Product: Christian Catalyst Collection: Malcolm Muggeridge [VHS]
Rating: 5.0
A Wordsmith's Last Words
This is the EO TV show that the book, A Twentieth Century Testimony, was based on. It's an amazing 43 minute travelog, as it were, following Malcom around as he expounds and meditates, that sometimes seems to be about him and sometimes by him. He engages viewers in the first person, but the camera portrays him in the third. He holds forth on his dreams and visions, which seem to have always been with him, but have crept through his writings until he almost seems to be relating from another world. This video shifts scenes at least five times, with suitable segues between anecdotes, musical interludes and natural scenes for contemplation. As monks meditated on skulls, Malcom muses on gravestones. He feeds chickens at home on his farm, where his wife Kitty reads aloud from Newman. He recalls his past as a "vendor of words," sprinkling in bits from George Herbert and John Bunyan, Saints Francis and Augustine. He contemplates his wax double at Madame Tussaud's, then loses himself in the wilderness in Galilee, or rather, he would say, finds himself. Someone has subtitled in the dates 1903-1990 at the beginning of this video in which he is still very much alive, lending an eerie sensation as if after the end scene at the Sea of Galilee, he got in one of the boats and sailed away. Somehow this video was wrongly listed as NC-17, when it very likely is actually rated "G."