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(More customer reviews)On May 17, 1968, the Berrigan brothers, Daniel & Philip, accompanied by 7 other Catholic activists, burned stacks of draft records in Catonsville, Maryland. They then awaited arrest for their willing destruction of Government property, and trial for their crime of conscience. Of course they were convicted, fined & sentenced to jail time, as were so many who protested the madness of the Vietnam War.
Daniel Berrigan went on to write a verse play about the trial, which in turn was made into this probing film. Both document to the past & witness to the future, it examines the demands of individual conscience, the price one is willing to pay in defying evil, and the struggle between the august indifference of the law & the anguish of the empathetic heart.
To many, this will seem like nothing more than an artifact of the 1960s, an unnecessary snapshot of naïveté ... or perhaps of arrogance. The current popular consumer culture is only too eager to erase the painful moral dimensions of that time, papering them over with day-glo & tie-dyed images all too easily packaged & sold in mass-market bulk.
But with new revelations of torture in the news each day, new understandings of the lies that sold a brutal war to the public, this film remains all too timely. That might put off a fair number of potential viewers, even assuming they could find a copy, because very few of us wish to be confronted with our own complicity in monstrous acts, whether knowing or unknowing. But the issues it raises demand consideration, demand that we wrestle with them, demand that we look.
History, particularly when it's unflattering & unsettling, is so easily flushed down the memory hole today. The tape is long out of print & hard to find; the chances of a DVD release are small at best. More's the pity, because for those who really want to know what the 1960s were about, and why they still matter, this film is indispensible. Most highly recommended!
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