Dir: Monica Teuber
Star: Steve Bond, Nastassja Kinski, David Warner, Günter Meisner

“Magdalene (Nastassia Kinski)– her business is pleasure– but when she spurns the love of the powerful Baron von Seidel (David Warner) she becomes the victim of his deadly rage. Father Mohr (Steve Bond) is young, idealistic, and unprepared for his new assignment to a town of lost souls, rampant corruption and Magdalene. Seduced by her charms, he intercedes to save her life and becomes the Baron’s next target.”
— Video cover

Well… About that… While I admire the enthusiasm, the blurb probably counts as over-selling thing just a little for this decidedly PG-rated tale.  The focus is actually on Father Joseph Mohr (Bond), who takes over as the parish priest in the Austrian town of Oberndorf, due to the illness of the previous incumbent (veteran Anthony Quayle, in one of his final performances). This newcomer draws the ire of local landowner Baron von Seidl (Warner), who fears the new priest’s radical ideas might pose a threat to the cozy business arrangement he has with the local monsignor (Meisner). Seeing Mohr’s fondness for and platonic involvement with woman of ill-repute, Magdalene (Kinski), von Seidl hatches a plot to force her to sign a confession saying Mohr was her lover, creating a scandal which would force his recall by the archbishop. Magdalene refuses, and flees Oberndorf for Salzburg, but the Baron’s tentacles can still reach her there.

I’m not quite sure what the aim is here. It’s not so much the above which is the issue, as the additional sub-plots that appear to have strayed in from another movie, and been bolted on to this for no readily apparent reason. For instance, there’s bandit leader, Janza (Franco Nero), who has the hots for Magdalene, during his forays into town. When she spurns his proposal of marriage – she seems to have discovered religion, through hanging out with Father Mohr – he takes up with the Baron instead. Nothing much appears to come of this. Odder still, is that Mohr’s place in history is mostly due to him having written the words to Silent Night, along with local schoolmaster, Franz Gruber (Cyrus Elias). So that subplot gets tacked on to the storyline as well, and really doesn’t fit in with the strongly anti-ecclesiastical atmosphere of the main thread. While that aspect is based in fact, the rest of it is, by all accounts, entirely fictional, further enhancing the odd flavor of a European goulash.

The main problem on the acting side is Bond, who was a regular on US soap General Hospital from 1983 through 1987, and looks he came straight from its set to take part in this film. Which is a problem, since this is supposedly Austria not long after the battle of Waterloo, rather than modern-day America, and Bond never looks anything except horribly out of place. The rest of the cast are much better: Warner is particularly good as the slimy Baron, but then, any kind of villain is pretty much right in Warner’s wheelhouse. Despite the near-pointlessness of his character, Nero does demonstrate his charisma, and Quayle’s performance has a poignancy, in part due to knowing that the actor sadly wouldn’t see out 1989. However, it’s hard to be sure if everyone is speaking the same language – literally, as one senses some of those taking part are not using English.

As for Kinski, the film is not exactly subtle in its suggestions that Magdalena is intended to be a parallel for Marie Magdalene, the associate of Jesus Christ. Just as her predecessor is often identified in Western Christianity as a saved prostitute, so Magdalene is “saved” from her life of vice, largely by the virtuous example of Mohr, who treats her kindly in a way with which she is largely unfamiliar, and she latches on to him as a result. It’s notable that, when von Seidel asks Magdalene if she slept with Father Mohr, she snaps back that she hadn’t – but she would if he asked her to. That’s probably the film’s best scene, with Kinski showing a sparky fire that makes for electric viewing; it’s likely not a coincidence that Bond is elsewhere, and uninvolved, as his performance is extremely flat, draining the dramatic life from proceedings just about any time he’s on screen.

In particular, it’s pretty clear that Mohr is far too squeaky-clean a priest to be drawn off the moral high-road, despite all of Magdalene’s best efforts to lure him into the fleshly pleasures – even if she does come particularly close on one occasion. Had she succeeded, it might have made for a more interesting and ambivalent movie, if the Baron’s scheming had been based in a greyer moral reality. Instead, the resolution here is very unfulfilling for just about everyone, with Mohr basically wandering off. He may have saved Magdalene’s soul from eternal damnation and hellfire, but I’m not sure she’s exactly happy about it.

This is a largely forgettable Euro-pudding of a film. After the string of high-profile Hollywood disaster movies [by which I mean they were disasters for those who financed them, rather than anything else], I can understand why Nastassja chose to return to her native Europe and ply her trade there. But I’d be hard-pushed to claim with a straight face that this was any kind of improvement, artistically, on the kind of thing she had been doing in America. There are still moments when she lights up the screen like a Roman candle, but even she can’t overcome the negative elements of a plodding script and an co-star in Bond who is woefully miscast.