Brand (1959)

A religious fanatic (Patrick McGoohan) returns to the Norwegian mountains of his childhood where he becomes the village priest. But he is a hard unforgiving man who believes in the often cold and cruel God of the Old Testament and he places near impossible responsibility on his parishioners and even his own wife (Dilys Hamlett). Based on the play by Henrik Ibsen and directed by Michael Elliott. If an artist, like Ibsen, is great then it stands to reason that therefore everything he writes is great. But BRAND gives rise to the notion that even great writers have their off days/plays. I'll concede that BRAND probably reads better on the page than when played out on stage where it's a rather dull play with ideas on God and faith and one's duty to God are bantered about to the point of exhaustion. It doesn't help that McGoohan's performance is a really bad imitation of Richard Burton and he's played or at least comes off very unsympathetically. With Patrick Wymark and Peter Sallis.