You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

In being interviewed by Dave Itzkoff for the New York Times regarding his movie You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Woody Allen says, “I was interested in the concept of faith in something. This sounds so bleak when I say it, but we need some delusions to keep us going.”

His statement that “we need some delusions to keep us going” has the form of a universal truth about human nature.  This might be interpreted to mean that we all have delusions, so fundamental is this need to our existence.  In that case, Allen would be including himself as someone who has delusions, which means he believes things that are false.  But if he knows they are false, then he does not believe them.

In his next sentence, however, it becomes clear this this need to have delusions often goes unfulfilled, for he distinguishes between people who successfully delude themselves and those who are unable to do so.  Now, those who cannot delude themselves obviously continue on with their lives, so his next sentence makes it clear what he means by “keep us going”:  “And the people who successfully delude themselves seem happier than the people who can’t.”  From this we may infer that by his expression “keep us going” he means “make us happy.”

He specifies the delusions he is most interested in:  “I’ve known people who have put their faith in religion and in fortune tellers. So it occurred to me that that was a good character for a movie: a woman who everything had failed for her, and all of a sudden, it turned out that a woman telling her fortune was helping her.”

That character is Helena.  When the movie begins, she is visiting a fortune teller, Cristal, who is able to feel cosmic waves, read the future with cards, provide guidance through astrology, and give assurances to Helena about her future lives by way of reincarnation.  Helena has turned to Cristal because she has been miserable ever since her husband left her.  She had a nervous breakdown, tried committing suicide by taking sleeping pills, has been seeing a psychiatrist, and has been taking medication, which hasn’t worked.  As Helena explains to Cristal, “My husband walked out on me for one simple reason. I was too honest with him. I refused to allow him to delude himself.”

Helena’s husband was Alfie, played by Anthony Hopkins.  Afraid of growing old and dying, he started jogging and eating health foods, believing in the longevity of his genes.  Because Helena kept telling him, “You’re not a young man anymore” and “You can’t fight time,” he left her.  Then he acquired the accoutrements of youth.  As the narrator informs us, “He bought a sports car. He took a flashy bachelor pad. Had his teeth whitened and his skin darkened.”

At this point it is worth noting that while Helena’s delusions have to do with the supernatural, Alfie’s delusions are secular.  The importance of this distinction is that whereas supernatural beliefs are metaphysical, which means they cannot be refuted by experience, the same is not true of secular delusions.

Alfie hires a call girl, Charmaine.  The sex is so good, with the help of a little Viagra, that he becomes a regular customer, eventually falling in love with her and marrying her.  Of course, they are utterly incompatible.  Alfie wants Charmaine to accompany him to see plays, and she thinks they are dumb.  In an effort to be fair, he agrees to do something she wants.  In the next scene, they are in a night club full of young people, while Alfie, being an old man, looks and feels totally out of place.  Electronic dance music is droning on and on.  Charmaine says, “I love this tune.”

It becomes clear that the marriage won’t work.  Charmaine’s extravagance has led Alfie into debt as he tries to keep up appearances, and she cheats on him with an employee at the gym.  Alfie tries to get back together with Helena, asking her to meet him where they had their first date, hoping they can begin again.  “I made a terrible mistake,” he says.  “My life is so messed up. I can’t tell you how messed up it is….  I blundered. I made a stupid mistake. I screwed up. I’m so fucking scared of being alone….  And then I saw my life slipping away, and I panicked.”

Helena refuses to get back together with Alfie, but she has good news for him.  “Alfie, you’ll live again. We don’t just live one life. The world is far more mysterious than it appears to our eyes.”  When a bewildered Alfie asks her what she is talking about, she announces that she has lived before, as have we all, so he need not be concerned about how his life has turned out this time.

In short, whereas Helena’s supernatural delusions make her happy, Alfie’s secular delusions have made him miserable.  And the way Helena blithely dismisses his concerns with her foolish beliefs only adds to that misery.

Alfie and Helena have a daughter Sally (Naomi Watts), who is married to Roy (Josh Brolin).  They are disappointed with the way their lives have turned out and are frustrated by unfulfilled desires.  Roy has a degree in medicine, but he fancies himself a writer of novels.  His first one was published, but nothing has been accepted since.  When his latest book is rejected, Helena tells him that Cristal predicted as much, but not to worry, since he may do better as a writer in a future life.

Roy stubbornly refuses to get a job based on his degree.  This means he is supported, in part, by Sally, but mostly by Helena, who receives alimony from Alfie.  As she is the one who pays the rent, Helena feels free to just barge into their apartment whenever she wants, overwhelming them with all the stuff Cristal has been telling her.  The only delusions that Roy and Sally suffer from are those of Helena.

When Roy is told that a friend of his has died, that friend having just finished a novel, Roy steals it and passes it off as his own, which is accepted with raves.  He figures this will establish him as a great novelist.  When Sally tells him she wants a divorce, he decides to marry another woman, Dia, with whom he has been carrying on a flirtation.  He gets Dia to break up with her fiancé, completely disrupting all the elaborate plans that had been made for their wedding.  But then it turns out that Roy’s friend did not die, but is only in a coma, from which the doctors are sure he will eventually recover.  Roy realizes that he will be exposed and that his life is ruined.

Sally is also miserable.  She fell in love with her married boss Greg (Antonio Banderas), only to find out that he is planning to leave his wife for another woman, one that Sally knows personally.  Heartbroken, she quits her job.  She tells Helena she has decided to start her own art gallery.  Helena had promised Sally that she would provide the financial backing for that, but now Helena says that Cristal has informed her that the aspects are not right, that the stars are not in the right alignment, and so she should not enter into any financial transactions for the indefinite future.

It would be too cynical say that Cristal wants to be able to milk Helena for all she is worth and thus does not want her wasting any of her money on Sally.  Rather, like someone who talks to God and finds that he and God are always in agreement, Cristal has seen in the stars what tends to her benefit.

Sally has been tolerating Helena’s delusions because she believed they made her mother happy.  But now that her delusions have this inconvenient result, Sally becomes furious, yelling at her mother, telling her she is a poor, pathetic, gullible imbecile.  She should not have said those things, of course, but putting up with Helena’s nonsense has not been easy.  If Helena merely believed in the supernatural, and it made her happy, that would be one thing.  But she is a fanatic.  No one can talk to her without her obsessively going on and on about all her crazy beliefs, oblivious to how miserable she is making others in doing so.

In the interview with Itzkoff, Allen says, regarding Helena, “The problem is, eventually, she’s in for a rude awakening.”  Had I read this interview before watching the movie, I might have thought that Allen was referring to her relationship with Jonathan, with whom she has fallen in love.  He is a widower who owns an occult bookshop and is said to be devout in a New Age way.  He wants to marry Helena, but he feels he needs permission from Claire, his deceased wife.  During a séance, he tries to ask Claire for permission to marry again, but he can’t bring himself to do so, fearing it will upset her.  Helena becomes angry and leaves the table.

Here is where I would have thought the movie would end, this being Helena’s rude awakening.  Her marriage to Alfie broke up because she refused to allow him to delude himself.  And now her hopes of marrying Jonathan are dashed by his delusions regarding Claire.

Instead, we get a final scene in which Jonathan tells Helena that another séance was held, and Claire has given him permission to marry again.  While we listen to Helena and Jonathan talking about their past lives, it appears that they will live happily ever after. As it is, there is nothing in this movie to indicate that Helena will have the rude awakening of which Allen so confidently spoke.

In any event, no one would want to be like Helena.  It would be too high a price to pay for happiness.

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

The opening scene of The Thomas Crown Affair begins with a man named Erwin (Jack Weston), enclosed within a small frame, walking down the hallway of a hotel.  He nervously knocks on a door, but there is no answer.  He knocks again, still no answer.  Finally, he turns the doorknob and slowly enters a dark room.  Having closed the door behind him, he suddenly finds bright spotlights shining in his face.  Shielding his eyes from the light, he asks, “What’s going on here?”

There is a man behind a desk in the dark.  His face cannot be seen, and his voice is disguised electronically.  He tells Erwin that he has a job for him: “Work an hour, you do an errand, you drive a car.”  Erwin is told that the job shouldn’t be dangerous, but if there is any shooting, he is on his own.  Otherwise, he will get $50,000 for the job, paid out in monthly installments so there will be no quick spending.  When Erwin asks how he will know that he will get paid, the answer is, “You don’t.”

Erwin agrees to the conditions.  He is tossed an envelope full of cash and told to buy a Ford station wagon.  When Erwin looks as though he is going to ask something, the man says, “No questions.  What you don’t know can’t hurt you. You or me, Erwin, boy.”

In the next scene, we find out what we already really knew, that the man in the dark is the title character, played by Steve McQueen.  We also find out that he is the head of a large, successful, financial company.  He has his amusements—playing golf, flying a glider, driving a dune buggy, playing polo—but he suffers from ennui.  The solution to that, apparently, it to mastermind a caper.

The caper turns out to be a bank robbery.  We have seen a lot of movies featuring a bank robbery, some of them quite complicated and executed with precision, but in each case, the men all know each other and plan it together.  This robbery is carried out by four men, in addition to Erwin, that don’t know each other and can recognize one another only by wearing sunglasses.  Simply put, this is not believable.  However, just before the robbery begins, one of the men, played by Yaphet Kotto, blesses himself, so I suppose that with God’s help, all things are possible.

Presumably, each of these four men went to that same hotel room.  Erwin is a salesman, not a professional criminal.  If we may be allowed to assume that the individual situations of the other four men were similar to that of Erwin, then none of these men were professional criminals either, each one just taking a few hours off from his regular job to rob a bank. This raises the question, what did Thomas Crown do, pick the names of these men out of a phonebook?

