In the spring, he knew he was in love with her. In the Winter of that same year he was on trial for her murder.

Sometimes....

Director Stanley Kramer ended his career with this absorbing drama, adapted from the play by Milan Stitt and based on a real-life event from 1927. Dick Van Dyke stars as Father Rivard, an intellectual priest in a small, impoverished mining town in the state of Washington. A lonely man with low self-esteem, Rivard is depressed by the arduous and dreary lives of his flock, until the arrival of Sister Rita (Kathleen Quinlan), a bright, spirited young nun who joins his parish to teach at its school. Rita appreciates Rivard on a level that few others in the community can, and soon the priest falls in love with her. But when Sister Rita is murdered, Rivard's infatuation is revealed and the love-struck priest is put on trial. Only Rivard's housekeeper, Mrs. Shandig (Maureen Stapleton), knows the truth about Sister Rita's death. Kramer broke up the staginess of his source material by structuring The Runner Stumbles (1979) into three acts that unfold not sequentially but simultaneously, revealing Rivard's developing relationship with Rita, his prison stint, and his murder trial all at the same time.


The Runner Stumbles opened to mixed to negative reviews. Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times, complained: “The movie's ethics are...so hazy, and its attention to religion so perfunctory, that it almost seems as if this were a story about something else that had been transferred, as an afterthought, to a Church setting...Mr. Kramer treats the film's religious questions as afterthoughts, and too often achieves a dispirited, noncommittal tone.”[2]
Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, considered the film to be “a little silly,” but added that “in its relentlessly old-fashioned way, "The Runner Stumbles" has a sort of dramatic persistence: It's not great, but it's there.”[3] Variety criticized the film for being “presented in such a way that, at times, it appears like the best of the old-fashioned 1940s tear jerkers complete with overly lush sound track.”[4]
The Runner Stumbles was not commercially successful, and it turned out to be Kramer's last film. It had a brief VHS video release, but to date it has not been released on DVD.


Release Date: November 16, 1979 @ Loews NY Twin

Distrib; 20th Century Fox