Word: gortner
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WHEN YOU COMING BACK, RED RYDER is a showcase for Marjoe Gortner. It shares much with the movie that introduced him. In the documentary Marjoe Gortner exposed himself as a rip-off travelling evangelist who gloated as he fleeced his followers. His sexual energy and charisma invited comparisons with Mick Jagger. Blue-haired dowagers fainted at his feet...
...When You Coming Back, Red Ryder, Gortner plays a crazed Vietnam vet who terrorizes a bunch of people in a New Mexico diner in 1968. Both the time frame and the tripped-out pomposity bring to mind the sixties marijuana generation. Background music is provided by the likes of B.B. King and Tammy Wynette, and I kept thinking of those late-night stoned raves in which you immortalize your first love affair on film in your head and try to match its moments to your favorite songs: "And then, after our fourth fight, when I'm crossing Boylston Street...
...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...
MARJOE IS AN UNDENIABLY slick and engrossing film unfortunately, it is a movie that focuses on the wrong subject. An expose of the "big time" evangelical preaching racket, this documentary has been conceived as a public act of repentance for former revivalist Marjoe Gortner. It serves almost entirely as a showcase for its egotistical protagonist and never confronts a more important topic--the lives and motivations of the people caught up in his religious revivals. As a result the audience is subjected to a frustratingly inarticulate exercise which is nevertheless provocative and revealing in spite of itself...
...told the nature of their infection. Similarly, for the purposes of his documentary. Marjoe continued to victimize unsuspecting people for a year. While the element of good in his work must be considered, there is no doubt that the revivals brought in many thousands of dollars unjustly. Even if Gortner didn't share in the cash (he does not tell us), a number of his unwitting con men colleagues did. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the profits from this movie are going, in any way to undo the exploitation Marjoe purports to expose...