Watch The Runner Stumbles (1979) Free Online

Release Date: 1979

Cast: Kathleen Quinlan, Dick Van Dyke, Tammy Grimes

Categories: Movies, Melodrama, Docudrama

The Runner Stumbles is a 1979 film directed and produced by Stanley Kramer, based on the Broadway play by Milan Stitt. The film stars Dick Van Dyke, Kathleen Quinlan, Maureen Stapleton, Tammy Grimes, Beau Bridges and Ray Bolger. The film is set in 1911 at a Roman Catholic parish in the rural town of Solon, Michigan. Sister Rita (Quinlan), a young nun, arrives at the parish to help run the church school. When the parish’s two elderly nuns contract tuberculosis, Sister Rita is forced to move into the rectory that is home to Father Rivard (Van Dyke), the parish priest. The close proximity... MORE

The Runner Stumbles is a 1979 film directed and produced by Stanley Kramer, based on the Broadway play by Milan Stitt. The film stars Dick Van Dyke, Kathleen Quinlan, Maureen Stapleton, Tammy Grimes, Beau Bridges and Ray Bolger. The film is set in 1911 at a Roman Catholic parish in the rural town of Solon, Michigan. Sister Rita (Quinlan), a young nun, arrives at the parish to help run the church school. When the parish’s two elderly nuns contract tuberculosis, Sister Rita is forced to move into the rectory that is home to Father Rivard (Van Dyke), the parish priest. The close proximity between the two begins to set off gossip and suspicions, to the point that a monsignor from the diocese (Bolger) comes to give Father Rivard a talking-to. The gossip turns out to be correct, as the priest and the nun confess their love for each other. However, their declaration of emotion leads to tragedy. The Runner Stumbles opened to mixed to negative reviews. Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times, complained: “The movie's ethics are...so hazy, and its attention to religion so perfunctory, that it almost seems as if this were a story about something else that had been transferred, as an LESS