Directed By: Marty Feldman
Starring: Marty Feldman, Ann-Margret, Michael York
Tag line: "A DIFFERENT kind of love story"
Trivia: The production shoot for this picture ran for fourteen weeks but involved five months of pre-production
Three years before he made In God We Trust, Marty Feldman directed his first motion picture, The Last Remake of Beau Geste, an ambitious movie set at the turn of the 20th century that, while not perfect, proved a much better showcase for his brand of humor.
When his wife gives birth to the daughter he never wanted (then promptly dies, leaving him a widower), Sir Hector Geste (Trevor Howard) finds he has no alternative but to adopt a son. It doesn’t take long for him to spot the young man who will carry on the family name, a strapping orphan he immediately renames “Beau”.
The problem is that Beau has a biological twin brother, Digby, who isn’t nearly as heroic a lad. But since they are a set, Sir Hector decides to adopt them both.
The years pass, and Beau (Michael York) becomes every bit the man his father intended, while Digby (Feldman) does not (“Beau grew into the full stature of his manhood”, Digby says in his dual role as narrator. “I grew up”). Nobody can resist Beau’s charms, not even Sir Hector’s adult daughter (and Beau’s step-sister) Isabel (Sinead Cusack), who is deeply in love with him.
Feeling Beau is ready, Sir Hector entrusts him with the fabled Blue Water diamond, the source of the family’s wealth, and tells Beau to guard it with his life.
The years pass, and Sir Hector, returning home from war, brings with him his new bride Flavia (Ann-Margret), a woman much younger than himself. During a night of heated passion, Sir Hector suffers an attack that puts him on death’s door. Sensing an opportunity, the money-hungry Flavia announces that she intends to sell off the Geste estate, as well as the Blue Water diamond, which will surely fetch a pretty penny on the open market.
To prevent Flavia from carrying out her scheme, Beau steals the Blue Water and heads to North Africa, where he joins the French Foreign Legion. Hoping to protect his brother's reputation, Digby confesses to the theft of the diamond and is sentenced to a life of hard labor.
Thus begins a grand adventure that will see the Geste boys square off against a crooked warden (Terry-Thomas); a conniving French general (Henry Gibson); a hard-as-nails German drill instructor (Peter Ustinov); and an Arab Sheik (James Earl Jones) whose goal is to kill every legionnaire in the Sahara.
Through it all, Beau and Digby remain steadfast in their desire to preserve the family's legacy. But Flavia has a few tricks up her sleeve that may just see her coming out on top.
As he would several years later with In God We Trust, Feldman assembles a strong cast of supporting players for The Last Remake of Beau Geste, a wonderful mix of classically trained actors and professional comedians. Michael York is convincing as the strapping Beau, and makes for a fine hero; while Peter Ustinov gets his share of laughs as Markov, the German officer who tries his damnedest to swipe the Blue Water diamond (though Beau has many adversaries throughout the film, Markov is, for all intents and purposes, his chief rival). Also quite good are Roy Kinnear (as Markov’s second-in-command), Spike Milligan (as Sir Hector’s senile butler Crumble), and James Earl Jones (as one of the strangest Arab Sheiks ever to grace the screen).
Naturally, Feldman himself also gets a few chuckles along the way as Digby, a role that makes great use of his physical skills (Digby’s escape from prison is shot as if it were a silent comedy, complete with pratfalls and slapstick). And as the gold-digging wife, Ann-Margret is as funny as she is sexy.
Yet as far as I’m concerned, it’s Trevor Howard who steals the show, delivering a boisterous performance as the battle-crazed Sir Hector while, at the same time, reciting some of the film’s best lines. During his visit to the orphanage, Sir Hector tells the headmistress, Miss Wormwood (Irene Handl), the kind of life he intends to give a prospective son. “Naturally”, Sir Hector says, “he will be brought up with an English gentleman’s attitude and love of slaughter”. It’s thanks to the bombastic Howard that the opening scenes of The Last Remake of Beau Geste are so damn uproarious.
As for the movie itself, some sequences are truly inspired. While trekking through the desert, Digby stumbles upon a mirage that pulls him into the 1939 film version of Beau Geste, where, thanks to the magic of movies, he finds himself sitting directly across from a young Gary Cooper! A later scene, involving James Earl Jones’ run-in with a Valentino look-alike, was reminiscent of the ending of Blazing Saddles, and at one point Feldman even breaks up the action with a commercial, presented by Ed McMahon (the ad itself, which features Avery Schrieber as a camel salesman, is sure to make you smile).
Unfortunately, The Last Remake of Beau Geste runs out of steam well before it is over, and like In God We Trust has a few moments that fall flat (I didn’t laugh once during the entire ballroom dance sequence). Still, with its excellent cast and moments of madcap hilarity, The Last Remake of Beau Geste is a pleasant diversion.
It may not be comedy gold, but The Last Remake of Beau Geste is at least good enough for silver or bronze.
Directed By: Marty Feldman
Starring: Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle, Louise Lasser
Tag line: "This is Brother Ambrose. Lead him not into temptation. For he's sure to follow"
Trivia: To prepare for his role as Aramgeddon T. Thunderbird, Andy Kaufman practiced preaching on city streets
Apparently, I was one of the very few people who caught Marty Feldman’s In God We Trust on the big screen.
My father took my brother and I, as well as a friend of ours, to see it one night in the fall of 1980, and we laughed our heads off.
Alas, not many shared our enthusiasm for the movie; In God We Trust was a box-office dud. Its failure to find an audience may have had something to do with its subject matter (organized religion), and the various comedic jabs that Feldman and company took at televangelism. I remember my father telling us afterwards that In God We Trust was “blasphemous” (which I thought was kinda strange, seeing as he laughed as much as we did), so it’s possible the film was saddled with that unfortunate label, and the faithful stayed away.
