Word: angeles
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Angel Baby (Madera; Allied Artists) is a Bible Belter that brings to the movies Salome Jens, whose performance as the range "whorse" in Jean Genet's Balcony captivated New York's off Broadway last season. Now there is reason to believe that her seductive hallelujahs as a prurient evangelist may well make her the toast of the movie tabernacles. For Salome (she pronounces it Sal-o-way) is that rare actress whose vernal essence comes from within, breathing innocence, poignancy and a strange soft beauty into an otherwise wooden face...
...then, "Believe! Believe and say 'God!' Say it! Say it!" Salome, swept away by George's oil-slick, sensual emotionalism, says it-"God!"-again and again "in humility and gratitude and ecstasy." George runs a traveling caravan that swizzles bourbon with its brimstone, and Salome, or Angel Baby, as they call her, hooks up. Brother George was long ago spliced to Mercedes McCambridge, a twisted, Bible-quoting shrike, but their platonic trailer-camp marriage is as punishing as purgatory. So those "illustrated sermons," in which Salome dances (not as her Biblical namesake but as Delilah...
Meantime, Angel Baby, "swept up by this powerful sense of calling," gets herself billed as "The Preacher of the Ages." But when she finds out she is only a mockery as a miracle worker, Salome goes out of her head. Yet at film's end, for reasons known only to God and the moviemakers, she heals a crippled child just by praying over him. Her faith restored, even if the audience is confused, she and George head for his cozy trailer and, presumably, the troubled trail again...
From the far-flung corners of the Moslem world, pilgrims last week converged on Mecca, city of the Prophet's birth, where they would make the ritual seven circuits around the shrouded monument and enter to kiss the Black Stone handed down by the Angel Gabriel to Abraham. If they took time to notice, they might have detected a change in the air. Along the six-lane highway that leads inland to Mecca from the Red Sea port of Jiddah, pilgrims were ministered to by mobile hospitals, reservoirs of ice water, and troops of Moslem Boy Scouts...
TELEPIX: The original BLUE ANGEL (not to be confused with the recent Mai Britt remake) continues. The sultry Marlene Dietrich is the Chanteuse, and therein lies much of the evening's excitement...