The Light of Day
Entertaining Angels
Joe Martin
July 1, 1998
Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story directed by Michael Rhodes (Paulist Pictures, 1996), 111 minutes.
Dorothy Day is the closest thing to a Mother Teresa that America has ever known. Mention her name, though, and the most you can hope for is a blank stare. Hollywood producer Bud Keiser aimed to change that a couple years back with the ambitious Entertaining Angels. And though it generated some terrific critical buzz, commercially the thing never really took flight. In fact, hitting screens in only a handful of cities, Angels was probably seen by fewer viewers than a turkey like Howard the Duck. Now it finally makes its way to your corner video store, and if any movie in memory deserves a second lease on life, this is the one.
Moira Kelly plays Day, a young woman who hangs with the jet set of 1920s New York. Names like Leon Trotsky, Gertrude Stein, Eugene O'Neil, and Hart Crane fill the pages of her little black book. A budding journalist, she contributes to radical rags like The Masses and publishes a novel. Her young life is one long series of drinking bouts, heady love affairs, and Leftist political protests. She lands herself behind bars so often that one local New York City jail even maintains a "Dorothy Day Suite."
But there's another side to this free-spirited character. One day she wakes up pregnant (Lenny Van Dohlen plays common-law husband Forster Batterham), and the gravity of her situation turns her life inside-out. Writing later, in The Long Loneliness, she said, "I was determined to not have my daughter floundering through many years as I had done, undisciplined and amoral."
Seeking for a center, Day inexplicably turns to the one institution her Greenwich Village cronies simply cannot stand: the Catholic ...
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