Pope Joan | |
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Directed by | Michael Anderson |
Written by | John Briley |
Produced by | Kurt Unger Daniel Unger (uncredited) John Briley (associate producer) Leonard C. Lane (executive producer) |
Starring | Liv Ullmann Olivia de Havilland Franco Nero |
Cinematography | Billy Williams |
Edited by | Bill Lenny |
Music by | Maurice Jarre |
Distributed by | Columbia-Warner Distributors (UK) Columbia Pictures (US) |
Release date |
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Running time | 132 minutes (original uncut version) |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Pope Joan is a 1972 British historical drama film based on the story of Pope Joan. [1] Even though modern consensus generally considers Pope Joan to be legendary, [2] in the film her existence is treated as fact.
It was directed by Michael Anderson and has a cast which includes Liv Ullmann (in the lead role), Olivia de Havilland, Lesley-Anne Down, Franco Nero and Maximilian Schell. The soundtrack was composed by Maurice Jarre with additional choral music provided by The Sistine Chapel Choir, directed by Domenico Bartolucci. [3]
The film was released on DVD in 2003 on Region 1 format disc. [4] It was also re-titled in some areas as The Devil's Imposter, with much material cut.
The version of the film released in 1972 differed significantly from the version that had originally been filmed. Anderson's original was made with flashbacks and flash-forward sequences about a modern-day Evangelical preacher who believes her life parallels that of Pope Joan. In this version psychiatrists try to send her back through her past lives to establish if she is the reincarnation of Pope Joan. [5] However, the distributor decided to have all of the contemporary sequences removed and released the film as a straightforward historical drama. In 2009, the film was re-edited and the previously unreleased footage set in the 20th century was re-inserted. However, it also cut some of the footage of Joan being pope. It was re-released under the title She… Who Would Be Pope. [6]
Roger Greenspun summed up the legend in The New York Times :
In some medieval histories of the Roman Catholic Church there was a gap between the pontificates of Leo IV (847‐ 855) and his successor, Benedict III. Possibly to explain this gap, a legend grew up concerning a woman, Joan, born near Mainz, educated in Athens, who went to Rome disguised as a monk and so impressed Leo with her wit and learning that, thinking her a man, he appointed her his secretary and made her a cardinal. Upon his death, she was elected pope. But her pontificate was brief for when the people discovered that she was a woman, they barbarously murdered her outside the Lateran Palace. Although the legend has been discounted by church historians for centuries, it has been the source of several fictional accounts—none, I suspect, weirder than Michael Anderson's Pope Joan, which opened yesterday. [7]
In The New York Times , Roger Greenspun wrote:
Joan's vocation may be to serve God, but her temptation is always to satisfy men. The men show up surely enough — the artistic Benedictine brother Adrian (Maximilian Schell); the fiery Louis, her favorite (Franco Nero), and great grandson, no less, of Charlemagne—and never more regularly than at the convent where Joan passes her adolescent girlhood. It is an outrageous convent, wild despite the efforts of Olivia de Havilland as Mother Superior to keep things ladylike, and its novices might have been penitents from the cast of Sex Kittens Go to College...
Like everybody else, I have adored Liv Ullmann in Persona and Hour of the Wolf . Not even Pope Joan, which generally manages to make her look like George Peppard's twin brother, can suppress her grave appeal -- but I think she is being used to provide some Ingmar Bergman eroticism to balance the film's intermittent tone of Hollywood piety. [7]
Time Out magazine called the film a "rough and often painfully clumsy costume epic with the usual love story underneath it all, and chauvinistic presumptions abounding. Against all odds, Ullmann gives a remarkable performance, and it could have been a gem of a subject had it been handled by a woman director." [8]
Liv Johanne Ullmann is a Norwegian actress. Recognised as one of the greatest European actresses of all time, Ullmann is known as the muse and frequent collaborator of filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. She acted in many of his films, including Persona (1966), Cries and Whispers (1972), Scenes from a Marriage (1973), The Passion of Anna (1969), and Autumn Sonata (1978).
Pope Joan was, according to legend, a woman who reigned as pope for two years during the Middle Ages. Her story first appeared in chronicles in the 13th century and subsequently spread throughout Europe. The story was widely believed for centuries, but most modern scholars regard it as fictional.
Pope Sergius III was the bishop of Rome and nominal ruler of the Papal States from 29 January 904 to his death. He was pope during a period of violence and disorder in central Italy, when warring aristocratic factions sought to use the material and military resources of the papacy. At the behest of Theophylact I of Tusculum, Sergius seized the papal throne from Antipope Christopher, who in turn had deposed Pope Leo V. Sergius' reign was subsequently marked by Theophylact's influence. As pope, Sergius continued many ecclesiastical controversies of his predecessors, including conflict over Pope Formosus' legacy, annulling all ordinations made by the late pope, and the filioque controversy with eastern patriarchs. His pontificate was similarly marked by temporal conflicts, with Sergius' refusal to crown Berengar I of Italy as Holy Roman Emperor, and his support of Byzantine Emperor Leo VI the Wise's fourth marriage. Sergius also saw the restoration of the Lateran Palace.
