Comedy Movie Churches

Car Wash (1976) and Fletch Lives (1989)

In our blog about bars, we ask people about churches, and a leading gripe we hear is that churches and clergy are money grubbing. I don’t think that’s actually true about most churches, but it’s sadly true of some, and that makes greedy preachers a favorite comedy trope.

Car Wash is an ensemble comedy, following the employees of a, well, car wash in a neighborhood that’s not the best in Los Angeles. Music legends (Otis Day, the Pointer Sisters) join with TV personalities (Starsky and Hutch’s Huggy Bear, Antonio Fargas; original Saturday Night Live cast member Garrett Morris; Hogan’s Heroes’ Ivan Dixon), and comedians (George Carlin, Professor Irwin Corey) round out the cast. Richard Pryor’s Daddy Rich is surprisingly likable in spite of his obvious character flaws.

DJs at a local radio station form a Greek Chorus for the mostly comic episodic action of the film. (The station plays such public service announcements as “Cancer cures smoking.”) Before Daddy Rich makes his appearance, we hear about his upcoming services on the radio and see his picture on a Wall of Fame inside the car wash, between JFK and MLK Jr.

The Reverend, with his white suit and gold-topped cane, eventually drops by the carwash in his gold limousine with a license plate reading “TITHE.” When he emerges from his car with three stylishly dressed (well, stylishly dressed for the ‘70’s) women (the Pointer Sisters), one of the workers asks who he is.

His coworker says, “It’s Daddy Rich! Don’t you know him from TV?”

Someone asks the Reverend his secret, and he responds, “The secret is there are no secrets! Believe in the Lord and believe in yourself! And most of all, believe in that federal green because money talks and [bovine excrement] walks!”

Some of the workers offer him money (though he obviously has much more than they do) and he gladly accepts it, “I take what is given to me.”

The workers clean the entire car, even though there’s really only a speck on the trunk. One of them asked what the interior of the limo is like, says, “Like being in church with Burt Reynolds!”

Almost everyone at the car wash seems to admire Daddy Rich, except for a Black Muslim named Abdullah (formerly Duane, played by Bill Duke). When Abdullah challenges Daddy Rich, they have this interchange:

Rev.: “Guess you don’t believe in my church - the Church of the Divine Economic Spirituality? You don’t believe in God?”

Abdullah: “I don’t believe in your god.”

The Reverend: “My God’s done alright by me. Why don’t you climb on board, and for a small fee, I’ll set you free, nearer thy God to thee.”

Abdullah calls the Reverend a pimp and they nearly come to blows, but Rich refrains -- as he is “a Christian man.” He passes around an offering plate, and then leaves, waving from the limo sunroof.

In 1989’s Fletch Lives, the Reverend Jimmy Lee Farnsworth (R. Lee Ermey) is nearly as popular in his small southern town as Daddy Rich was at the carwash. (The film is a sequel to the 1985 film, Fletch, which was also directed by Michael Ritchie; both star Chevy Chase as the title character.)

Fletch, a Los Angeles reporter, inherits a Louisiana mansion and moves there to start a new life. Representatives of Farnsworth Ministries soon approach him to buy the property. (Fletch mentions that his aunt almost left it to the ministry. He says, “the Reverend must have touched her, but not deeply enough.”)

Farnsworth Ministries doesn’t just have a church. They also have Bible Land, an amusement park that Rev. Farnsworth claims is “the most important event since the crucifixion.” It has rides, of course, including a hell ride (which we see treated by visitors as a Tunnel of Love) and a Noah’s Ark ride. (The Flood scheduled every ten minutes looks remarkably like floods I’ve seen on the Universal Studio Tour).

On his nightly television program, which is syndicated throughout the country, the Reverend Farnsworth is not at all shy about asking for money. He also provides a show, with tap dancers and a performing monkey, Mr. Coco.

He astounds the audience when he calls individuals on stage and tells them personal facts about their lives. (He does this with the help of an earpiece connected to a computer room where a great deal of personal information about audience members is stored. The computer itself is one of those room-filling machines with reel to reel tapes.) Rev. Farnsworth encourages people to confess their sins before the television cameras (one woman wants to go into great detail about her sexual misadventures), after which he assures them of God’s forgiveness -- and then asks for money. As each audience member is carried offstage, the Reverend always proclaims, “Another soul saved by Jimmy Lee Farnsworth.”

We eventually learn the Reverend was once a used car salesman and convicted embezzler before he went into ministry.

Fletch doesn’t think much of Farnsworth’s ministry. ( “I believe in a God that doesn’t need heavy financing.“) But Fletch himself doesn’t come off too well in the film. Soon after arriving at his plantation, he sleeps with his attractive realtor. While he sleeps, the woman is murdered. When Fletch discovers she’s dead, he smirks at the camera and makes a cheap joke. Throughout the rest of film, he jokes about her death being a result of his sexual prowess. Nothing Farnsworth does is that tacky.