Alternatively, if they were criminals before the robbery, why did Crown select an amateur to drive the getaway car, especially someone like Erwin?  He sells cosmetics, which calls his manhood into question, and he is frequently seen wiping the sweat off his face, not to mention the fact that Crown contemptuously referred to him as “Erwin, boy.”

Whatever the situations of the other four men, they were presumably offered the same deal as Erwin, that they would not get their share of the loot until later, and without any guarantee that they ever would, given that they would not know who the man in the dark was.  Oh, sure!

And while that man in the dark was making these offers, the instructions could not have been as simple as telling them to buy a car.  We have to imagine him handing each man a schematic of the bank, saying here is where you will be, and here is where the others will be, and then you will do this, and another man do that, and so forth and so on, all while the spotlight is shining in the eyes of the man being given these instructions.

This is the reason why it was only Erwin that we saw in that hotel room.  We might believe that a character played by Jack Weston would be easily cowed by the setup and go along with it, considering that his role in the caper was simple enough, but seeing the other four men go through that would strain our credulity.

Finally, is it likely that Crown had to interview only four men besides Erwin?  Would there not have been several men that declined to participate in the robbery, especially when looking at that schematic with drawings representing who does what when?  Why, there might have been men parading in and out of that hotel room for weeks, not wanting any part of it, any one of whom might have called the police, letting them know what was going to happen.

On the day of the robbery, the four men drop the money they took out of the bank into Erwin’s station wagon.  He drives the car to a cemetery where he deposits the money in a trashcan.  After he drives away, Crown shows up in his Rolls-Royce.  He gets out and puts on gloves.  Then he puts a wreath of flowers on a grave while looking around to make sure he is alone.  Then he gets the bags of money out of the trashcan, puts them in the trunk of his car, and drives off.  I guess he put gloves on so he wouldn’t leave his fingerprints on the flowers.

Crown flies to Geneva and deposits some of the money in a Swiss bank, telling them there will be more deposits in the future.  Meanwhile, the police are baffled.  Enter Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway), insurance specialist.  Her specialty is to pick out the guilty party by looking at some photographs and then have sex with him.  Lucky for her, Thomas Crown does not look like Erwin.  Lucky for us too.

Speaking of Erwin, he is a henpecked husband whose wife hates him.  Vicki puts an ad in the newspaper offering a reward of $25,000 to be a fink and report anyone who was in Boston on a June 9th (the day of the robbery), drives a 1967 Ford station wagon, and is nervous, jumpy, or irritable.  Erwin’s wife sees a chance to get her hands on a lot of money and get rid of her husband at the same time.  So, she makes the call. Erwin is arrested and confesses to his part in the robbery, but he is unable to tell Vicki who hired him.

Nevertheless, Vicki is convinced that Crown is her man, and she lets him know that she will make things difficult for him financially. However, he has so much money that he says it doesn’t matter.  In fact, he tells her he is going to pull off another caper, not for the money, but for reasons existential, saying it’s between him and the system.  [Back in the late sixties and early seventies, “the system” was an oppressive social structure that threatened to overwhelm the individual, keeping him in his place.  “There is it again, the system,” says Buford Pusser in Walking Tall (1973).]

The plan is for Vicki to meet him at the cemetery where the drop will be made again, and together they will leave for Switzerland.  It will be a test of her love for him.  Another bank is robbed, pretty much in the same way, although I should think that this time Crown would hire a bachelor to drive the getaway car. In any event, when Crown’s Rolls-Royce shows up at the cemetery, Vicki is waiting for him with the police.  Apparently, her love for him was not true.

However, there is only a hired driver behind the wheel.  He hands Vicki a telegram, saying, “Left early.  Please come with the money, or you keep the car.”

The Thomas Crown Affair was the first movie in which someone robbed a bank and got away with it.  However, he had to give up the woman to do so, for she was still part of the system.  It would not be until The Getaway (1972) that a heterosexual couple would rob a bank, get away with it, and live happily ever after.

Boys Town (1938)

Boys Town is based on the life of Father Edward Flanagan, who started the title home for young boys.  The movie begins in a prison. Dan Farrow, a man who is about to be executed, wants to confess.  The warden is pleased.  Farrow was convicted on circumstantial evidence, and everyone will be relieved to know that he was definitely guilty.  Farrow doesn’t care about that.  He’s hoping to avoid going to Hell, saying, “I’m doing it because I’m scared. It may help the big rap when I go through that last door.”

Farrow asks for a drink, and the warden obliges by pulling out a flask.  Instead of a last meal, I guess he gets a last shot of whiskey.  But just as he is about to swig it down, a priest walks up, one Father Flanagan (Spencer Tracy), who shakes his head no, causing Farrow to forgo the drink.

Apparently, Farrow had asked for Flanagan, saying, “He knew me when.”  They talk briefly about what happens after you die, with Flanagan emphasizing the importance of being sorry for one’s mistakes.  It is worth noting that Flanagan used the word “mistakes” rather than “sins.”  Unlike the word “sin,” the word “mistake” carries no connotation of evil, just an error of judgment.

Then four other men enter the cell: the warden, the judge, a reporter, and the executioner.  The reporter wisecracks, saying to Farrow, “If you’d stuck to your guns, I’d have kept you alive for years.”

“I wouldn’t try to be funny if I were you,” the warden says to him. “This man wants to admit his debt to the State.”

At this point, Farrow erupts, angry at the way the State has let him down ever since he was just a kid, when he was orphaned and homeless, forced to gradually enter a life of crime to stay alive, eventually forming a gang with other men just like him.  When one of his gang informed on the rest of them, Farrow says he killed him, the crime for which he must now pay.  But, he goes on to say, if he had had just one friend when he was twelve years old, none of this would have happened.  These words haunt Flanagan after he leaves the prison and goes home.

As he walks down the street, we see dozens of young boys, many of them homeless orphans, fighting amongst themselves and damaging property, including the smashed window of a pawnbroker, Dave Morris (Henry Hull). Dave blames Flanagan for attracting these young hoodlums with his homeless shelter, Father Flanagan’s Refuge, which is next door.  Upon entering the shelter, Flanagan tells the men that live there that he won’t be running the place anymore because he realizes it’s too late to help them.  He means this in the spiritual sense, for he has been providing them with something to eat and a place to sleep.

Some of the boys that were in street causing trouble are arrested, but Flanagan is able to get the court to be lenient.  In return, he makes the following promise:  “I’ll assume full responsibility for these boys if you’ll place them in my charge. I’ll give them a home, I’ll see to their schooling, and I’ll guarantee their good conduct.”

He goes to the bishop to get permission for what he wants to do, but the bishop is skeptical, offering Flanagan a parish instead, telling him he is just dreaming.  “But I’m not dreaming,” Flanagan says. “There’s one thing I know, I really know. And that is, that there’s no such thing in the world as a bad boy.  I’m sure of that.”

The bishop gives him permission to start a home for boys, but provides no financial assistance.  For that, Flanagan must repeatedly turn to Dave.  This makes it clear that Boys Town is not exclusively a Christian thing.

Boys Town grows from five to five hundred boys.  At this point, Mickey Rooney, as Whitey Marsh, enters the picture.  He is the younger brother of Joe Marsh, a prison inmate who wants Flanagan to reform Whitey.  His reasoning is a bit strange.  It’s not that Joe regrets his life and does not want Whitey to end up like him.  Instead, he says that Whitey just doesn’t have what it takes to be like him.

At the same time, Whitey is clearly supposed to be the ultimate test of Flanagan’s belief that there is no such thing as a bad boy.  Unlike the other boys, who seem to be a bunch of goody two-shoes, Whitey comes across as a hoodlum wannabe.  The idea is that if Flanagan can reform Whitey, then that proves he is right.  But if Whitey does not “have what it takes” to be like Joe, then Whitey really isn’t much of a test case after all.  In fact, the only “bad” things we know about him is that he likes to play poker and shoot pool.

There is much silliness in this movie, and there is much melodrama.  Joe escapes from prison and teams up with his gang. They rob a bank, killing the night watchman.  By sheer coincidence, Whitey, who has left Boys Town, just happens to run into that gang, one of whom shoots him.  He ends up in the hospital, with the police thinking he was part of the robbery.

Pressure is put on Whitey to tell who it was that robbed the bank, recalling the situation at the beginning of the movie, where Farrow confesses to killing the guy that informed on the rest of the gang.  For some reason, the logic of which escapes me, if Whitey does not squeal on his brother Joe, then Boys Town will be shut down.  I guess the idea is that if Whitey was part of the robbery, then there is such a thing as a bad boy, which undermines the rationale for the existence of Boys Town.

In the end, Joe exonerates Whitey, even urging him to tell what happened.  Then Joe and his gang are physically overpowered by Flanagan and the boys from Boys Town.  Whitey ends up back at Boys Town, crying in the arms of Father Flanagan, who says, “There is no bad boy.”

That is not what most of us would call a realistic view of human nature, but we make allowances for the fact that Father Flanagan was a member of the clergy.  This is just the sort of thing one should expect from a priest who is totally absorbed in Christianity, who is full of faith, hope, and charity.  Or is it?  Actually, given the official position of the Catholic Church, one might have expected him to say there is no such thing as a good boy.

In 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was accused of impiety by the archbishop of Paris for saying that man is basically good.  In his book Émile, Rousseau averred that “all is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things, all degenerates in the hands of men.”  In The Social Contract, he begins with the words, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”  In an earlier work, Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Men, he argued that it is civilization that has corrupted man, for in a state of nature, he is noble and good.  Since we cannot go back to that primitive state, Rousseau concluded, we must change society in such a way that man’s essential goodness can flourish.

