Saint Joan

Otto Preminger – 1957 – USA
 

Much controversy surrounds this version of the Joan of Arc story based on George Bernard Shaw’s play; stemming from 1) comparisons to more sober and respected interpretations by Dreyer and Bresson, 2) charges that Catholic screenwriter Graham Greene watered-down Shaw’s anti-clerical theme, and 3) a widespread belief that Shaw could not and should not be adapted to film at all.  While Preminger’s film is neither a masterpiece nor his best work, I don’t find any of these complaints very valid.  If there is a problem with the film, more likely, it has to be Preminger’s loyalty to Shaw.  A fine director, he nevertheless lacked a visionary’s willingness to prune and/or amend source material as needed in order to shape it into something both personal and cinematic, as Orson Welles did so ingeniously with his Macbeth (1948) and Othello (1952), for example.  American Jean Seberg – (sporting her famous short haircut that would be so influential to fashion in the 60s) – plays Joan surrounded by a mostly British cast that includes heavyweights John Gielgud, Richard Todd, Finley Currie and Harry Andrews.  Seberg’s interpretation of Joan effectively hovers between righteous innocence and borderline schizophrenia.  Seberg was so upset by the negative reviews of her performances here and in a subsequent film for Preminger, Bonjour Tristesse (1958), that she remained in France for years afterward; (making a splash in Godard's Breathless, among other things).  But her genuine naivete is crucial to her role; both Seberg and Joan are dangerously out-of-their-depths.  Surviving intact from Shaw, more importantly, is a wry look at political power that puts off some viewers because it does not come down clearly on the side of the good.  In this world, cynics with a mordant sense of humor are the survivors, mediating between the small-minded zealots in power, who rise and fall, and the unbending idealists, who burn at the stake.