Faith & Spirit Quote by Ann Robinson

There is something disarmingly candid in Ann Robinson’s memory of George Pal: not a grand theological claim, but a working method. “Began and ended something with The Bible” lands like a behind-the-scenes ritual, the kind that can sound quaint until you realize it’s also a production philosophy. Pal isn’t merely sprinkling in symbolism; he’s framing the day, the set, the story world with an authority bigger than the studio schedule. That framing matters because it turns filmmaking into a moral enterprise, not just an entertainment one.

Robinson’s phrasing does quiet rhetorical work. “Oddly enough” signals mild surprise, as if she’s still taking his certainty in through the lens of a modern, secular industry. Then she normalizes it: “All his pictures had a religious undertone.” The subtext is less about doctrine than about reassurance. These aren’t movies preaching at you; they’re movies insisting that chaos is containable.

The kicker is the pronoun: “protecting us.” Not “the characters,” not “the audience,” but “us” on set. That collapses art and life. In the mid-century moment when Pal was making optimistic, often anxious science fiction and spectacle, “God was always there” reads as a counterweight to Cold War dread and technological unease. Robinson is pointing to how a producer smuggles comfort into genre narratives: you can stare down monsters, apocalypse, or the unknown, as long as the universe has a chaperone.