When we hear slogans such as “defund the police” and “abolish prisons,” we know who is heir to this philosophy.  Those who espouse such ideas may have never read Rousseau or even heard of him, but the basic idea is the same:  instead of spending money on the police and on prisons, we should spend that money on social services that will reshape society and eliminate its corrupting influence.

After Rousseau’s books were condemned in Paris, he fled to Protestant Switzerland, but the Calvinists were hardly less hostile to his writings, the burning of his books being ordered by the executive council of Geneva.  Rousseau’s works offended Catholic and Protestant alike, for he had contradicted the doctrine of original sin, which holds that man is basically evil.  This doctrine is essential to Christianity, for it explains why the Son of God had to suffer and die on the cross to pay for the sins of mankind.  If man is essentially good, as Rousseau claims, then the crucifixion was unnecessary.

Father Flanagan made a distinction between men and boys.  For a man who is already steeped in sin, it may be too late for him, but with boys it is different.  After all, in Mark 10:13-15, when the disciples of Jesus tried to prevent children from approaching him, he said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.  Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.”

This would seem to be at odds with the doctrine of original sin, something St. Augustine addressed in Book I of his Confessions [Penguin Books Ltd, translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin, 1961].  In his prayer to God regarding the sins of man in general and his own sins in particular, he says, “Who can recall to me the sins I committed as a baby?  For in your sight no man is free from sin, not even a child who has lived only one day on earth.”

He notes that a baby will throw a tantrum if he does not get his own way, doing his best to strike and hurt others, including his parents, when they do not give in to him.  “If babies are innocent,” he notes, “it is not for lack of will to do harm, but for lack of strength.”  It is, indeed, unnerving to consider that if babies had the size and strength of adults, they would be monsters.

The part of his life he spent as a baby, Augustine goes on to say, “is no different from the time I spent in my mother’s womb.  But if I was born in sin and guilt was with me already when my mother conceived me, where, I ask you Lord, where or when was I, your servant, ever innocent?”

Moving on to his life as a boy, he admits that he often quarreled, lied, cheated, and stole.  Although the stakes were small, his sins as a boy were motivated by the same passions as the sins of adults.

These points having been made, he addresses what Jesus said regarding children:  “It was, then, simply because they are small that you used children to symbolize humility when, as our King, you commended it by saying that the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

In other words, the little brats are no better than the rest of us.

Even just taking a neutral position, saying that man is not essentially either good or evil, is too much for the Catholic Church.  Pelagius, a contemporary of Augustine, denied the existence of original sin, saying that man has free will and can choose to be good, all on his own and without any help from God.  This is known as the Pelagian heresy.

Well, times have changed.  Father Flanagan, in saying that there is no such thing as a bad boy, sounds more like Rousseau or Pelagius than Augustine.  But instead of being charged with impiety or heresy, Flanagan was beatified as a Servant of God, and Pope Leo XIV granted him the title of Venerable.

The Miracle (1948)

One afternoon in 1967, I went to see Bedazzled with a friend of mine. We thought it was funny, and when it was over, my friend said he was glad that the Supreme Court had ruled that blasphemy in the movies was protected by the First Amendment.  I didn’t know that at the time, but given what we had just seen, I knew he must have been right.

Years later, I read Obscene, Indecent, Immoral, and Offensive:  100+ Years of Censored, Banned, and Controversial Films by Stephen Tropiano.  From this book I learned that in the case of Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio (1915), the Supreme Court ruled—in a 9-0 decision—that motion pictures are not protected speech.  Writing on behalf of the court, Justice McKenna said that motion pictures merely represent visually stuff that is already available in books and newspapers.  As a result, they do not warrant protection under the First Amendment.  Furthermore, he went on to say, the power and attractiveness of such visual representations make them “capable of evil.”

In 1948, Roberto Rossellini produced Il Miracola (The Miracle).  As it is only forty-one minutes long, it was originally paired with another movie, La Voce Umana (The Human Voice), and titled L’Amore (Love).  According to Tropiano, audiences in Italy found the movie to be boring, and the Vatican expressed only a mild objection to it.  When it debuted in America in 1950, however, religious authorities were outraged.  Cardinal Spellman objected to the sacrilegious nature of this movie as something Satan himself might have produced.  Efforts to ban this movie reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in Burstyn v. Wilson (1952)—also in a 9-0 decision—that movies were indeed protected speech by virtue of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, thereby overturning the Mutual decision.

From the summary of The Miracle, I wondered why such a fuss had been made.  It was about a simpleminded woman who lets a stranger get her drunk, have sex with her, and get her pregnant.  She thinks the man is St. Joseph and that her pregnancy is by the grace of God.  The people in her village mock her, thinking she is ridiculous.

I decided to watch the movie myself to see what the big deal was all about, but that proved to be something of a challenge. I was finally able to watch it on ok.ru.  This is not the first time this Russian website has allowed me to see a movie not available elsewhere.

Anna Magnani plays Nanni, and Federico Fellini plays the Vagabond.  Nanni is up in the mountains shepherding some goats when the Vagabond passes by.  As soon as she sees him, she says, “Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”  She believes the Vagabond to be St. Joseph, saying she knew he would come, how beautiful he is, how she worships him.  In other words, she has been caught up in this obsession with St. Joseph for some time, and all that was needed was for a good-looking guy to walk by and flesh out her delusion.  She wants him to give her his grace and take her to Heaven with him.

Apparently, she has already been telling people in the village that she has had visions of St. Joseph, and they have been telling her she is crazy, saying, “Mad people can’t go to Heaven.”  She says that a voice she heard, which she took to be Joseph, told her to jump off a cliff, but fortunately she realized it was just the devil pretending to be Joseph, wanting her to kill herself so she would not go to Heaven.  But if she does start to fall, she says to the Vagabond that he will take her hand, and together they will fly through the air.

As she rambles on like this, I can see why this movie is paired with The Human Voice.  In that movie, the entire thing is about a woman, played by Anna Magnani, talking to her lover on the telephone, who apparently is breaking up with her.  Just as we hear only her side of the conversation, so too in this part of The Miracle do we hear only Nanni talking, with the Vagabond remaining silent, while continually giving her wine to drink.

As she goes on talking, it becomes clear that her fantasies are sexual in nature.  In The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud says dreams of falling or flying have sexual significance.  Even if one is not a Freudian, psychoanalysis was all the rage when this movie was made, and Rossellini clearly assumed that the audience would make that association.

She lies down and unbuttons her dress while speaking of Heaven, her hand going underneath, touching her breasts, feeling her own sweat.  She speaks of how she might have gotten married, but in that case, she says, “I wouldn’t be able to come with you.”

The original language of this movie is Italian, so I can’t be sure about this expression, but the English translation is peculiar, because that is not what you would normally say to someone sitting beside you.  One might say, “I will go with you,” or “You will come with me,” but “I will come with you” would be strange, unless, of course, the word “come” is being used to mean “have an orgasm.”

She quotes part of Matthew 1:20:  “Joseph, son of David, be not afraid to take Mary as your wife because that which is conceived in her…”  She does not finish the quotation, which continues, “is of the Holy Ghost.”  In addition to assuming that the Vagabond is Joseph, she is identifying with the Virgin Mary, but she is suppressing the part about the Holy Ghost. She does this to avoid making a distinction between St. Joseph and the Holy Ghost.

Jesus is the Son of God.  Now, if the Bible said that Yahweh impregnated Mary, that would force us to imagine Yahweh and Mary having sex.  So, the author of Matthew availed himself of the idea of God as pure spirit in order to avoid such imagery.  Nanni wants to have sex with the Vagabond, thinking him to be Joseph, but if he is just Joseph, that would be nothing more than having sex with a man.  On the other hand, the Holy Ghost, all by itself, would not be able to satisfy her lust.  So, she combines Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus, with the Holy Ghost, the real father.  In that way, having sex with the Vagabond can be experienced as having sex with God.

She continues:  “My St. Joseph.  Throw away my body and take my soul.  Throw it away without any clothes on.” Shortly after that, the screen goes dark. Presumably, they have sex, after which she falls asleep.

When she wakes up, she descends the mountain with her goats, and at the bottom, she runs into Brother Raffaele, who is a monk.  She asks him, “Tell me, saints can appear to us, can’t they.”

He assures her they can, saying, “I always see the Madonna.  She appears whenever she wishes.”

Nanni asks if she is pretty, and Raffaele says, “She’s beautiful.”

So, like Nanni, he sees a saint of the opposite sex, and just as Nanni thought Joseph was handsome, he thinks the Madonna is beautiful.  We cannot help but suppose that, like Nanni, he has sexual fantasies with his own favorite saint.

At this point, another monk shows up.  He is a bit more realistic, saying in his twenty years at the monastery, he has never had a vision or seen a miracle.  Brother Raffaele says he is crazy, and Nanni becomes angry.

What follows is a strange scene.  Nanni is in church.  She steals an apple from another woman’s basket and then goes outside and eats it.  All I can figure is that this is an allusion to the original sin, provided we assume some common misconceptions.  Biblically speaking, the forbidden fruit was not specified as being an apple, though it is often identified as such.  Furthermore, a lot of people think that the sin in question was sexual.  But that cannot be because the Bible makes it clear that Adam and Eve were married, and there is nothing sinful about a married couple having sex.  Nevertheless, the apple has come to represent the forbidden fruit of sex.  So, Nanni is being associated with Eve. The apparent implication might seem to be that her having sex with the Vagabond was sinful, and indeed, that is the attitude of the people in her village when they find out she is pregnant. In defending this movie, however, Rossellini refers to Nanni as a “demented woman” who deserves our pity, rather than as a sinful woman who deserves our condemnation.

