The film is set in 1927 at a Roman Catholic parish in a rural town in Washington state. Sister Rita (Kathleen Quinlan), a young nun, arrives at the parish to help run the church school. When the parish?s two elderly nuns contract tuberculosis, Sister Rita is forced to move into the rectory that is home to Father Rivard (Dick Van Dyke), the parish priest. The close proximity between the two begins to set off gossip and suspicions, to the point that a monsignor from the diocese (Ray Bolger) comes to give Father Rivard a talking-to. The gossip turns out to be correct, as the priest and the nun confess their love for each other. However, their declaration of emotion leads to tragedy.[1]
Reception
The Runner Stumbles opened to mixed-to-negative reviews. Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times, complained: ?The movie's ethics are...so hazy, and its attention to religion so perfunctory, that it almost seems as if this were a story about something else that had been transferred, as an afterthought, to a Church setting...Mr. Kramer treats the film's religious questions as afterthoughts, and too often achieves a dispirited, noncommittal tone.?[2]
Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, considered the film to be ?a little silly,? but added that ?in its relentlessly old-fashioned way, "The Runner Stumbles" has a sort of dramatic persistence: It's not great, but it's there.?[3]Variety criticized the film for being ?presented in such a way that, at times, it appears like the best of the old-fashioned 1940s tear jerkers complete with overly lush sound track.?[4]
The Runner Stumbles was not commercial successful and it turned out to be the last film directed by Stanley Kramer. The film had a brief VHS video release, but to date it has not been released on DVD.
Encyclopedia
top