Nonetheless, because of the great damage that the prosperity gospel does to the reputation and work of the true gospel of Jesus Christ, I’m giving the Reverends Daddy Rich and Jimmy Lee Farnsworth our lowest Movie Churches rating of One Steeple.

On the Small Screen in Utah

If you are a guy of a certain age there were a few films that everyone quoted, such as The Blues Brothers and Animal House. And a number of the other films that were watched again and again were films starring Chevy Chase, including Vacations I & III (but not II), The Three Amigos, and, most quoted of all, Caddyshack. Then his career crashed, and his films became utterly unwatchable, perhaps reaching the nadir with The Karate Dog. But before the great downswing, he made 1985’s Fletch.

Fletch was based on a novel in a popular mystery series by Gregory McDonald. The screenplay was written by Andrew Bergman (The In-Laws) and directed by Michael Ritchie (The Bad News Bears). Chase’s Fletch, a reporter for an unspecified Los Angeles paper, is working on a story about the drug trade on a Southern California beach. But the bad guy has a connection to Utah.

Fletch follows the baddie, Alan Stanwyk -- played by Tim Matheson (Animal House) -- to Provo. He asks someone whether Stanwyk is a Mormon and is told, “I don’t think he does a lot of singing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.”

When Fletch learns about Stanwyk’s second wife, he says, “That’s illegal, even in Utah.” So there’s not a lot of Utah in the film, but that which is there is important. (There was filming in Utah, but Ogden plays the part of Provo.)

Utah also has a very memorable cameo at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). River Phoenix plays young Indy in a chase, via horse and train, through Arches National Park in Moab where the audience learns how the hero got his whip, his hat, and a scar. There are much less interesting races via automobiles in Need for Speed (2014), based on the popular video game. Aaron Paul races a Shelby Mustang through Moab and the Bonneville Salt Flats. A better car chase film is Vanishing Point (1971), an existential thriller with Barry Newman speeding a Chrysler Imperial through Cisco and Thompson Springs.

Utah has provided locations for many Westerns, most famously those directed by John Ford. In two of the greatest Westerns ever made, Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956), Ford prominently featured both John Wayne and Monument Valley. Warlock might sound like a horror film, but it was another Western featuring Henry Fonda and Richard Widmark and Arches National Park.

Carnival of Souls (1962) was a horror film, a low budget one, that featured the Great Salt Lake and other Utah landmarks made quite sinister by means of its odd black and white photography. It has been featured before in Movie Churches as its main character is a church organist.

A quite different film set and filmed in Salt Lake City is Chilly Scenes of Winter (the original title in 1979 was Head Over Heels), a romantic comedy starring John Heard and Mary Beth Hurt. The original theatrical release had a happy ending, but later releases ended on a more melancholy note, like the novel the film was based upon.

A film based on a grim true story is 2010’s 127 Hours about a canyoneer who became trapped in a climbing accident near Moab. He was forced to amputate his own arm (real life spoilers), the film was nominated for Best Picture, director Danny Boyle was nominated for his writing, and James Franco was nominated for his performance as Aron Ralston.

Another true story that’s more famous locally, is that of the original Mormon pioneers who settled the state. In 1940, 20th Century Fox featured Dean Jagger as the title character in Brigham Young, though the real stars were Tyrone Power and Linda Darnell as young lovers following their leader from Illinois through Nebraska to the Great Basin of Utah. (Unusual for a studio at the time, there was location shooting including in Kanab, Utah.)

On the Small Screen in Colorado

For our Colorado film, I was looking forward to featuring one of the greatest films ever made, by which I mean, of course, 1984’s classic war film about a Soviet invasion of the United States: Red Dawn. Sadly, I found that the Patrick Swayze masterpiece was filmed in New Mexico. Sorry, Wolverine fans.

Fortunately, there are other great films that are set and filmed in Colorado, at least in part. Christopher Nolan’s 2006 film about a deadly rivalry between magicians (played by Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman), The Prestige, takes place mostly in England. But a very important part of the film takes place in Colorado. Jackman’s character goes to Colorado Springs, Colorado, to ask Nikola Tesla for help in developing a magic trick. Tesla is played by David Bowie (one of many great losses of 2016). And the Colorado segments were filmed in Colorado.

The magicians of the film escalate a violent duel, and neither learns the vital lesson of Jesus from Mark 8:36: “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world and yet lose his soul?”

A number of the films set and filmed in Colorado, like The Prestige, take place only partially in Colorado. For instance, 1983’s Wargames has Matthew Broderick as a high school student In Seattle, Washington, but computer hacking and the threat of thermonuclear eventually bring him and a young Ally Sheedy to the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado Springs.

National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) is about a cross country family car trip, and one of the stops is Colorado (filmed in Pagosa Springs and Pueblo). The Chevy Chase comedy is not kind to old women and small dogs. Another very popular comedy, 1994’s Dumb & Dumber (with Jim Carrey) features a great deal of travel, including important stops in Estes Park and Copper Mountain, Estes Park and Copper Mountain.