Nanni’s pregnancy would be scandalous enough given that she is not married, but since she insists that her pregnancy is a miracle, brought about through the grace of God, people make fun of her.  Because she identifies with the Virgin Mary, we can only imagine what would have happened had Joseph not married Mary and made an honest woman out of her, so to speak.  That is, imagine if Mary had remained single and had gone around telling people that she was great with child because the Holy Ghost had come upon her.

Nanni is mercilessly ridiculed by people as she walks down the street. They throw stuff at her, and someone puts a washing basin on her head, which reminded me of the crown of thorns put on the head of Jesus on his way to being crucified. Just as I was thinking that this might all be in my imagination, Nanni says, “My God, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing,” which is essentially what Jesus says in Luke 23:34.

In addition to suggesting that the real Virgin Mary was, like Nanni, delusional, or rather that the entire thing was made up, and that people in general are foolish to believe in such stories, this movie also says that the message of Christianity, which is all about love, charity, and forgiveness, is a fraud and that the Christians in her village are cruel hypocrites.

In the end, Nanni climbs up to a church at the top of a mountain, so high up that I couldn’t help but wonder who would go there.  And, indeed, it is deserted.  It is there that she has her baby.  The End.

According to Tropiano, Cardinal Spellman inspired protests to chants of, “This is the kind of picture Communists want.” And Martin Quigley, who worked closely with Joseph Breen, the man in charge of enforcing the Production Code, argued that this movie was part of a Communist conspiracy to destroy religion.

Maybe that’s why it was only on that Russian website that I was able to see this movie.

Body Heat (1981)

Body Heat is often compared to Double Indemnity.  In both movies, a man has an affair with a married woman, and they conspire to kill her husband for money.  In Double Indemnity, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) are the lovers.  They murder her husband, played by Tom Powers, in order to collect on his accident insurance.  By the end of the movie, however, Walter has murdered Phyllis because he suspected she would betray him, and he is on his way to the gas chamber.

In Body Heat, Ned Racine (William Hurt) and Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) are the lovers who murder her husband Edmund (Richard Crenna).  Because she had signed a prenuptial, the only way for her to get any of his money was by inheriting it.  After the murder, Matty betrays Ned, who ends up in prison, while she gets what she has dreamed of since high school, “to be rich and live in an exotic land.”  She has committed the perfect murder.

Of course, Body Heat was made in 1981, whereas Double Indemnity was made in 1944.  Before 1968, when the Production Code was still in force, there was no way someone could get away with murder in a movie.  After the Production Code was abandoned, it became possible to make such a movie, but it almost never happens because we usually don’t like it.  In fact, we so don’t like it that a lot of people deny that there is any such thing as a perfect murder.

In Jigsaw (1962), two detectives are trying to solve a murder.  After being foiled at every turn, one of them says, “It’s beginning to look like the perfect murder to me.”

His superior dismisses the possibility:

There’s no such thing as a perfect murder, my lad.  Somewhere there’s always a flaw.  There’s always a track leading from the kill to the killer, and no matter how well he covers the track, he’s going to leave more tracks doing it.

And yet, murders go unsolved all the time.

Perhaps, in all fairness, we have to distinguish between an unsolved murder and a perfect murder.  Unsolved murders often involve street crime, murders committed by lowlifes, as when a dope fiend kills a drug dealer, and all the police do is send the body to the morgue.  The idea of a perfect murder presupposes that the killer and his victim are at least middle class.

Even when so restricted, there still remain unsolved murders, so perhaps we should make another distinction, in that a murder would not have to be perfect in order for someone to get away with it.  It could have been sloppily done, but the police were busy with other cases and didn’t have the time to thoroughly investigate it.  The perfect murder is supposed to be a matter of wits:  the ingenuity of the killer in setting it up, maybe even faking evidence, as opposed to the cleverness of the detectives in trying to figure out who done it.

Perhaps the mistake lies in trying to apply the concept of the perfect murder to real life, where it does not belong.  Instead, the idea of a perfect murder belongs only in fiction, and even then, only as an ideal toward which the killer strives but never quite realizes, as in movies like Jigsaw, where it turns out not to be perfect, and the killer is caught. Body Heat, however, is a rare exception to this principle.

If we are to enjoy a movie in which someone commits a perfect murder, it is essential that the victim is only getting what he deserves.  In Body Heat, Peter Lowenstein (Ted Danson) is Ned’s friend.  He is also a prosecuting attorney, and he suspects that Ned is involved in Edmund Walker’s murder.  “Walker was a bad guy,” he says, “and the more I find out about him, the happier I am he’s dead. I figure it’s a positive thing for the world….  As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care who killed him, and I don’t care who gets rich because of it.”

That means we don’t have to care either.

Furthermore, there is a scene where Ned is at a restaurant with Edmund and Matty.  When Matty excuses herself to go to the powder room, Edmund says that if he ever found out that she was having an affair with another man, he would kill the guy.  Because he would be willing to kill over a woman, it doesn’t seem so bad that Ned is willing to do the same thing to him.

The second person to be murdered is Mary Ann Simpson.  Actually, she is the real Matty, and Matty is the real Mary Ann.  To avoid confusion, they will be referred to by their assumed names, not their real ones.  Matty assumed Mary Ann’s identity to cover up her unsavory past, and when Mary Ann found out about it, she started blackmailing Matty.  As we have learned from watching movies, blackmailers never accept a single sum of money to keep quiet.  They always come back for more, so the person being blackmailed can put an end to it in only one way.  In other words, the blackmailer brings it on himself.  Furthermore, we always detest blackmailers and want them to come to a bad end, more so even than those that commit murder.  We might accept that Matty gets away with murder and enjoys the rest of her life, but we could not stomach the idea of Mary Ann getting away with blackmail, the movie ending with her living life to the full after having soaked Matty for all she was worth.

Another thing that makes it possible for us to accept the idea of Matty getting away with murder is that we never actually see her kill anyone.  Just as Walter is the one who killed Phyllis’s husband in Double Indemnity, Matty gets Ned to kill Edmund, and we never see her kill Mary Ann, who is already dead when the explosion occurs in the boathouse where her corpse had been placed.

Finally, Matty is a woman.  If a man in a movie murders his wife for money, he absolutely must come to a bad end.  But when a woman does that to her husband, is there not some deep, underlying sympathy for her?  As the song says in Chicago (2002), “He had it coming!”

And this is paradoxical, because when a woman kills her husband, that seems to be the greater evil.  At least, it seems that way to men. In any event, they don’t expect that from a woman.  Men are known for being violent, whereas women seem unsuited for it:  physically, because women are the weaker sex; psychologically, because we think of women as compassionate and nurturing.  That is why Lady Macbeth says, “Unsex me here,” so that she can help her husband commit murder.

Clytemnestra murdered her husband with the help of her lover Aegisthus.  And yet, was she not justified in doing so?  Did not her husband, Agamemnon, murder their daughter Iphigenia as a sacrifice to Artemis? But whereas Clytemnestra is known as the notorious husband-murderer, Agamemnon is not principally known as a daughter-murderer, but for leading the Greeks in a conquest of Troy, gaining glory for himself in doing so.

Perhaps it worth noting that the need for a sacrifice resulted from the fact that Agamemnon had killed a deer in a grove that was supposedly sacred to Artemis.  Calchas, the seer, told Agamemnon that in order to appease Artemis, he must sacrifice Iphigenia.  Now, I think we can all agree that the Greek gods do not exist.  So, this idea on the part of Calchas that Iphigenia must be sacrificed arose out of his own imagination.  In other words, a man decided that a young girl must die.

Calchas could have said to Agamemnon, “Artemis wants you to be sacrificed since you were the one that killed that deer.  She says your brother Menelaus can take over from here and lead the ships to Troy.”

Alternatively, he could have said, “Your son Orestes must be sacrificed.”  But he did not because the idea of sacrificing a female rather than a male was more congenial to all concerned, aside from the girl and her mother, that is.

Finally, the whole story could have been pure fiction, in which case I would be willing to give long odds that it was a man who made it up.

There remains the question, is Body Heat the first work of fiction in which a woman commits the perfect murder?  No, that honor goes to the novel Vanity Fair, in which Becky Sharp is twice referred to as being in the role of Clytemnestra.  She poisons her lover, Jos Sedley, for his life insurance. Most adaptations, be they movies or television series, shy away from that ending, even allowing Becky and Jos to live happily ever after.  The only exception that I am aware of is the 1987 version, in which the murder does take place and Becky gets away with it.

Interestingly, there are repeated allusions in the novel to the murder of Iphigenia, reminding us of how women have readily been sacrificed by men in pursuit of their own selfish ends.

There is a fundamental injustice between the sexes that has been there from the beginning, which men have exploited to their advantage.  And so it is that when a woman finally strikes back against a man, there is a sense of justice being served.  He had it coming!

Religulous (2008)

I saw Religulous when it first came out, and while I enjoyed Bill Maher’s humorous take on religion, there was one section of the movie that told me something I did not know.

It begins with Maher saying that when he went to church as a child, there were “moments of sheer terror” at the thought of burning in the eternal fire of Hell.  Following this, the scene changes, and we find Maher announcing that he is in the Vatican.  But not for long.  Suddenly, the camera is apparently pushed down, filming the floor, while the microphone picks up sounds of scuffling.  The next we see of him, he is standing in front of the Vatican.  He says he wanted to interview the Pope, but he would have settled for a cardinal, a monsignor, or even the flying nun. No such luck.  Instead, they just threw him out.