Pope Leo IV was the bishop of Rome and ruler of the Papal States from 10 April 847 to his death. He is remembered for repairing Roman churches that had been damaged during the Arab raid against Rome, and for building the Leonine Wall around Vatican Hill to protect the city. Pope Leo organized a league of Italian cities who fought and won the sea Battle of Ostia against the Saracens.
Dame Olivia Mary de Havilland was a British and American actress. The major works of her cinematic career spanned from 1935 to 1988. She appeared in 49 feature films and was one of the leading actresses of her time. At the time of her death in 2020 at age 104, she was the oldest living and earliest surviving Academy Award winner and was widely considered as being the last surviving major star from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. Her younger sister, with whom she had a noted rivalry well documented in the media, was Oscar-winning actress Joan Fontaine.
The Emigrants is a 1971 Swedish film directed and co-written by Jan Troell and starring Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Eddie Axberg, Allan Edwall, Monica Zetterlund, and Pierre Lindstedt. It and its 1972 sequel, The New Land (Nybyggarna), which were produced concurrently, are based on Vilhelm Moberg's The Emigrants, a series of novels about poor Swedes who emigrate from Småland, Sweden, in the mid-19th century and make their home in Minnesota. This film adapts the first two of the four novels, which depict the hardships the emigrants experience in Sweden and on their journey to America.
Maximilian Schell was a Swiss actor. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the 1961 American film Judgment at Nuremberg, his second acting role in Hollywood. Born in Austria, his parents were involved in the arts and he grew up surrounded by performance and literature. While he was still a child, his family fled to Switzerland in 1938 when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, and they settled in Zürich. After World War II ended, Schell took up acting and directing full-time. He appeared in numerous German films, often anti-war, before moving to Hollywood.
Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland, known professionally as Joan Fontaine, was an English-American actress who is best known for her starring roles in Hollywood films during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Fontaine appeared in more than 45 films in a career that spanned five decades. She was the younger sister of actress Olivia de Havilland. Their rivalry was well-documented in the media at the height of Fontaine's career.
Maria Margarethe Anna Schell was an Austrian-Swiss actress. She was one of the leading stars of German cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1954, she was awarded the Cannes Best Actress Award for her performance in Helmut Käutner's war drama The Last Bridge, and in 1956, she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for Gervaise.
Lesley-Anne Down is a British actress, singer and former model. She made her motion picture debut in the 1969 drama film The Smashing Bird I Used to Know and later appeared in films Assault (1971), Countess Dracula (1971) and Pope Joan (1972). She achieved fame as Georgina Worsley in the ITV period drama series, Upstairs, Downstairs (1973–75).
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, for a time also entitled Elizabeth the Queen, is a 1939 American historical romantic drama film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, and Olivia de Havilland. Based on the play Elizabeth the Queen by Maxwell Anderson—which had a successful run on Broadway with Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt in the lead roles—the film fictionalizes the historical relationship between Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. The screenplay was written by Norman Reilly Raine and Aeneas MacKenzie.
Face to Face is a 1976 Swedish psychological drama film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. It tells the story of a psychiatrist who is suffering from a mental illness. It stars Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson.
The New Land is a 1972 Swedish film co-written and directed by Jan Troell and starring Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Eddie Axberg, Allan Edwall, Monica Zetterlund, and Pierre Lindstedt. It and its 1971 predecessor, The Emigrants (Utvandrarna), which were produced concurrently, are based on Vilhelm Moberg's The Emigrants, a series of four novels about poor Swedes who emigrate from Småland, Sweden, in the mid-19th century and make their home in Minnesota.
The 35th Academy Awards, honoring the best in film for 1962, were held on April 8, 1963, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica, California, hosted by Frank Sinatra.
In This Our Life is a 1942 American drama film, the second to be directed by John Huston. The screenplay by Howard Koch is based on the 1941 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same title by Ellen Glasgow. The cast included the established stars Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland as sisters and rivals in romance and life. Raoul Walsh also worked as director, taking over when Huston was called away for a war assignment after the United States entered World War II, but he was uncredited. This film was the third of six films that de Havilland and Davis starred in together.
Marlene is a 1984 West German documentary film co-written and directed by Maximilian Schell about German-American actress Marlene Dietrich. It was produced by Bayerischer Rundfunk and OKO-Film and released by Futura Film in West Germany and by Alive Films in the United States.
The Male Animal is a 1942 American comedy-drama film produced by Warner Bros., starring Henry Fonda, Olivia de Havilland and Joan Leslie.
First Love is a 1970 film, written, directed, produced and starred in by Austrian director Maximilian Schell. It is an adaptation of Ivan Turgenev's 1860 novella of the same name, starring Schell, Dominique Sanda, and John Moulder-Brown.
Pope Joan is 2009 epic historical drama film produced by Bernd Eichinger, based on American novelist Donna Woolfolk Cross' novel of the same name about the legendary Pope Joan. Directed by Sönke Wortmann, it stars Johanna Wokalek as Joan, David Wenham as Gerold, her lover, and John Goodman as Pope Sergius II. The film's world premiere occurred in Berlin on 19 October 2009, with its general release in Germany on 22 October 2009.
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