Unfortunately this film got the wrong director. Leo McCarey was known for entertaining blockbusters, while the subject and story here is sinister indeed, and the message of it all gets lost in a direction that clearly had no interest in the subject. Leo McCarey actually hated directing it, and he left it unfinished thoroughly disgusted with it, to let others finish it off. The story is very arguable indeed especially by the disinterested treatment given it by the direction, while the novel is by Pearl S. Buck, who if anyone knew her China. She if anyone knew what she was writing about whenever she wrote of China. The story is a grim account of the communist take-over in 1949, masking its imposition in pretty phrases and feigned demonstrations of good will, while gradually the destruction sets in, methodically going from bad to worse until finally there is nothing left but ruins and corpses. William Holden and Clifton Webb are the two priests who get caught in this force of pincers with no way out except martyrdom, while they can do nothing about the towering accumulation of atrocities. Leo McCarey was a good Catholic himself and made some very nice Christian films, above all "The Bells of St. Mary's" with Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman, but here the Christian bathos and tendencies must have become too much for him, so he abandoned the ship, letting it founder by itself, which it partly does. However, the acting is superb, so is the music and the cinematography, but to make a film like this a more serious director would have been needed with some detachment and perspective to the story he actually is filming,
Review of Satan Never Sleeps