But then a priest does turn up, Father Reginald Foster.  In the course of their conversation, Foster makes reference to all the books he has read by atheists who say religion is stupid.

“You know what’s going to happen to them,” Maher replies.  “They’re going to be roasting in Hell.”

“Come on, roasting,” Foster replies.  “That’s the old Catholic thing.”

“That’s what they taught me,” Maher says, somewhat perplexed by this.

“Yeah, I know,” Foster says, “that Hell business.”

“Well, come on,” Maher persists, “the standard doctrine that I was taught as a kid.”

“Yeah, that’s all gone,” Foster says dismissively.  “That’s all finished.”

“But that’s not fair,” Maher replies. 

“Yeah,” Foster concludes, giving the whole business a raspberry.

After priests frightened Maher with Hell when he was a child, they now say, “Never mind,” and have a laugh at his expense for having ever believed such foolishness.

I was as perplexed as Maher.  No Hell?   Somebody should have told me!

I have a friend who is a Catholic.  She said she once asked a priest about a hypothetical situation: A man and woman are truly in love with each other and plan on getting married, but one Saturday night they get carried away and have sex.  Filled with guilt, they decide to go to confession on Sunday, after which they will get married so as to preclude the possibility of lapsing into sin once more.  However, on the way home they are involved in an automobile accident and both are killed.

“What would happen to them?” she asked.

The priest replied, “They would go to Hell.”

After I saw Religulous, I called her up to tell her that her priest had apparently not received the word.

Recently, I happened to be reading an excerpt from Against All Gods, by A.C. Grayling, who discusses the phrase “fundamentalist atheist.”

Christians among other things mean by “fundamentalist atheists” those who would deny people the comforts of faith….  Yet in its concessive, modest, palliative modern form Christianity is a recent and highly modified version of what, for most of its history, has been an often violent and always oppressive ideology….  Nowadays, by contrast, Christianity specializes in soft-focus mood music; its threats of hell, its demand for poverty and chastity, its doctrine that only the few will be saved and the many damned, have been shed, replaced by strummed guitars and saccharine smiles.

In other words, by taking what Jesus had to say about Hell seriously, the fundamentalist atheist is spoiling everyone’s good mood.

Grayling goes on to mention that the Church of England abolished Hell by an Act of Synod in the 1920s.  Instead, those who do not accept Christ as their savior are merely separated from God.  Apparently, the Catholic Church came to a similar conclusion in 1992.  And so it is that the Anglican and Catholic Churches no longer have a Hell.  All they have now is a Heck.

Needless to say, a lot of Christians still believe in a real Hell, a place where those without faith will literally burn in the eternal fire.  Early in the movie Religulous, Maher, who is, of course, a fundamentalist atheist, passes by a billboard which reads, in all caps, “HELL IS REAL.”

Maher’s mother was Jewish, but his father was Catholic, and he was raised as such.  When talking about religion, he also includes Islam.  So, all three Abrahamic religions are examined, along with Mormonism and Scientology.  He says that he used to make jokes about religion as a standup comic, but his quest now is more fundamental, so to speak.  He wants to understand how otherwise rational people, from a fear of death, can cling to a belief that “they know can’t be true.”

When Maher is talking to the kind of people that believe in Hell, they are usually also the ones that are fundamentalists in the ordinary sense of the word.  As a result, Maher can question them about such things as the story of Adam and Eve.  But given the fact that the Anglican and Catholic Churches no longer believe in Hell, it is not surprising that they don’t believe in a lot of other stuff in the Bible too, so that a fundamentalist atheist like Maher has less material to work with.

However, as Grayling points out, the mean-spirited, fundamentalist atheist can still cause discomfort by going on about “the demand for poverty and chastity,” by noting that in Matthew 19, Jesus says that we should sell all our worldly possessions and give the proceeds to the poor.

While talking to Father Foster, Maher points to the Vatican, saying:  “When you look at a building like that, a giant palace, does it seem at odds with the message of the founder?”

Foster, in his usual joking manner, admits that it does bother him, and that he wouldn’t live there if he were boss.

With only a little prompting from Maher, Foster goes on to say that a lot of stuff Christians believe are just “nice stories,” and people believe them or not as they want.  “Talk about Cafeteria Catholics!” he says, followed by another raspberry.

Maher asks, “So how do you convince people of what’s the true faith?”

“You don’t,” Foster says, as he sums it all up.  “Forget it.  You just have to live and die with their stupid ideas.”

And one of their “stupid ideas,” of course, is their belief in Hell.

So, for that “hypothetical” couple my friend was worried about, Religulous brings them good tidings of great joy.  They might end up being separated from God, but at least they will have each other.

The Andromeda Strain (1971)

The Andromeda Strain begins with a prologue telling us that the movie we are about to see is based on actual events:

This film concerns the four-day history of a major American scientific crisis.  We received the generous help of many people attached to Project Scoop at Vandenberg Air Force Base and the Wildfire Laboratory in Flatrock, Nevada.  They encouraged us to tell the story accurately and in detail.  The documents presented here are soon to be made public.  They do not in any way jeopardize national security.

Sometimes movies do this, saying that what we are about to see is true even though it is not.  The film poster for Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) said, “Just the Way It Happened!”  A film poster for Macon County Line (1974) made a similar claim:  “It Shouldn’t Have Happened.  It Couldn’t Have Happened.  But It Did.”  Most of us eventually learn not to take such claims seriously, although I have known people who believed the events depicted in Serial Mom (1994) really happened because the title card said, “Based on a true story.”

No doubt some people are hoping the documents referred to in the prologue of The Andromeda Strain are part of the UFO Files and will finally be released.  The truth that is out there, however, is more down to earth.  There was merely a desire on the part of those that made this movie to give it some verisimilitude.  More effective in that regard, however, is the movie’s female scientist, Dr. Ruth Leavitt, played by Kate Reid.  I may have barely noticed the prologue, but she really impressed me, making the movie seem realistic, science fiction though it may be.

Previously, a female scientist in a movie would be played by a beautiful woman, who would become the love interest of the leading man.  She might even wear high heels to enhance her sex appeal as Faith Domergue does in It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) and This Island Earth (1955).

To say that Kate Reid is no beauty would be an understatement, but I have seen her in movies where she was made to look somewhat attractive, as in This Property Is Condemned (1966).  But in The Andromeda Strain, she wears frumpy clothes. And, of course, she wears flats.

Normally, when a woman in a movie is supposed to be unattractive, she is played by an actress who would be regarded as pretty in real life, like Bette Davis in Now, Voyager (1942) or Betsy Blair in Marty (1955).  That way we can believe it when she eventually finds love.

In Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956), John Bromfield has to get a checkup before going to South America.  He has a cigarette dangling out of his mouth as the doctor takes his blood pressure.  The doctor explains that his assistant will be giving Bromfield some inoculations for tropical diseases, saying that she is a capable, young woman.

“Yeah, I know how it is,” Bromfield remarks, “Can’t get a man, so she chooses a career.”

“Yes,” the doctor agrees, “very sad.”

The woman is played by Beverly Garland, who is as pretty as she is capable.  She ends up getting Bromfield before the movie is over.

But we have no such expectations with Kate Reid.  She may already be married in a movie, but she is not suited to be the love interest of a leading man.  In Shoot (1976), Reid plays the widow of a man recently killed in a shootout between two groups of hunters.  Cliff Robertson calls her on the phone, pretending to be an old friend of her late husband, wanting to come over and offer his condolences, but really wanting to find out what she knows.  When he gets to her house, she tells him that while she was on the phone with him, she was sitting on her bed stark naked.  During their conversation, she says she keeps a .357 Smith & Wesson right near her bed to prevent the “hippies and the junkies and the jigs” from robbing and raping her.  Before Robertson leaves, she asks him, “Would you believe that I haven’t got on any underwear underneath this outfit?”

Coming from her, we are supposed to regard this as a preposterous proposition, and we are not surprised that Robertson excuses himself and leaves.  In real life, speaking for myself, I would have succumbed.  The flesh is weak.

Back to The Andromeda Strain.  The movie is about a satellite that has returned to Earth with a deadly organism, and four scientists are brought to together to prevent it from spreading.  In addition to Dr. Ruth Leavitt, there is Dr. Jeremy Stone (Arthur Hill), Dr. Mark Hall (James Olson), and Dr. Charles Dutton (David Wayne).  It is an emergency, so soldiers arrive to pick up each scientist.  Two of them, Stone and Dutton, are married, and soldiers arrive at their homes.  Seeing their domestic lives interrupted is dramatic.  Inasmuch as Hall and Leavitt are single, however, it would not have been interesting to see soldiers arrive at their respective apartments, one of them watching television and the other taking a nap.  So, soldiers arrive where they work:  Hall, just as he is about to operate on a patient; Leavitt, while she is at a critical point in an experiment she has been overseeing.

There are a few time-capsule jokes in these scenes.  When Mrs. Stone interrupts her husband while he is speaking to someone, saying it’s important, he says, “The S.D.S. has arrived, no doubt.”  When Dutton tells his wife there is no need for her to pack clothes for him, she says, “A hippie.  He’s going to a love-in.”  And when the soldiers come for Leavitt, saying the orders are from Dr. Robertson, the president’s science advisor, she says, “Call Robbie.  Tell him I burnt my draft card.”

