The Father Kino Story (1977)

The Father Kino Story is The Mission meets The Lone Ranger. It should appeal to family viewers who prefer The Alamo (1960) to The Alamo (2004), Fess Parker as Daniel Boone, and even something as contemporary as Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field. Richard Egan plays Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, a Catholic priest who in the late 1600s envisioned and pioneered an extensive missionary outreach to the indigenous peoples from Mexico City to Baja California (which Sir Francis Drake believed to be an island while Father Kino suspects it to be a peninsula leading back to the mainland west of Arizona). We see limited examples of the Mexican Army's officiousness and brutality when certain commanders paint all natives with the same brush of rebellion and then justify servitude, vengeance, and punishment. Father Kino intervenes for humane treatment and goes up the chain of command to finally broker a peace for all tribes that will preserve the work of the church and the civil government. He also creatively works with and around his church superiors, never giving up on his hope to return to ministry among the natives in (Baja) California. We see Ricardo Montalban, Cesar Romero, Aldo Ray, Keenan Wynn, and others in cameo roles and a mixed but mostly progressive approach to racial tolerance. (Father Kino is always for it, however, he overlooks one native chief's references to unconverted natives of other tribes as "devils" and wryly thanks the army commander who smugly points out his treatment of a half-Hispanic native as a "white.") This story feels historically believable is part of my Catholic movie list (tiny.cc/robolinks). Enjoy! 3 stars.