Pinpricks in the Panaceas

...It would be cruel to deny the poor sinner the pleasure of giggling at the poor redeemed, which is his form of hope...

...At times, I am afraid, it also strikes one as ludicrous...

...The film documents human gullibility, fear and hysteria, and how they are exploited...

...But this episodic film, which sets out to perform a reductio ad ab-surdum on seven of the questions raised, and presumably answered, in the book, turns out to be only sporadically funny...

...He became a national sensation, causing rapture among the faithful and ruptures among elder fellow ministers...

...It is fascinating to watch the various techniques the evangelists employ to milk their flocks—some highly methodical, systematized, well-nigh rationalistic...

...Typical of these is a skit about a huge breast that goes around killing people...

...Are the other manmade saviors—hypnotists, psychiatrists, philosophers, theologians —necessarily more truthful...

...not by the honorable-ness of its method...

...Later, he is seen joyously counting the take while reminiscing about his childhood and upbringing and his break with his parents, who kept all the money he made...

...There are methods in miracles, and Marjoe the narrator betrays quite a few of these highly unprofessional professional secrets, yet even as one's indignation with the unscrupulous mulcters mounts, as one resents their oily self-righteousness, one cannot help shuddering at how much worse off their victims might be, left to their own devices...

...and disporting himself with his black girl friend after the final break with religion...

...It may have something to do with innocence, with a certain naive surprise that in a land of plenty one can feel so deprived...

...If their rainy days and nights are made more hopeful, their money may be wisely spent...

...A weak-kneed ending and a skit that, if anything, argues for the potential validity of aphrodisiacs—while butchering Elizabethan English with "st" endings applied to every other verb...

...others more emotional, improvisatory, belonging almost perfectly in the realm of the popular performing arts...

...it is, terribly, the human condition in essence...

...The little skits it invents for making hash of the Reu-benite topics are, with one or two exceptions, neither relevant nor irreverent enough...

...The King oatches him, orders his execution, but it is the head on his fool's scepter, a replica of his own, that gets chopped off...

...It shows that greatest human weakness at work: the hunger for hope...

...The son of revivalist preachers in California, Marjoe (a portmanteau name derived from Mary and Joseph) received the call at the age of four and was preaching by the time he was five...

...The film includes a good many clips from this period, and they are worthy of taking their place alongside the religious satires in the early novels of Evelyn Waugh...

...After he is caught out in the street in drag, we shift to him and his wife in bed that night, where she delivers the payoff line: "Why couldn't you come to me and say, T have a diseased mind...

...Without hope, the human animal cannot go on...

...the same "untruth" in a grain of dust thrown in your eyes in Southern California or Madison Square Garden...

...Except for a truly funny episode about intercourse as missile launching, aptly taking up a Reuben metaphor, and an amusing but overlong bit about a sexually irresistible sheep, the film mostly exhibits Allen's usual schoolboyish or self-flagellating attitudes toward sex...

...He is seen also at a Lucullan feast exchanging pieties with fellow ministers...

...I would have understood...

...if the other animals can, how lucky for them...

...Nor will the objection made by Andrew Sarris hold: that if this film exposed the operations of Popes and Billy Grahams, fine, but picking on small-time chiselers is cowardly and sterile...

...There would have to be some similarity to what really goes on in sex clinics or Dr...

...For those of us who are freethinkers, Marjoe is an amusing, appalling, and reasonably well made documentary...

...Reuben's ministrations is not the one to satirize him with conviction...

...It is as gratuitous as, barring that punchline, it is unfunny...

...Marjoe and his fellow conmen, who bilk their pathetic white and black hordes even as they provide them with transcendent experiences, are not really cheating them at all...

...we get an answering episode showing a respectable Jewish paterfamilias sneaking away from his daughter's future in-laws' living room to the bedroom, there to array himself in borrowed feminine regalia...

...Its ostensible aim, the debunking of Dr...

...Should they somehow stray into a theater showing it, they would dismiss Marjoe as the one black sheep that tums up even among good shepherds...

...Why not...

...Most of the vignettes, moreover, have no point of view, betray an unwholesome attitude toward sex, and end with a copout...

...The chanting, shouting, swooning faithful whom we encounter here are caught in a downpour of miseries reflected in their faces and behavior...

