GREGORY PECK is a mild-mannered Hollywood liberal. He defends culpable friends in private, and perhaps the causes that incriminate them. He lends lip service and sometimes money to social crusades even in public. But he rarely instigates an action that would make a difference to anyone outside of the film industry.

He has now produced a film which seems to have changed his image in some men's eyes. The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, adapted by Daniel Berrigan from his own play, and filmed by Gordon Davidson--who staged the original production as artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum--is definitely radical in outlook. The figures it focuses on and attempts to heroicize not only damn the Vietnam War, but a general policy of American Third World influence which they view as evidence of economic imperialism.

Unfortunately, despite the claims of that New York Times interviewer blazoned over the ads, the film is as Establishment a piece of goods as any. It is photographed by Haskell Wexler in his slickest if-we-have-a-tiny-set-I'm-gonna-move-my-camera-anyway style (which produced the most glaring defects in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf). It is staged as a conscious theater piece, with actors orating to the audience--failing to produce what I suppose was intended as Brechtian effect, but making the whole affair come off like a video-taped TV show. And the treatment of the text is so reverential that any discussion of the issues is precluded by liturgical overtones (the Berrigans are saints--live like them).

Many of the film's limitations derive from the original material. Documentary theater--such as Berrigan's play--sacrifices characterization and theatrical expressiveness in order to get the simple facts straight and pure. This can be deadly dull. And, though I've not seen the play, only read it, I assume that the nearness of the Catonsville Nine's trial, and some clever ploys at arousing consequent emotional tension (including film clips of the actual Catonsville action), are what insured its almost universal acceptance one year ago.

Both as film and theater, the work's documentary pretensions cut against its major points. Beyond their political ideology, the Berrigans are part of the radical movement in the Catholic Church which is intent on establishing communal religious celebrations at the same time that they forward social change. None of the exhilarating sense of release from Rome and of their free-wheeling new identity, which are part of the experience of the movement, is felt from the Berrigan work. What should be a spiritual bacchanalia comes off more like a wake. It's no wonder that the film closed early, and no shame. I could only see it attracting the Berrigans' close friends and the backers' relatives.

PRODUCER GREGORY PECK strutted into town two weeks ago to plug the film before its short-lived Paris Theater run. Most of what he had to say had been said before. He decided to back the film at a personal financial risk of $250,000 because he saw it in Los Angeles and was moved. His Catholicism really didn't affect his decision. Peck simply wanted a way of stating the guilt of American government on screen, naming real names--without catering to the wild and unpatriotic.

For what impressed Peck most about the Berrigans were their patriotism--their roots in the Midwest American heartland--and their discipline. Peck knew about neither Phil Berrigan's peace movement past, his hardheaded political analyses and "Just War" philosophy (no pacifist he), nor Dan's more cosmopolitan and poetic development. Sufficient for Peck were the facts that the Catonsville people spoke from their firsthand experiences in Latin American hills and Paris slums; that they then tried to change the government through normal channels; and that their action was non-violent, based on moral guidelines and designed to awaken religious resonances.

Peck compared the play and its impact to the Depression's Waiting for Lefty. He hoped it would have the same kind of "inspirational effect". But that comparison merely reveals the fuzzyheadedness of the entire production. An audience watching Odets in the '30's knew what body of thought lay behind his words and at play's end were urged to take direct action and go out on strike. A Catonsville audience is left with the taste of the Lord's Prayer in their mouths--with only isolated protests to aim for and little analysis to guide them.

I believe Peck to be a sincere man. When he says, "Since 1968, something in the world has been happening which is inhuman, that makes you unable to breathe the same air," he really means it. But he is the sort of man who leads his name to intentions alone, whether those of half-baked films or a half-baked American Film Institute (of which he is a Trustee). And too many roads to futility are paved by such good men.