Sidney Poitier stars as Homer Smith, a construction worker travelling West toward California who stops in a small town in Arizona because he needs water for his car radiator.\u00a0 He meets some women working a small subsistence farm who turn out to be nuns who escaped from East Germany and are now attempting to build a chapel for their local Catholic parish of poor Mexicans and a few other locals.\u00a0 He agrees to do some construction chores for them that they are obviously unqualified to perform but the next day when he tries to get paid they give him an egg and a cup of milk for breakfast and give him another list of chores to start on.<\/p>\n
At this point he begins the endless series of disagreements with the Mother Superior who rather than wanting to pay him for the work he has already done is convinced that Smith, or Schmidt as she calls him, has been sent by God to build their chapel for free.\u00a0 At several points Smith either prepares to or actually does leave the convent, but each time something inside of him makes him change his mind.\u00a0 As he explains to one of the characters in the story, he had always wished he had the money to go to school to become an architect or an engineer.\u00a0 He had always wanted to build something of his own design and as unreasonable as it is for him to be asked to build the chapel without pay, the challenge of the project is very attractive to him.<\/p>\n
And we also see that as much as he and the Mother Superior butt heads over the project and as impolite and unappreciative of all his help as she is, he has admiration for her faith and courage.\u00a0 And he enjoys the friendliness and innocence of the other sisters and he spends his free time teaching them English and teaching them to sing some of the Baptist spirituals that he knows from his childhood. \u00a0The theme of the movie is a song called Amen which is lip-synched by Poitier onto the vocal by the song\u2019s writer Jester Hairston.<\/p>\n
And the story unfolds with Smith finding a part time job with a local construction company that allows him to provide the penniless nuns with the first decent meals they\u2019ve probably had in years.\u00a0 And Smith drives them to the Catholic Mass in town where the local priest performs an outdoor Mass out of the back of his camper.\u00a0 There the sisters introduce Smith to the congregation and he is able to get a good breakfast at the local diner from Juan (played by Stanley Adams, a familiar face from the Twilight Zone and Star Trek).<\/p>\n
But the dream goes bust when the Mother Superior\u2019s efforts to obtain donated construction materials from wealthy individuals and organizations fail completely.\u00a0 When Smith asks her about the supplies she explodes in a burst of ungrateful abuse and he quits and drives off.\u00a0 Now the sisters must walk the miles along the desert highway again on Sundays and the congregation notices that Smith is missing.\u00a0 Despair descends on Mother Superior and all seems lost.\u00a0 But three weeks later as they are walking to Mass, Smith appears in his car and drives them to town.\u00a0 The congregation is so happy to see that he has returned that the Mexican laborers donate adobe bricks that they have made and even offer to assist in the construction labor.<\/p>\n
But first they must overcome Smith\u2019s stubborn determination to build the whole chapel himself.\u00a0 A funny scene is presented where a dozen laborers are sitting around watching Smith lug heavy adobe bricks up a ladder to place them on a wall in the blazing sun.\u00a0 It is obvious that he is almost exhausted by the exertion and the heat.\u00a0 Finally Juan brings a brick over to the wall where Smith is working.\u00a0 Juan innocently states that if he doesn\u2019t want the brick he can walk over it and climb up and down the wall with a brick of his own.\u00a0 When Smith finally takes the brick the rest of the laborers start carrying bricks over.\u00a0 But soon they start carrying the cement and setting the bricks themselves.\u00a0 Pretty soon Smith walks away in frustration as his building is being built by others.<\/p>\n
But things work themselves out.\u00a0 The laborers and the sisters have no real knowledge of how to design a building and pretty soon Smith rescues them from the Tower of Babel that German nuns and Mexican laborers arguing about the placement of windows represents.\u00a0 Smith takes control as the superintendent and the designer.\u00a0 He finds himself respected and valued by the Mother Superior, the sisters, the parish priest, the townspeople and is even offered a supervisory job at the construction company that he works part time at.\u00a0 And the completion of the chapel is a bitter sweet event for the sisters and Smith.\u00a0 But you can see that he has learned what he is capable of and that it is time for him to move on.\u00a0 So even though the Mother Superior has plans to show him off the next day at the first Mass and then to try and rope him into further construction projects; a school, a hospital; Smith knows that he will leave that night.\u00a0 But to make the parting easier he starts another one of their singing lessons.\u00a0 He sings the verses of Amen while the sisters sing the chorus and he sings the song right out the door and over to his car and finishes it off as he drives away.<\/p>\n
This is a sentimental movie with its heart in the right place.\u00a0 Poitier is a funny likeable character who sells his part admirably.\u00a0 Mother Superior is played as an overbearing authoritarian who hides her fear behind a gruff mask of commands and scorn.\u00a0 The other nuns are well played.\u00a0 Stanley Adams as Juan, the philosophical agnostic who hedges his bets against Hell by helping Smith and the nuns in their project, is generally amusing.\u00a0 The scenes juxtaposing the African American from the south and the German nuns trying to find common ground around religious music is genuinely charming.\u00a0 This is a nice small movie for Christmas or Easter or any time of the year when you want something heartwarming but relatively lighthearted.\u00a0 Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sidney Poitier stars as Homer Smith, a construction worker travelling West toward California who stops in a small town in Arizona because he needs water<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237],"tags":[2790,2791],"class_list":["post-12858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-sidney-poitier","tag-stanley-adams"],"yoast_head":"\n