Hall really does not want to be part of the team, and he wonders why he was picked.  Stone says that among other reasons, the fact that Hall is a bachelor means that he satisfies the recommendation of the Odd Man Hypothesis.  We eventually learn that this is the theory that a bachelor is psychologically best suited to allowing a nuclear device to go off, killing everyone in the Wildfire Laboratory, himself with it, should it be necessary to destroy the organism and keep it from spreading.

Before Hall finds this out, however, he asks, “Who picked Leavitt? Talk about the Odd Man Hypothesis, which we haven’t yet. She’s really an oddball.”

Yes, it’s very sad. Couldn’t get a man, so she chose a career.

To my knowledge, there has never been another movie produced since this one in which an unmarried, female scientist is deliberately depicted as unattractive, and enough so as to preclude any romantic involvement with the male lead.

In the end, the deadly organism is finally neutered, and all is well, after which we imagine the four scientists going their separate ways.

Of course, things would have been different had Faith Domergue played the part of Dr. Leavitt, in which case a romantic relationship between her and Hall, which is to say, between Ruth and Mark, would have been inevitable. I can just imagine it. In the final scene, he takes her in his arms and kisses her, telling her he loves her.  She looks up at him and says, “Would you believe that I haven’t got on any underwear underneath this outfit?”

The Four Feathers (1939)

The Four Feathers is a novel that was published in 1902.  One can only conclude that it must be a popular story, for there have been seven movies based on it, the best of which is said to be the one produced in 1939.

That movie begins when a Dr. Sutton arrives at the home of General Faversham for a reunion of retired military officers of the British Army.  Sutton brings word that General Gordon has just been murdered at Khartoum, which happened in 1885.  General Faversham’s arrogance upon hearing of this is unabashed:  “That’s no news to me.  I said that was going to happen years ago when they first sent Gordon to Egypt. He wasn’t hard enough.”

Whether sincerely or disingenuously, Dr. Sutton feeds his vanity.  “They wanted someone like you out there,” he says.

“Just what I was going to say myself,” the general agrees without the slightest trace of modesty. “First time for a hundred years there hasn’t been a Faversham in the Army, and look at the mess they make.”

General Faversham berates himself for not having married sooner.  As a result, he is too old to have gone to Egypt and do things proper, and his son Harry is too young, only fifteen.  Furthermore, he is worried about the boy.  After sending him to the best army school in England and inspiring him with tales of his ancestors, the many portraits of which are hanging on the wall, famous for their military exploits, he caught Harry reading poetry.  “Shelley, of all people!”

Presumably, it wouldn’t have been so bad if Rudyard Kipling had been the poet Harry was reading, but Percy Bysshe Shelley was an atheist who wrote the subversive poem “Ozymandias,” mocking the conceit of the British Empire.

The general has decided to let Harry dine with them that night, hoping to infuse some martial spirit into the boy.  That night, General Burroughs (C. Aubrey Smith) starts things off by reminiscing about the Crimean War, some thirty years earlier, telling of how he led the charge at Balaklava:  “Ah, war was war in those days, and men were men. No room for weaklings.”

As for those weaklings, several stories are told of men who were cowards and ended up getting the death they deserved, either while running away or by committing suicide later out of shame.  “There’s no place in England for a coward,” General Faversham avers, while giving his son a stern look.

Ten years later, Harry (John Clements) is now an officer.  He learns that his regiment will join Sir Herbert Kitchener’s Anglo-Egyptian Army for the reconquest of the Sudan, finally avenging the death of General Gordon.  His fellow officers are ecstatic.  Later, we see people cheering as the soldiers march down the street and a military band plays “The British Grenadiers.”  We see a woman weeping sentimental tears as she sees her husband off.  Then she and the crowd sing “Auld Lang Syne.”  However, no one is more teary-eyed than General Burroughs, who wishes he could go with them.

Harry is among the crowd, dressed in civilian attire, viewing the spectacle with dispassion.  The day before the regiment was to leave for Egypt, Harry informed his commanding officer that he was resigning his commission, saying that now that his father is dead, his duty to him in upholding the family tradition of service in the Army is over.  After the colonel reminds Harry of his duty to his country, but to no avail, he accuses him of being a coward.  Harry remains adamant in his determination to leave the Army.

Prior to this, Harry’s engagement to Ethne (June Duprez), daughter of General Burroughs, was announced at a party celebrating the occasion.  Now at the Burrough’s home, Harry explains to a bewildered Ethne why he did not leave with the others:  “We’ve discussed it so often, the futility of this idiotic Egyptian adventure, the madness of it all, the ghastly waste of time that we can never have again.”

While Ethne may have agreed with Harry in principle when they discussed it, he mistakenly assumed that she would approve of his resigning his commission.  Upon hearing about it, however, she eases back out of his arms.  Harry continues:

I should have done it sooner. Long ago. It’s released me from the life of an impostor. That’s all a man is when he fails to be true to the things he believes in. I believe in our happiness. I believe in the work to be done here to save an estate that’s near to ruin, to save all those people who’ve been neglected by my family because they preferred glory in India, glory in China, glory in Africa.

As Ethne listens, not fully comprehending, a package arrives.  It contains a calling card from each of Harry’s three friends:  Mr. Thomas Willoughby, Mr. Peter Burroughs, who is Ethne’s brother, and Captain John Durrance (Ralph Richardson), Ethne’s disappointed suitor.  Attached to each man’s card is a white feather, signifying cowardice.

Moreover, Harry realizes that Ethne also thinks he was wrong to resign his commission. She says:

Some people are born free. They can do what they like without concern for consequences. But you were not born free, Harry, and nor was I. We were born into a tradition, a code which we must obey even if we do not believe. And we must obey it, Harry because the pride and happiness of everyone surrounding us depends upon our obedience.

In response to this, he plucks a white feather from her fan to go with the other three.

As I watched this first part of the movie, I thought about what might have been.  If only Harry had remained true to his resolve, forgoing his love for Ethne, accepting the accusation of cowardice from his three friends, remaining true to himself while helping those neglected by his family’s estate.

But that would have been impossible in a movie, where cowards must either redeem themselves or come to a bad end.  The only exception is comedies, such as in a Bob Hope movie, where cowardice can be played for laughs.  But this movie is no comedy.  So, what I was dreaming of was not realistic.

And yet, it would have been far more realistic than what follows.  Overwhelmed by the judgments of others, Harry concludes that he is indeed a coward.  So, he goes to Egypt and disguises himself as a Sangali native whose tongue had been cut out as punishment, the reason being that since he cannot speak the language, he needs an excuse for not talking.  This allows him to sneak around the general area of Egypt and the Sudan in hopes of redeeming himself in some way.

Meanwhile, Captain John Durrance has had a sun stroke and been blinded by the sun. Determined to do his duty, he lets no one know of his condition, leading his men without being able to see where he is going, brandishing his sword and swinging it about in ludicrous fashion.  When his company comes under attack, many are killed in the battle, and Durrance is almost one of them.  But Harry, who had managed to infiltrate the Dervishes, saves him while he is being attacked by a Fuzzy Wuzzy.  Durrance passes out, and Harry is knocked unconscious.  As a result, both are left for dead.  When Harry recovers, he leads Durrance to safety.  While Harry is slipping one of the white feathers into Durrance’s papers, some British soldiers think he is robbing him and take him into custody, putting him in a convict gang.

Durrance is sent back to England, where Ethne decides to marry him out of pity.  Women often make sacrifices like this in the movies.  Speaking of the fair sex, Ethne is the only major female character in the movie.  All the other women have only bit parts.  Her mother is no longer living, just as Harry’s mother was no longer living.  This makes the movie intensely masculine.  Ethne’s sole function in this movie is to be the prize for a man of courage.

Meanwhile, back in Africa, Peter Burroughs and Thomas Willoughby, who were part of Durrance’s company, have been captured.  Harry manages to get himself into the prison where they are being held, at which point he orchestrates a jail break, getting the three of them to safety, returning to them their white feathers as well.

In the end, when Durrance finds out who saved him in the desert, he breaks off his engagement to Ethne, allowing her the freedom to marry Harry.  But while Harry has managed to return the white feathers to his three friends, Ethne says he must still do something to prove his courage to her, although she says this in a good-natured way.  While her father, General Burroughs, is once again telling of how he gave the order to charge in the battle of Balaklava, Harry has the temerity to contradict him.  Presumably, his father had told him what really happened, that Burroughs never gave that order, that he ended up leading the charge inadvertently because his horse got spooked and took off with everyone else following him.  Burroughs admits that he will never be able to tell that story again.

With that, Harry returns the feather to Ethne, and they live happily ever after.

It is only natural when watching a movie to try to put yourself in the shoes of the protagonist, wondering what you would have done.  However, my personal experience is limited to the Vietnam War.  There are some superficial similarities.  For one thing, just as the British had no business being in Egypt and the Sudan, America had no business being in Vietnam.  For another, when Harry resigned his commission, that corresponded to my dodging the draft.

But for the most part, the Vietnam War was the complete opposite of the British adventures in Africa.  During the late 1960s, there was no shame in dodging the draft, quite the opposite.  It was practically a badge of honor, with other guys that I knew in college hoping that they would be so lucky.  Even the sergeant at the draft board, upon reading the recommendation written by the doctor, based on the lie I had told him, looked up at me with a big grin and said, “Congratulations!  You just got yourself a 1-Y deferment.”

My parents were pleased.  My father had fought in World War II, which many people would regard as one of America’s good wars, but he told me that he would never fire another shot in anger for the whole lot of them.

My two friends also managed to get out of the draft, although, unlike me, they did so legally, each having a minor health problem.

As for my girlfriend, when she learned that I had dodged the draft, she said she would give me something special that night as a reward.  I’m still thinking about that one.