...This is funny in an absurd way, but it is followed by a softening anticlimax in which the spouses join in a good laugh at their hosts' bewilderment...

...Marjoe begins with the protagonist briefing the camera crew on how to behave while filming his revival meetings...

...It will not be shown in most of the places where evangelists thrive, and the most parched seekers after Jesus will give it a wide berth in any case...

...Thus to the question, "Are transvestites homosexual...

...Reuben, or anything...

...The chief value of the film, as I see it, is to those teetering on the brink of religious emancipation, who might liberate themselves through seeing it...

...Give the great unwashed the blood of the Lamb to wash in...

...the low-level absurdity and exaggeration in no significant direction, aside from being witless, lack the necessary modicum of appositeness and meaning...

...Marjoe is a film one can weep or laugh at...

...Well, it won't...

...On the road to success, his hand gets stuck in the Queen's chastity belt...

...Or both...

...Then we see him, alone or with other preachers, working on the faithful: arousing them to high pitches of hysteria, laying on hands, collecting devout handouts...

...Reuben's mind to make this a funny and useful parody...

...Does it matter that their purchase has nothing to do with the truth...

...You can perceive the same "truth" in a drop of holy water as in all the fountains of Rome...

...give those unwashed in it the right to their smug but pleasurable laughter...

...If there is anything nearly as pathetic as the look of defeated children, it is the look of defeated childish adults...

...They may be selling a "Jesus" who does not exist, at least not in the form in which he is peddled...

...Not for nothing does Marjoe Gortner now strive for a career in pop music or theater—at last report, he is being considered for the lead in a Broadway rock musical...

...Now what does this dreary skit say about homosexuality, transvestism, Dr...

...Reuben's bestseller, is a worthy and potentially hilarious enterprise...

...Sexual sanctimoniousness, straight-off-the-shoulder division, lends itself to almost as much deflation as the odor of sanctity exuded by revivalist religion...

...Or take the episode meant to answer the question about the efficacy of aphrodisiacs...

...making private pronouncements about the tricks of the trade and the phoniness of it all...

...One of the very few compensations for enlightenment (feeble though it be) in this essentially enlightenment-hating land is the privilege of sneering at the culturally inferior...

...I'm unfit to function with normal, decent people...

...American Gothic faces and Christina's World faces, they seem lonelier and sadder than their equivalents from Asia and Europe...

...Then there are the faces, those primordially American faces that extend from Grant Wood to Thomas Hart Benton, from Norman Rockwell to Andrew Wyeth...

...but the grass-roots evangelists speak the medicine these humble wounds understand...

...For these people, if they are capable of logic, it will not matter whether the religious melodrama is big or small, splashy or austere, megalopolitan or rural...

...It is a skit about a medieval king's jester who is puny and unsuccessful, but resolves, at the behest of his father's ghost (here an inept and meaningless spoofing of Hamlet) to seduce the Queen by means of a love potion...

...I'm perverted...

...The objections to Marjoe voiced by the more piously humanitarian reviewers is that it makes city slickers feel undeservedly and unpleasantly superior to the multitudes prostrating themselves before the Lamb of God...

...A film that needs Dr...

...What good, then, is a film like Marjoe, which might rob the lowly of their seamy salvation...

...there is no artistic difference between Jagger selling sympathy and Gortner antipathy for the devil...

...They are, of course, more sophisticated...

...His performances during revival meetings are every bit as good as what I have seen from leading rock musicians on film (and that is the only fair comparison...

...preaching in tandem with his father, after an apparent partial reconciliation...

...To the question about the reliability of findings at sex clinics, the film responds by positing a master sexologist who is a travesty of a mad scientist from the horror cheapies, and whose experiments and theories could just barely send up Vincent Price and Roger Corman, but never Masters and Johnson...

...A miracle can perhaps be judged best by the quality of hope it engenders...

...But that weakness is not a bad habit, a psychological imbalance or a moral defect...

...would be nice to be able to report that Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask is all laughter...

...But what they are surely selling is hope, and it may be that those wretched widow's mites—crumpled 20-dollar bills extracted from oldsters saving them for a rainy day—are not criminally extorted at all...