When this was released students attending Roman Catholic grammar schools were encouraged to see it, since it was an account of the Hungarian prelate, Joszef Cardinal Mindzenty's courageous stand against the Communist regime that had his native land within its ruthlessly cruel clutches. Charles Bickford, an actor of considerable gravitas, was a good choice to play the Cardinal, and, among the cast, Bonita Granville, the wife of this film's producer, Jack Wrather, was another of those arrested, interrogated and tortured by the Hungarian Communist regime, then still firmly in place at the time of this film's release.
I can still recall some rather graphic scenes of torture, including victims chained and forced to endure alternately scalding hot and freezing cold showers, and being strapped to chairs that spun dizzyingly for what was made to seem many agonizing minutes at a time. Nightmares precipitated by a viewing of this film haunted my dreams for quite a few months thereafter. It has always been a source of bewilderment to me that political and religious regimes use torture to break down the resistance of those opposed to their cruel and manifest untruth. What have they proved when they drag forth their victims to attest to their supposed "crimes"? Those who know the truth but have somehow escaped the terrible fate of their compatriots know that the "confessions" elicited by their hated oppressors are a sham. What they also know is that, at the Final Judgment, something which the concept of justice assures all honest hearts and minds will someday occur, the Lord's vengeance will be swift and eternal, and Satan himself will be assigned the task of meting out tortures more horrible than anything inflicted on this plane.
I can still recall some rather graphic scenes of torture, including victims chained and forced to endure alternately scalding hot and freezing cold showers, and being strapped to chairs that spun dizzyingly for what was made to seem many agonizing minutes at a time. Nightmares precipitated by a viewing of this film haunted my dreams for quite a few months thereafter. It has always been a source of bewilderment to me that political and religious regimes use torture to break down the resistance of those opposed to their cruel and manifest untruth. What have they proved when they drag forth their victims to attest to their supposed "crimes"? Those who know the truth but have somehow escaped the terrible fate of their compatriots know that the "confessions" elicited by their hated oppressors are a sham. What they also know is that, at the Final Judgment, something which the concept of justice assures all honest hearts and minds will someday occur, the Lord's vengeance will be swift and eternal, and Satan himself will be assigned the task of meting out tortures more horrible than anything inflicted on this plane.