Delayed Reaction: A Man Called Peter

The Pitch: The true story of a man who was the chaplain for the United States Senate before he died.
The Hays Code. My god. Good riddance to you.

For a while now, I've been looking for a new project. I functionally finished with Club 50 and have had a solid year of being lost in the wilderness, seeing where my whims take me. That's fine, but it lacks any urgency and doesn't force me to look outside my genre comfort zone. One idea I had was to work through the National Board of Review lists, going back to when then began in the 30s or 20s. Another was to see the top 10 movies in the box office for every year I could track before 1987. In the spirit of that latter idea, I found A Man Called Peter on Netflix.

It's going to be hard to keep up with this new box office list if this movie is a good representation of popular sentiment during the Hays Code era. The Hays Code, for anyone unfamiliar with it, is the standards for film production that the MPAA ratings replaced. As bad as we may consider the MPAA ratings, the Hays Code was worse. A Man Called Peter feels like a poster child for what the Hays Code was all about. It's a sleepy movie, full of long sermons about God and how to live chaste and moral lives. There isn't any real drama. The characters aren't complex. It's just some speeches and plot in between to get to the next speech. Really, the less said about it the better. Sometimes, movies are forgotten about for a reason.

Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend