It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

"Gideon" is a wonderful play and was a memorable TV production. The Gideon of the title is an ordinary shepherd, as I recall, and when the Angel of God asks him to do something, Gideon stubbornly refuses. The play is their continuing debate on obedience versus disobedience to God, and Peter Ustinov and Jose Ferrer give superior performances. I've never forgotten "Gideon" and long to see it again. I hope it still exists in the Hallmark Hall of Fame film vault. In the 1970s, Sister Mary Corita Kent used an apt quotation from the play for one of her powerful posters: "It is Passion, Gideon, that carries a man to God, and passion is a balky beast.... Yet it inspirits man's sessile soul above his own inadequate world and makes real such things as beauty, fancy, love, and God.... Passion is the very fact of God in man that makes him other than a brute...." Ustinov and Ferrer brought their own great passion to this play and it ought to be restored (if necessary) and shown again.