STEUBENVILLE, Ohio — It's a scene you haven't yet seen at your local multiplex and probably haven't caught on video or DVD: half a dozen Irish-Catholic U.S. soldiers, backs bared, bound hand and foot to wagon wheels, defiantly chanting the Hail Mary while being whipped by Anglo-American officers — singled out for punishment due to their ethnicity and religion.

Even movie-savvy Catholics often haven't heard of One Man's Hero, Lance Hool's 1999 film about the San Patricios, a group of Irish-Catholic immigrants in the 1840s who joined the U.S. Army but deserted after suffering religious and ethnic persecution, fled to Catholic Mexico and wound up fighting on the Mexican side in the U.S.-Mexican War. The film, starring Tom Berenger, never got a proper U.S. theatrical release and hasn't been promoted on video and DVD, even in Catholic markets and media.

Thomas Nash is working to change that. Nash is the driving force behind a campaign to get One Man's Hero the exposure he thinks it deserves — and his efforts have resulted in nearly 30 U.S. bishops signing a petition to MGM supporting a new theatrical release for the film in selected American and Irish markets.

A senior information specialist for Catholics United for the Faith, Nash happened to catch the film on DVD with his father on Holy Saturday 2002. Impressed with its moral themes, positive portrayal of Catholic piety, sympathetic view of Irish immigrants battling anti-Catholicism and refreshing lack of objectionable content, Nash did some research on why the film seemed so obscure — and wound up launching a personal campaign on the film's behalf.

What Nash learned is that Orion Pictures — which owned distribution rights for the film for most of the English-speaking world — had been bought by MGM Studios Inc., which showed little interest in the project and eventually wound up dumping it directly to video.

“One Man's Hero has been unjustly stymied by MGM,” Nash told the Register. “The film has become a modern-day metaphor for the story it portrays, with MGM's treatment of the film sadly paralleling that of the U.S. government's treatment of the San Patricios. Indeed, the St. Pats were not welcome in the good ol’ U.S.A. in the 1840s and now a film about them is not welcome here in the third millennium. Well, at least not yet.”

God and Country

But not all Catholics share Nash's perspective. The film's title — an allusion to the expression “one man's hero is another man's traitor” — is particularly apt for the San Patricios themselves: Church leaders in Mexico and Ireland have long considered them heroes, but many others, including many U.S. Catholics, consider the San Patricios traitors or at least criminal deserters.

“As an Irish-American and Catholic,” one blogger wrote recently, “I utterly reject the attempt to deny guilt and shame the [San Patricios] brought upon the Irish immigrants…. The passage of time does not erase treason.”

Nash — also of Irish-Catholic heritage — takes exception to that, arguing that it was the United States that broke faith with Irish soldiers by its unconstitutional refusal to provide Catholic chaplains and punitive approach to those who sought to attend Mass or who refused compulsory Protestant services.

Hool, the film's director, concurs. “There's a debt owed the Irish who have been mis-characterized as villains,” he told the Register. “The bond was broken by America, not them.”

Hool finds MGM's indifference to the film puzzling: “The film got standing ovations in Dublin and Belfast,” he noted, and would likely be a moneymaker in Ireland, so why not release it there?

In the United States, too, Hool said the film was positively reviewed in a number of publications and had been promised a positive write-up in The New York Times — though the review never ran, since the film wasn't released in New York. He also claimed a screening for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars, was very well received — but MGM didn't follow up by pushing for awards consideration.

Is MGM sitting on a pro-Catholic masterpiece? You might not get that impression from the handful of generally lukewarm reviews available online from Web sites such as RottenTomatoes.com, Metacritic.com and IMDb.com. (For the Register's take on the film, see “Video/DVD Picks,” page 12.)

Mixed Reviews

Audience response also has been mixed; some viewers have responded positively to the film's passion and conviction while others are unimpressed with its dialogue, battle scenes and historicity. Sticklers for accuracy have objected, for example, that the film's hero, John Riley (played by Berenger), deserted the American army not as a sergeant, as depicted in the film, but as a private.

But Nash isn't the only one who believes the film deserves a chance to connect with theater audiences. After a screening at last fall's meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C., 29 bishops signed Nash's petition to MGM “respectfully exhorting” the studio to release the film theatrically in selected markets in the United States and Ireland — or to consider selling distribution rights for those areas. Signers included Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb., and Auxiliary Bishops Jose Gomez of Denver and Emilio Allué of Boston.

MGM responded to Nash's petition Jan. 9, acknowledging the “impressive signatures” and promising to “direct” the request to “the appropriate executives on our management team.” MGM hasn't responded to the Register's requests for an interview.

How likely is the film to get a theatrical release, given its availability on video and DVD? Neither Hool nor Nash could think of any precedent for a film being successfully released in theaters after first going directly to video. (A small number of evangelical-produced films, such as Left Behind, have deliberately followed this release strategy, with less-than-stellar results.)

But Hool, who said he found the campaign on his film's behalf “flattering,” said there was hope, since it wouldn't cost the studio much money and could potentially be a windfall, especially in Ireland.

And Nash, whose campaign Web site can be found at www.geocities.com/oneman-shero2004, was also hopeful, adding, “Either way, the campaign should help get the film the attention it deserves.”

Steven D. Greydanus writes from Bloomfield, New Jersey.