiftly to Manhattan, he worked as a World's Fair barker to earn money for dramatic school, later got a job guiding tourists through Rockefeller Center, snared a couple of dramatic scholarships. Then Guthrie McClintic spotted him, gave him a few small parts and finally a big one (in Emlyn Williams' Morning Star) that led to Hollywood.