ILLUSTRATION BY BRITT SPENCER
St. Louis Sage
Ah, you found the old movie? Actor Don Murray had come to St. Louis to promote Shake Hands With the Devil. He went to the press showing, and a slangy, rough-voiced man slung himself into the seat next to him and said, “Now listen, kid. I ain’t no square priest.”
Murray turned, registered the Roman collar around the guy’s skinny neck. The Reverend Charles “Dismas” Clark (Dismas was “the good thief” crucified alongside Jesus) had a proposal for him: Make a TV movie about the opening of Dismas House, one of the first halfway houses in the nation. Clark’s old lawyer friend Morris Shenker had helped him buy an empty school building, and the Jesuits had approved the plan. All Clark needed was publicity.
Intrigued by this supercharged blend of heavenly ideals and street smarts, Murray nodded thoughtfully. Forget the feel-good story for TV; he’d write the story as a motion picture.
The Hoodlum Priest went way over budget, partly because Murray insisted on filming in St. Louis. (“Its cheap saloons, alleys and slums, photographed in newsreel detail by Haskell Wexler, lend polish,” The New York Times noted.) Wexler went on to win Academy Awards; young Keir Dullea, who sliced an artery doing a scene on Produce Row, went on to stardom.
The film premiered in St. Louis on February 28, 1961. (Cardinal Joseph Ritter issued a special dispensation so Catholics could attend the gala during Lent.) Mayor Raymond Tucker drank alongside Shenker’s future client, the infamous Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa, who’d been finding jobs for Clark’s ex-cons.
Shenker was part-owner of the Dunes Hotel and Casino in Vegas—which, Sage suspects, is why Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. flew here in June 1965 to stage a benefit for Dismas House. Johnny Carson emceed (and actually sang), Sinatra brought the house down with “Fly Me to the Moon,” and Dean Martin changed a lyric in “Everybody Loves Somebody” to “If I had you in my shower...”
Newsweek pronounced The Hoodlum Priest one of the best 10 films of 1961, and it lent impetus to the national halfway house movement. Clark believed in second chances; he’d grown up rough, the son of a coal miner in rural Illinois, and might’ve chosen crime himself. Instead, he became a Jesuit. He won inmates’ trust by visiting weekly and bringing cigarette money; when they were released, he gave them lodging, food, and help finding jobs. When he died, The New York Times obit headlined him as “A Pastor of 3,500 Ex-Convicts.” A mind-blowing 95 percent of the men who’d gone through Dismas House had not returned to crime.