1969’s Downhill Racer stars Robert Redford as a professional skier who travels throughout the world, from Austria to France to Idaho Springs to Boulder, Colorado. (Redford’s athlete is more than a bit of a jerk.) 1985’s American Flyers with Kevin Costner is about bicycle racing, and it has races in various states, but the big race is in Colorado. Sylvester Stallone’s 1993 film Cliffhanger is about the sport of mountain climbing. (And it’s about theft and hijacking, but those aren’t really sports… Or sporting.)

Two other sports films -- which also happen to feature teen romance -- were set and filmed in Colorado. 1978’s Ice Castles, about a world class figure skater, was filmed in Colorado Springs (and Minnesota). That film stars Robby Benson, as does 1977’s One on One about college basketball. It was filmed entirely in Colorado.

There have been a number of Westerns set in Colorado, but they have often not been filmed there. 1953’s The Naked Spur, however, starring James Stewart and Janet Leigh and directed by the great Anthony Mann, did much of its filming in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

And there is also a horror film that was filmed in Colorado. 1980’s The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Jack Nicholson, was filmed in Colorado. The film is about a man who takes his family to an isolated hotel in the Rockies. The family is all alone. Well, except for maybe the ghosts. And the madness. And the murder. It doesn’t seem the film could have done wonders for the tourist industry.

Funny Churches Month: Foul Play (1978)

After Chevy Chase left Saturday Night Live, his first big project was the film Foul Play, written and directed by Colin Higgins as an homage to the comic suspense films of Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock often discussed a feature of his films, the MacGuffin, a device of no importance in itself that moves the plot along. In a lecture at Columbia University, he cited this joke as the origin of the idea of the MacGuffin:

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says “What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?” and the other answers “Oh that’s the MacGuffin.” The first one asks “What’s a MacGuffin?” “Well,” the other man says, “It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.” The first man says, “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,” and the other one answers, “Well, then that’s no MacGuffin!” So you see, a MacGuffin is nothing at all.

In Foul Play the MacGuffin is a pack of cigarettes with hidden microfilm containing IMPORTANT INFORMATION. Goldie Hawn plays an ingénue named Gloria who is given the pack by an undercover policeman shortly before he is murdered. This sets the bad guys on her trail, making attempts on her life, bringing Officer Tony Carlson (Chase) of the San Francisco Police to her aid. The proof of the “MacGuffin” nature of the pack of cigarettes is shown when ultimately it's casually tossed in a fireplace and burned without the information inside ever being examined or used.

But there is another MacGuffin in the film. That other MacGuffin is the reason I’m writing about the film. It's the Roman Catholic Church.

The film opens with the murder of an Archbishop. We see the clergyman leaving his chauffeured limousine and entering a mansion, apparently his home. A servant asks how his evening went, and he responds, “The opera gala will be a triumph!” He thinks he is alone in his study as he puts a record (The Mikado) on his stereo, but he isn’t. An unseen assailant draws a knife and kills him.

Then we see Gloria and listen as she describes her dating woes to a friend at a party. Her friend urges her to take chances. She takes a chance and picks up a hitchhiker on her way home from the party, who happens to be the undercover policeman mentioned above, and the plot is in motion.

Throughout the film we hear TV and radio news stories about Pope Pius XIII visiting the United States. We hear about his address to the UN where he is warmly welcomed for his message on world peace. We hear of his meeting the President and congressional leaders and sharing a message of brotherly love. We also learn from newscasts that he will be visiting San Francisco, the film’s location.

Eventually, sleuthing leads to the name of the organization that murdered the Archbishop and has made numerous attempts on Gloria's life: The Tax Churches League. This is a rather unique twist for a Hollywood film. Usually the twist is that some mucky-muck or other in the church is the guilty party, but we learn that the bad guys are attacking the church, plotting to assassinate the Pope. (Years earlier, we learn, they had unsuccessfully tried to kidnap Billy Graham.)

Eventually, when the villains have Goldie and Chevy tied up, they explain their plans, doing the monologuing that movie scoundrels so love. “The Pope is a symbol of the vast wealth and corporate power of the world’s churches. The sham of organized religion is robbing true spirituality of its life. We tried years ago to organize a peaceful campaign to tax these corporations, but we were attacked and laughed at and finally imprisoned. We decided to pursue the historically proven path of violence.”

I don’t think you’ll mind too much if I let you know Ms. Hawn and Mr. Chase escape and foil the plan to shoot the Pope at the opera. But when one sees the Pope luxuriating in the prime seats of the theater, and his rather dim response to the violence that eventually erupts to save his life, one can’t help but wonder if the filmmakers share the sympathies of the Tax the Churches League.

But ultimately the silliness of the whole enterprise keeps one from thinking the film has anything serious to say about the state of the church. Still, the Pope in the film is in favor of world peace (quite the bold stand), so we’re giving the Movie Church of the film Two Steeples.

(There is another religious figure in the film. Billy Barty plays a Bible salesman hawking the New American Bible, which happens to be the Catholic translation. But Goldie isn’t in the market.)