Cinema
Goggle eyed
Peter Ackroyd
In God We Trust ('AA, Plaza Leicester Square) This is, we are told, 'a Marty Feldman film'. I have never thought of Mr Feldman as an adjective before; he has always resembled a strange, undeclinable noun. He is, of course, the ugly one — the nose like a can opener, the thin hair receding as if in shock at the eyes which protrude like golf balls: they seem to have a distinct personality of their own, swivelling wildly one way while their owner looks in the other.His appearance was always his `selling point'; he was an English Jimmy Durante and, in earlier years, it was enough for him to pop up suddenly in front of the camera for snorts and giggles to break out in the audience. Fortunately for all concerned, however, Mr Feldman can now do other things as well — he wrote and co-directed this film, for example.
He plays Ambrose, a factotum in a Trappist monastery in the Californian hills who has been told by his Abbot to go out into the world and raise money for the mortgage. Since the world in question is Los Angeles, it is as if Mary Magdalene had been asked to work in a shampoo factory. Some of the ensuing situations are predictable ones — a sign saying 'All Night Mass' turns out to be 'All Night Massage' — but some of them are original: Ambrose gets a job in a religious goods store. He is employed making small crucifixes, and we see him banging nails into a score of miniature Jesuses. Every time he does so, he washes his hands.
But not even the Moderator of the Church of Scotland could take exception to the level of such jokes, since they are all presented within so conventional a framework. Many of the jokes are visual ones, of the kind pioneered by the silent cinema and, I'm afraid, not equalled since. But even within this benign atmosphere, In God We Trust does attempt to parody the religious obsessiveness of California itself — a state where religion is like a pious fast food store, where worshippers queue up at the National Church of Psychic Self-Humiliation. Ambrose meets a 'Sebastian Melmoth' and his travelling church — literally a New England chapel perched precariously on four wheels from 'which Melmoth sells such diverting items as Lazarus Self-Raising Dolls. And there is Armageddon R. Thunderbird, a television preacher. With his spun silk hair, his unlined face, his microphone in the shape of a crucifix, his voice like that of Mae West, he is a perfect replica of the real prophets of the air waves. Even his `patter' sounds authentic: `God gave you his Son for Christmas. What did you get for God?'
Amid all these antics, there are some good performances. Louise Lasser, a happy hooker whom Ambrose meets, has been a star ever since Mary Hartmann, Mary Hartmann, the funniest of all American television series. She specialises in the low-key; she is dead-pan, flat, her shoulders droop, her mouth hangs down at the corners; she is ready to collapse at any moment: `I like to panic early,' she tells Ambrose, 'and avoid the rush'. And there is Wilfred Hyde White as the Abbot. Although one has grown tired of stage Englishmen who live in America, Mr Hyde White just avoids vulgarity with his own brand of feline grace. You know he is only doing it for the money, but he has turned moneymaking into a kind of art.
This said, however, the film cannot be described as a success. It is an agreeable, under-stated little comedy which, like all such affairs, runs out of steam before the close. The essential problem seems to be that it is centred around Mr Feldman himself, and he is not yet able to sustain the level of intensity and interest which is required. As a result, the film degenerates into the conventional material of 'B' pictures: car chases, explosions, Richard Pryor playing God, you know the sort of thing.
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