Marjoe Gortner goes behind the scenes of tent revival meetings in Oscar-winning documentary
MARJOE (Howard Smith & Sarah Kernochan, 1972)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Friday, March 8, 7:00, and Tuesday, March 12, 9:15
Series runs through March 16
212-505-5181
anthologyfilmarchives.org
Marjoe Gortner was born to preach. The fourth-generation evangelist, whose first name is a combination of Mary and Joseph, began singing the praises of the Lord at the age of four, but ten years later he had a change of heart. Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan record his return to the revival circuit in the early 1970s in the Oscar-winning documentary Marjoe. No longer believing what he preaches, Gortner, looking like he just stepped out of the cast of Godspell, leads the filmmaking team on a tour of revival meetings where he riles up crowds, blesses them individually, and collects lots of cash. Before going onstage, Gortner shares many trade secrets with the documentary crew, explaining precisely how the meetings will go and just what the various preachers will do to manipulate the audience, and that’s exactly what happens. With his 1970s golden mane and free attitude, Gortner is a compelling figure, whether preening like Mick Jagger while praising the Lord or sitting on a bed counting the green. Gortner went on to appear in such films as Earthquake, Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw, and The Food of the Gods as well as such television series as Falcon Crest, Kojak, Break the Bank, Circus of the Stars, and The Great Ride and was married to Oscar nominee Candy Clark in 1978-79, but he never gained the fame he did with this documentary.
Marjoe is screening March 7 at 9:00 at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “A Tribute to Amos Vogel and Film as a Subversive Art,” celebrating the lasting impact Amos Vogel, who started Cinema 16 and was cofounder of the New York Film Festival, introducing the public to seminal experimental, foreign-language, and cutting-edge independent film. In Film as a Subversive Art, Vogel wrote the following about Marjoe: “This deceptively humorous cinéma vérité study of a traveling evangelist emerges as a ruthless exposé of an aspect of America’s national psyche, with implications far beyond its immediate subject matter. Marjoe began by performing marriage ceremonies at the age of four (seen in the marvelous newsreels of the time) and graduated to fame on the ‘Holy Roller’ Pentecostal circuit, throwing women into convulsions, performing miracles, providing sex substitutes and mass therapy to the countless victimized poor and ignorant who flock to his meetings with their offerings. While the sequences of a prancing Mick Jagger imitation (complete with rock rhythms and brimstone) and of his huge and suffering audience in themselves constitute an impressive achievement of non-fiction cinema, simultaneous private interviews reveal the fiery evangelist to be a cynical atheist and hedonist, with contempt for his ‘work’ and at best an ambiguous solicitude for his flock. The revelation of mass manipulation by a charismatic, smiling con-man, the fervour and conservatism of the duped, the intrusion of questions of money and power over others – these American preoccupations are brilliantly reflected in this outrageous, disturbing black comedy.”
Based on the novel by Keith Waterhouse (which he also adapted into a play with Willis Hall and which later became a musical), John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar is a prime example of the British New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s, which features work by such directors as Lindsay Anderson, Joseph Losey, Ken Russell, Nicolas Roeg, and Karel Reisz. Tom Courtenay stars as William Fisher, a ne’er-do-well ladies’ man who drudges away in a funeral home and dates (and lies to) multiple women, all the while daydreaming of being the president of the fictional country of Ambrosia. Billy lives in his own fantasy world where he can suddenly fire machine guns at people who bother him and be cheered by adoring crowds as he leads a marching band. Reminiscent of the 1947 American comedy The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in which Danny Kaye dreams of other lives to lift him out of the doldrums, Billy Liar is also rooted in the reality of post-WWII England, represented by Billy’s father (Wilfred Pickles), who thinks his son is a no-good lazy bum. Shot in black-and-white, the film glows every time Julie Christie appears playing Liz, a modern woman who takes a rather fond liking to Billy. The film made Christie a star; Schlesinger next cast her in Darling, for which she won the Oscar for Best Actress. A 35mm print of Billy Liar is being shown March 7 at the IFC Center in the special program “Movie Night with Michel Gondry”; the director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind, and The We and the I, which opens at IFC on March 8, will participate in a discussion following the screening. “John Schlesinger’s film certainly had an influence on my films, especially The Science of Sleep, just like Walter Mitty or other films intercutting layers of consciousness,” Gondry explains on the IFC website. “Only Billy Liar is one of the few to achieve that in the context of a social satire. All Billy’s visions are like explosions coming out of this very crude and bleak reality. And his personality is very unique, nailed in his lack of ambition. This is one of the films that taught me how magic can come just from editing.”
French writer-director Léos Carax (
