Word: evangelists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...fortune that his parents kept from him, was doomed at 28 to a freakish sort of fame. That's the way ex-Evangelist Marjoe Gortner told it in the movie about his life, Marjoe. His father, Vernon Gortner, 69, disagrees. "I heard constantly from him before the movie broke," he said, but when the elder Gortner saw the film, "it was all I could do to choke back tears. Now he's told so many untruths he's afraid to face me. There never was such a sum. If it was money I was after...
...make things more uncomfortable, there is a strange absence of shock value in the episodes of trickery recorded by this film. While the success of such blatant exploitation is dismaying, and the number of tricks employed prodigious, the real picture of a corrupt evangelist that Marjoeprojects almost duplicates the stereotype made popular by the fictional Elmer Gantry. It is a sad but true comment that the dishonesty illumined already seems logical in the context of evangelical religion...
...century. Surely, however, the legend could not have been as turgid or as invincibly dull as the film that has been fashioned from it. The film makers, making a wild scramble for contemporary relevance, have chosen to frame the story with a singularly absurd yarn about a schizoid evangelist (also portrayed by Miss Ullmann) who believes she is Pope Joan. "Classic case of withdrawal," mutters Psychiatrist Keir Dullea, peering at her through huge spectacles...
...means of flashbacks, Pope Joan correlates the legend with the life of the young evangelist: the nunnery is inter cut with a modern orphanage, Joan's monk father with a back-country Bible thumper, and so on. Invention frequently flags, and there are great barren stretches of the movie that contain no contemporary parallels whatever, presumably because the scenario could invent no 20th century equivalents for the Saxons or the intrigues of the papal court under Leo, who is zestfully portrayed by Trevor Howard...
...stitch together glorious empires. Ling could do all that and make it sound different and better. When making presentations to potential merger partners, he would take a piece of chalk or a felt pen and sketch marvelous projections of future earnings. He sounded like a cross between an evangelist and Univac. Not even the financial experts fully grasped how Ling intended to meet his predictions, but they were eager to advance him money. They wanted to believe...