Several years later, I knew another girl who said that she would never have sex with any man who had been in the Army.  I had sympathy for the men who were not as fortunate as I had been and were sent to Vietnam instead, so I asked, “What if the man had been drafted?”

She said it didn’t matter, that he should have had the moral courage to refuse to be inducted, even though it meant going to prison.  I thought that was a little harsh, but she was beautiful, so I was pleased to hear that I was not disqualified from consideration.  At least, not for that reason.  Unfortunately, she apparently had a different reason for disqualifying me.

All my college professors were against the war, so they were happy for me too, and I was now free to enter graduate school.

In other words, given the social milieu in which I existed, no one accused me of being a coward.  And yet, that is exactly what I was.  You see, the way I figured it, if they sent me to Vietnam, there were people over there who would try to kill me.

But let us assume that things had been different:  that my father disapproved of my dodging the draft; that my friends had enlisted, proud to be doing their patriotic duty, while regarding me as a coward for shirking mine; and that my girlfriend broke up with me, ashamed of what I had done.  So, in order to redeem myself, I go to Vietnam as a civilian and disguise myself as a mute Vietnamese.  Then, when one of my friends is blinded from exposure to napalm, I manage to find him and lead him to safety.  My other friend is captured and put in a prisoner-of-war camp in North Vietnam, but later on, I am also taken prisoner and end up in the same camp, after which I organize a jail break, and we escape to safety.

The absurdity of this fantasy can go no further.  How could anyone set out to do something like that with any expectation of pulling it off?

In one last effort to identify with the protagonist of this movie, I ask myself what I would have done had I been Harry.  In that case, I suspect my cowardice would have taken a different form.  I would never have had the courage to resign my commission and face the opprobrium.  I would have gone off with the rest of the regiment, wondering all the while, “What am I doing here?”  Then, during a battle, assuming I was lucky enough not to be killed myself, I would have killed men who didn’t deserve it, men who were only defending their land against an invading army.

In fact, that was what I figured would happen if I had been unable to dodge the draft.  Not having the moral courage to face going to prison, I would have put on a uniform and allowed myself to be sent to Vietnam where I would have committed murder out of cowardice.

The Persona of Pierce Brosnan

The Long Good Friday (1980) was a good movie, although it had a lot of characters in it that I had trouble keeping track of, their faces being somewhat ordinary, other than the main stars, Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren.  However, there was one actor who, though he had only a small part, stood out:  Pierce Brosnan.

This was at a time when we were still suffering from James Bond movies starring Roger Moore.  He was handsome enough, so we had no trouble accepting the fact that he had a way with women.  But when he got into a fight with the bad guys, it always looked as though they were trying not to hurt him.  Of course, we all knew that there would never be another Sean Connery to fill that role, although George Lazenby was good in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), which I liked even better than some of the later movies with Connery.  When I saw Pierce Brosnan, I thought to myself that he had the right look to be the next James Bond.  Needless to say, a lot of other people thought so as well, and so it was that he eventually got that role.  Looking back, however, I have to wonder if Brosnan looked too right for the part, actually making James Bond less believable on that account.

Before that happened, however, he starred in Remington Steele (1982-1987), a television show about a female detective, Laura Holt (Stephanie Zimbalest), who finds that no one will take her seriously as a private detective because she is a woman.  So, she makes up the name “Remington Steele,” with its manly connotations, and pretends that this fictional man is her boss.  The ruse works, and business picks up.  Through some fortuitous circumstances, however, a man played by Brosnan ends up fleshing out that fictional character.  He doesn’t know much about actually being a private detective, but he has seen a lot of movies about private detectives, to which he often refers.  This is reminiscent of Don Quixote, a man that tried to become a knight by modeling himself on what he had read in books on knight errantry, to comical effect.  Of course, Laura is the one that solves all the mysteries, while pretending only to be helping her “boss.”

The show is partly a romantic comedy, so we are not supposed to take it too seriously.  In real life, the name “Remington Steele” would be laughable, an obvious fake, just as Brosnan’s character, in filling that role, is fake.  One wonders, if by looking the part too much, just as the name is too much, Brosnan is more suited to playing a phony detective than a real one.  Furthermore, it is fitting that his character used to be a thief and a con man, because someone that good-looking would make you suspicious if he were trying to sell you something.

This role captured the essence of Brosnan’s persona, that of someone that looks so right for the role he is playing that we cannot take him seriously.  This showed up in the Bond movies he eventually made.  As Roger Ebert noted when reviewing GoldenEye (1995), the first Bond movie Brosnan starred in, the formula for a Bond movie was there, but something was different:

“So, all of the parts are in place. And yet, in an important way, this James Bond adventure … marks the passing of an era. This is the first Bond film that is self-aware, that has lost its innocence and the simplicity of its world view, and has some understanding of the absurdity and sadness of its hero.”

Even though he admits elsewhere that Brosnan makes the best James Bond since Connery, he also acknowledges that, psychologically speaking, there is something different:

“Brosnan’s Bond looks at home in the casinos of Monte Carlo, but he’s more knowing, more aware of relationships. I am not sure this is a good thing. Agent 007 should to some degree not be in on the joke.”

Once again, we have that Don Quixote effect, as if a man is trying to be James Bond based on all the James Bond movies he’s seen.

Still, in these Bond movies, Brosnan must be the good guy and play it fairly straight.  In other movies about espionage, however, he is a shady character, a bit unscrupulous, as in Remington Steele.

A good example is the movie No Escape (2015).  This is principally a fantasy film for husbands who are failures.  A lot of men feel they have let their wives down, and in this movie, Jack Dwyer (Owen Wilson) has done so in a big way.  From the dialogue we learn that he used to be in business for himself, but he eventually had to give that up.  So, he takes a job with Cardiff, a water company, requiring that he relocate his family to some unnamed country in Southeast Asia, which means he and his family are strangers in a strange land, where they don’t speak the language and where the food being sold in the marketplace would cause you to lose your appetite.  They check into a hotel where the phone doesn’t work, some of the lights don’t come on, and there is nothing but snow on television.  And this looks like the best hotel in the whole city.  It all proves to be too much for Jack’s wife Annie (Lake Bell), and in the middle of the night he finds her sitting on the floor of the bathroom crying.  In other words, if things had proceeded normally from this point, this would have been a movie of misery, probably resulting in Annie’s taking their two children back to the United States before long and filing for divorce.

But then there is a coup, the prime minister is assassinated, everyone in the American embassy is killed, and the police are overrun by mobs of revolutionaries, whose ultimate goal is to slaughter every Caucasian foreigner in the country, especially employees of Cardiff.  As horrible as that sounds, it gives Jack a chance to redeem himself, as he leads his family this way and that through one melodramatic situation after another, even to the point of killing a man who was threatening them, which he does in full view of his wife.  And she thought her husband was a failure.  Hah!

On his own, however, he would never have been able to get his family out of the country.  Fortunately, on the plane coming over, they met Hammond, who is played by Pierce Brosnan.  Given all the James Bond movies Brosnan has starred in, we are not surprised when he turns out to be a British spy.  However, he is dissolute:  he drinks too much and frequents strip clubs.  Nevertheless, Hammond still has all the requisite lethal skills for a British spy.  When Jack and his family are about to be murdered by several rebels, Hammond and another agent, a local named Kenny, are able to intervene and kill all the bad guys.

Hammond tells Jack he knows of a place where they will be safe.  It appears to be a combination brothel and opium den.  Presumably, Hammond is a regular customer.  When they get on the roof, Hammond explains what is going on.  It turns out that he is a corrupt version of James Bond.  Now that the Cold War is over, his services are put to ends more pecuniary than patriotic.  He confesses to being the ultimate cause of the revolution.  His job is to get countries to borrow money for projects, such as waterworks, knowing that they will never be able to pay back the loans. Being hopelessly in debt, the countries have no choice but to let corporations like Cardiff come in and make big profits at the expense of the impoverished citizens.  Normally, things work out well, and the citizens don’t realize how it all happened.  But this time, things did not work out well, and so the people have risen up to take their country back.  In other words, Hammond continues, they are trying to protect their families just as Jack is trying to protect his.

Unfortunately, Hammond and Kenny are killed in subsequent fighting, but Jack and his family are eventually able to make it by boat to Vietnam.  From there, presumably, they will go back to the United States and stay there.  And so, thanks to the revolution caused by Hammond, Jack and Annie will live happily ever after.  Without that, he would have been a failure, and she would have divorced him.

However, it is in The Tailor of Panama (2001) that Brosnan’s persona was really put to good use.  In that movie, Brosnan plays Andrew Osnard, James Bond’s evil twin, as it were.  The movie begins with an establishment shot of MI6 Headquarters.  An M-like character informs Osnard that he is being transferred to Panama, or rather, being banished there for his sins:  blown cover, gambling debts, and the wives.

The “blown cover” is almost a joke in the James Bond genre.  Only in Dr. No (1962) did Bond try to conceal the fact that he was a spy.  By the next installment, From Russia with Love (1963), Bond is so well-known as a spy that SPECTRE has an island where men run around wearing James Bond masks so that assassins can practice killing James Bond.

Also starting with Dr. No, but continuing throughout the franchise, Bond always wins when playing chemin de fer, or whatever they play in those European casinos, especially when sitting opposite a beautiful woman.  But in The Tailor of Panama, gambling is one of Osnard’s vices, resulting in serious gambling debts, something that cannot be allowed for someone that has access to state secrets, as those debts would make him susceptible to exploitation by foreign governments.

Finally, Bond’s womanizing is typically restricted to single women.  Here we gather that Osnard has been fooling around with the wives of men with influence, including his superiors at MI6.

