Marty Feldman’s In God We Trust has no shortage of
ideas, albeit that the commercialized, grotesquely monetized brand of modern
religion makes them easy to come across: unfortunately, Feldman isn’t much of a
stylist, and struggles to wrestle the material into any kind of shape. He’s a
rather diffident leading man also, playing Brother Ambrose, venturing into an
unfamiliar and mostly sleazy world in search of money to save the remote
monastery in which he grew up: the film’s humour runs from Ambrose heading for
refuge to a place advertising “All Night Mass” and having to go running when
realizing that the signage’s last three letters had been temporarily covered
up, to his constant resort to cold showers to dampen carnal urges toward the
hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold who takes him in, to a temporary job nailing plastic
Jesus figurines onto miniature crosses. The film lacks any sense of real
engagement or relish, but it does luck its way into seeming mildly prophetic
via Andy Kaufman’s televangelist character Armageddon T. Thunderbird, who
preaches self-righteously absurd sermons (God is in the E.R. and you’re the
ones that put him there) to an adoring and pliable crowd, easily whipped up
into giving something eerily close to a Nazi salute, working every angle for
his own financial advantage and planning to unveil a third political party
which will carry him to supreme power – more than a few pre-echoes there of our
own false prophet, including the hair (although from the neck down the styling
is more evocative of Liberace). With more subtlety, Feldman’s film might also have
seemed to carry a warning about submission to technology, given that the closest
thing to an active God in the film is a sentient but misinformed supercomputer
(bearing the likeness of Richard Pryor), all too easily here reprogrammed onto
the path of righteousness.
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