Elmore was kinda coerced into adapting Rosary Murders by a local producer named Bobby Laurel. It really wasn’t Elmore’s kind of story and I don’t think his heart was in it.
Bobby Laurel was pure Detroit. A musician, he attended the University of Detroit and made his living for years playing piano at the old London Chop House. He wrote the theme song for the late J.P. McCarthy’s radio show.
He caught a break in 1987, when he produced The Rosary Murders , a feature film based on the novel by ex-Detroit priest William X. Kienzle. The screenplay was co-authored by Elmore Leonard, and much of the filming took place at Bobby’s alma mater, Holy Redeemer High School.
Janet Maslin in the New York Times nailed it.
A LARGE segment of Detroit’s Roman Catholic clergy has been attacked and murdered by a crazed killer, yet there’s only one sneaker-wearing priest on the trail. That is the premise of ‘‘The Rosary Murders,’’ a well-meaning but plodding thriller with a screenplay co-written by Elmore Leonard, who’s ordinarily so much faster on his feet. The story, based on a novel by William X. Kienzle, gives the impression of having been a lot more clever on the page. In fact the denouement, when at long last it arrives, reveals the killer to have staged quite an elaborate scheme, and its complexity comes as a surprise. Neither he nor anyone else in the film seems capable of that much ingenuity.
In ‘‘The Rosary Murders,’’ which opens today at Loews New York Twin and other theaters, Donald Sutherland plays the affable and iconoclastic Father Koesler, a priest with some decidedly modern ideas about his calling. He adopts an informal manner, reveals unmistakable disappointment when a favorite nun announces her intention to leave the order and marry, and is willing to baptize an illegitimate child after a fellow priest, Father Nabors (Charles Durning), refuses to do so. And when the string of murders begins, it is to Father Koesler that the killer turns. In a plot twist reminiscent of Hitchcock’s ‘‘I Confess,’’ the killer appears in church early in the film to taunt Father Koesler with the news of his exploits.
Though the police (led by Josef Sommer) are nominally involved in finding the killer, Father Koesler seems to be investigating alone. His only real assistant is Belinda Bauer, as the kind of glamorous newspaper reporter who paces when she talks, tosses her hair a lot and never takes notes.
The film’s only suspenseful episode finds Father Koesler alone in a house with the killer, though it would be physically impossible to direct such a sequence without a nerve-tingling frisson or two. (’‘The Rosary Murders’’ was directed by Fred Walton, who co-wrote the screenplay.) There is also a little inadvertent humor in the scene that has Father Koesler interrogating a nun who has taken a vow of silence, as she passes notes to him in the confessional. His questions are about the fate of a teen-age girl, and even the silent nun - who must repeat one of her answers by underlining it a few times - seems stunned at the remarkable slow-wittedness of her interrogator.