Osnard figures that he is expected to keep his head down, serve out his time in Panama, and retire with a pension.  But “M” says Britain has vital interests there and warns him of much danger in what goes on in that country:  money laundering, drug trafficking, and corruption.  We see Osnard smile at this, figuring he will fit right in.  On the plane to Panama, he scrolls through a list of two hundred Brits that are residents there.  He takes an interest in a tailor, Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush), about whom MI6 apparently has a lot of information.

The scene shifts to the shop of Pendel and Braithwaite, where Harry is promising to help a customer realize the dream of “becoming more than we are” with the proper attire.  Harry approves of the suit the customer picks, referring to it as “Connery’s choice,” presumably an inside joke with the audience, suggesting that the suit could make the customer look like the first and best actor to play James Bond.  Making appearances triumph over reality is the theme of this movie.

Osnard introduces himself to Harry as a future customer, but soon reveals that he knows the truth, that the business about Braithwaite is phony, that Harry has served time in prison, that his firm was never based in the prestigious Savile Row, and that he is seriously in debt on account of a farm he should never have bought.  Osnard promises Harry that he will help him with that debt if he provides Osnard with secret information that might prove useful to him, information that Harry can glean from the powerful men for whom he makes suits.

Harry doesn’t really have anything to tell, but he needs the money, so he makes up stuff about the “Silent Opposition.”  Later, when he makes up stuff about the president of Panama selling the canal to the Chinese, Osnard becomes excited, but not because he believes him, saying it’s “a better yarn than Arthur Braithwaite.”  When Harry is surprised that Osnard sees through his spiel, Osnard says that the important thing is that “it plays,” something he can report back to MI6.

It all reminds me of Our Man in Havana (1959), where Alec Guiness plays a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, before the revolution.  He needs money on account of his daughter, who just bought a horse, which she wants to keep in a stable at the expensive country club, while he wants to send her to finishing school in Switzerland.  He is approached by Noël Coward, who is a British Secret Service official, to get him secret information, for which he will pay a lot of money.  Guiness is unable to come up with any secret information, but his friend Burl Ives has some encouraging advice:  “That sort of information is always easy to give. If it is secret enough, you alone know it. All you need is a little imagination….  There’s something about a secret that makes people believe.”  When Guiness says that they want him to recruit agents, Ives tells him to invent them too.  And so he does.

Returning to The Tailor of Panama, we find that the story Harry made up, while good enough for London, was not accepted by Washington.  So, Osnard puts more pressure on Harry to come up with something that Washington will believe.  Harry says that will cost ten million dollars, thinking that will end it, but Osnard is fine with that.  Things get crazier and crazier, leading the Americans to launch a military invasion, after paying fifteen million dollars for Osnard’s bogus information.

In the end, Osnard is able to make it out of Panama, on his way to Switzerland, with two suitcases filled with the millions of dollars he was able to extract from Washington, after bribing the British ambassador with just over a million, since he had caught on to what Osnard had been doing.  As the two of them walk toward the plane Osnard will be boarding, he says, “Could this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship?” alluding, of course, to the movie Casablanca (1942), much in the way Brosnan, as Remington Steele, would allude to old movies.  On the plane, he flirts with a pretty stewardess, his next conquest.  And so it is that James Bond’s evil twin will live happily ever after.

As a final note, early in the movie, Osnard meets Francesca, a beautiful woman that works at the British embassy.  He makes a date with her at a place where a band is playing music.  At one point in their conversation, he asks her to dance.

“Oh, God, you don’t dance as well, do you?” she asks.  Even she realizes that Brosnan’s character is too perfect for the part he is playing.

Marjoe (1972)

I tried watching Marjoe, lo these many years ago, but when it began with this icky kid, with his mother by his side, talking about the Lord, I turned it off.  I should have given it more of a chance.

Recently, I was reading Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell:  Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, in which the author posed the question as to how much religious leaders completely believe what they are saying, to what extent they are mere charlatans, and to what extent they are a little bit of both, which Dennett thinks is most likely, that genuine belief needs to be accompanied by tricks and gimmicks:

Every religious leader, including priests, ministers, imams, and rabbis, experiences a spectrum from knowledge to innocence, similar to the revival preachers depicted in the Oscar-winning 1972 documentary Marjoe, which chronicles Marjoe Gortner, a charismatic young preacher who, after losing his faith, returned to preaching to expose the industry’s manipulations.

At that point, I put down the book and watched the movie.  It didn’t take long to see that what Dennett said was true, that Marjoe Gortner, or simply, Marjoe, so named as a combination of Mary and Joseph, made this movie as an exposé of revivalism.

He talks about what his mother did to him, starting when he was four years old.  He wanted to go outside and play, but his mother would make him spend hours and hours memorizing sermons or the words in wedding ceremonies, which he would then perform. When his memory would slip, she would hold a pillow over his face or hold his head under a water faucet so that he could not breathe.  The only thing that prevented this torture from being any worse was that she knew she could not beat him, leaving marks on his body, since he would have to appear in front of the press, where he would claim that none of his sermons were memorized, but all would come directly from God.

This in turn reminded me of another book I had recently been reading, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, who devotes an entire section of his book to the idea that in many cases, a religious upbringing can be a form a child abuse.  He even goes so far as to say that what priests of have done to children by molesting them sexually is not as bad as what they do to them mentally, although he does make a distinction between fondling (not so bad) and sodomy (very bad).

While I was mulling that over, I recalled something Patty Hearst said, several years after she had been released from prison, that while she did not like being repeatedly raped after being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, what they did to her mind was much worse.

Anyway, Marjoe explains that while everyone thought it was a miracle that such a young child could be a preacher, he says he never believed that stuff.  In fact, he says, “I can’t think of a time that I ever believed in God….”

In a scene where Marjoe is talking to the film crew that he has enlisted to make this documentary, he tells one of them that his long hair, his “lovely locks,” will have to go, otherwise those in the Pentecostal movement, of which Marjoe is a part, will want to save and convert him.  In order to be left alone, the crew member will need to cut his hair and play it straight.  Marjoe also tells the film crew that they can’t smoke, not even if they step outside the tent or auditorium, or someone will try to save them.  And they must leave the girls alone, the revival groupies.  They would pose a distinctly different danger.

In fact, Marjoe continues, if anyone asks them if they have been saved, it is not enough merely to say, “Yes, I’m saved.”  Instead, they need to say, “Yes, brother, I’m washed in the same blood as you.”  Marjoe goes on to say that it is important to use the word “blood,” for it’s a “bloody, gory religion.”

While we are watching one of the revival meetings, Marjoe says he likes the part about the singing and dancing.  In fact, at one point in the movie, where there is a black choir doing the singing, with a black female preacher singing and dancing up front, it all reminded me of that scene in The Blues Brothers (1980), when the title characters go to a Baptist church where James Brown is giving a sermon.  As opposed to that, the fun part, Marjoe goes on to say that all that stuff about sin and burning in Hell is a drag.  However, he admits that he needs to put sin and damnation in his sermons to make money.  Presumably, people are willing to pay more for the promise of salvation than they would just to sing and dance.

At one point during a sermon, Marjoe asks people to pick the largest bill they have in their wallet and drop it in the bucket.  That doesn’t seem too bad.  But later, a woman that is preaching tells people that if they want an extra-special blessing, they must really make a sacrifice, such as giving money that they were going to use to pay some bills.  She says she doesn’t want just an ordinary contribution, but a real sacrifice, one that hurts, for which God will give that special blessing.

It is a lucrative business, and Marjoe goes into great detail about all the ways of fleecing people.  He figures his parents made about three million dollars off him, which they spent, leaving him with nothing.  He thought about suing them, presumably under the Jackie Coogan Law, since they didn’t set up a trust fund for him.  But then he decided just to let it go, that in holding on to his hatred for his parents, he would only end up hurting himself.  That is probably for the best, even from a purely secular point of view.  However, Marjoe adds that he believes in karma, saying, “All those things that you do bad will eventually, someday, come back on your head.”

Of course, there is no such thing.  The world is full of wicked men and women who live quite comfortably and will never be punished for the evil that they do.  Along with belief in God, belief in an immortal soul, and the belief that all suffering has a meaning or a purpose, belief in karma, that we live in a just world, is a feature of religion.  And so it is that Marjoe has not completely freed himself from all religious belief.

Apparently, Marjoe decided that sometimes karma needs a little help, so he included his father in this movie, where it would be revealed that his father used Marjoe as a child to swindle the gullible and then absconded with all the money.  Aside from the film crew, none of the people in this movie knew that Marjoe was going to portray the evangelical movement in such a bad light.

To cap it all off, at the end of the movie, Marjoe is blatantly blasphemous.  In the backyard with his girlfriend, he makes fun of salvation by playing with his dog, saying that this dog was in a wheelchair, but now he is walking around, a miracle from God.  He pretends to be asking people to give money to help kill a Commie for Jesus, to fight communism so that little dogs like this can be free.

Early in the movie, when Marjoe is talking to the film crew, one of them asks the question we have been wondering about, given that this documentary is going to show how revivalism is a fraud.  “Are we going to film Marjoe’s crucifixion when they find out about all this?”

As noted by Christopher Hitchens in his god is not Great, however, there was no such “crucifixion” since the movie had no effect on the people it was about:

The film Marjoe won an Academy Award in 1972 and has made absolutely no difference at all.  The mills of the TV preachers continue to grind, and the poor continue to finance the rich, just as if the glittering temples and palaces of Las Vegas had been built by the money of those who won rather than those who lost.