Helen Gould (Frieda Inescort) is suffering from a heart condition, but
instead of listening to her doctor's advice, she visits Father Price
(Vincent Price) and wants to join his praying group to pray for a miracle.
Father Price though tells her to first and foremost listen to her doctor
in order to even expect a miracle. Mrs Gould does so, reluctantly, but
when despite this the miracle has simply refused to happen a few weeks
later, she already wants to pull out of the praying group. Father Price
though doesn't give up that easily and probes her mind ... and learns that
she has a broken heart because she has broken up with her daughter Peggy
(Marcia Henderson). Probing further, the Father learns that the two of
them broke off contactg because of Don (Adam Kennedy), the man Peggy
married against her mother's advice. Since Mrs Gould refuses to admit she
might have made a mistake though, she is unwilling to reconcile with the
girl. Father Price urges Peggy to make the first step leading to
reconciliation, but her husband is dead against it - which leads to a
fight, and since Peggy is pregnant, it leads to a premature birth. The
baby is fine, but Peggy less so, and while she is kept in hospital and
might die, too, she calls out for her mother. It takes Father Price one
heck of an effort to get mother to visit Peggy in hospital, but once
that's achieved, everything ends happily ... This is kitsch as
kitsch can: While the series Crossroads claims to tell true
stories about the power of (both Christian and Jewish) faith, the
individual episodes like this one do little more than tell highly
clichéed and extremely conservative tales about questionable miracles. At
least Vincent Price is good in this one, but then again his is a role
every actor of his talent could do in his sleep.
|