Of course, the fact that In God We Trust is only sporadically funny - with more jokes that fall flat than hit their mark - might have turned people off as well. But we’ll get to that in a minute…
Brother Ambrose (Feldman) has spent his entire life in a mountaintop monastery. Yet, despite his inexperience with the outside world, the head Brother, Abbot Thelonious (Wilfrid Hyde-White), assigns Ambrose a very important task: their order needs $5,000 to pay its mortgage, and therefore must send someone to Los Angeles to meet with Armageddon T. Thunderbird (Andy Kaufman), a television evangelist and the leader of the CDP (Church of Divine Profit) Network. Once Mr. Thunderbird learns of their plight, Abbot Thelonious is convinced he will immediately turn the money over to save the Monastery from foreclosure.
With the help of Mary (Louise Lasser), a prostitute; and Dr. Sebastian Melmoth (Peter Boyle), a traveling preacher who has transformed a school bus into a church on wheels, Ambrose does, indeed, get his meeting with Armageddon, who, it turns out, has a direct line for talking to God (played by Richard Pryor).
The question is, how far will Ambrose go to get the money he needs? Is he willing to sell his soul for it?
I know what you’re thinking: Did I really laugh my head off when I first saw In God We Trust? Absolutely! But keep in mind: I was only 10 years old at the time (weeks away from my 11th birthday), and my taste in comedy was… well, let’s say it was “under-developed”.
At that point, I had not yet been introduced to Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Monty Python, The Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Steve Martin, Cheech and Chong, or the plethora of other screen comics who would shape my sense of humor in the decades to come
Hell, I didn’t even get to see Caddyshack, The Blues Brothers, or Animal House until the following year, when we finally got cable.
So, sure, the slapstick routines that Feldman concocted for In God We Trust seemed completely fresh to me (he begins early, with a pratfall involving a split door at the monastery, followed immediately by a run-in with a stubborn “Silence” sign). Had I known how much his physical comedy (including a couple of dangerous stunts late in the film) owed to Keaton, Chaplin, and the like, I probably wouldn’t have been quite as impressed.
What is impressive, though, is this movie's cast. Along with writing and directing, Feldman plays Brother Ambrose, and is convincing as a naïve monk set loose in Los Angeles. Also good is Louise Lasser as Mary, the hooker with a heart of gold (her first encounter with Brother Ambrose leads to one of the movie’s better sight gags). The romance that develops between the two is well-handled, making the film, at least in part, a romantic comedy.
That said, the real stand-outs are the remaining three supporting players. Peter Boyle (Feldman’s co-star in Young Frankenstein) is damn funny as Sebastian Melmoth, proprietor and chief reverend of a mobile church and seller of religious-themed novelty items, like the Levitating Lazarus Doll (“Watch him rise from the dead in the privacy of your own home”). Whether preaching or stumbling around drunk, Boyle’s character gets some of the movie’s biggest laughs.
As does Andy Kaufman as Armageddon T. Thunderbird, the bleach-blonde televangelist with his own special hotline for communicating with God. Kaufman goes over-the-top with his performance, yet is so dynamic when he’s on-screen that you can’t look away.
Rounding out the group is Richard Pryor as God, or at least the computer manifestation of God (his actual moniker is G.O.D., which stands for "General Organisational Directivator"). A late scene, where Brother Ambrose reads the bible aloud to G.O.D., is a definite highlight.
With a cast like this, and a subject that was ripe for the picking (television evangelists were all the rage In the ‘70s and ‘80s), it’s a shame In God We Trust isn’t funnier. But with so much slapstick crammed in, as well as a handful of chase scenes that go nowhere, Feldman simply wasn’t aiming high (low?) enough with the humor.
There are moments of comedic brilliance that pop up from time to time, including the scene where Ambrose, prior to his meeting with Thunderbird, lands a job with a religious trinkets manufacturer, and is assigned the task of nailing little Jesus statues onto a cross (Ambrose finds it so distressing that he has to wash his hands after each one). But sequences like this are few and far-between, and when you consider that Feldman got his start on British T.V. (in the late ‘60s he co-wrote and co-starred in At Last the 1948 Show with Python alums John Cleese and Graham Chapman), and that his cinematic influence was Mel Brooks (along with playing Igor in Young Frankenstein, Feldman had a major role in Silent Movie), this film should have been amazing.
I still say it’s worth a watch. The cast, as I said, is excellent, and I like how the movie used Harry Nillson’s hilarious ditty “Good for God” (it plays over the credits and at other intervals throughout the film). But odds are you won’t come away thinking In God We Trust is a stellar comedy.
Unless you’re 10 years old, in which case you’ll probably love it.
Directed By: Mel Damski
Starring: Graham Chapman, Peter Boyle, Cheech Marin
Tag line: "A Shipload of Laughs"
Trivia: At one point, there were at least four different versions of this film's script
A 1983 comedy co-written by Monty Python’s Graham Chapman, Yellowbeard has one hell of a cast, some of the finest comedic performers of its day. So why wasn’t it a laugh riot?
It’s the end of the 17th century, and the notorious pirate Yellowbeard (Chapman), who has been rotting in an English prison for 20 years, is finally free. Throughout his incarceration, he refused to reveal the whereabouts of his treasure, which is rumored to be buried somewhere in the Caribbean.
As expected, a lot of people have been trying to get their hands on this bounty of gold and jewels, including Yellowbeard’s old shipmate Moon (Peter Boyle) and Moon’s new pal Gilbert (Marty Feldman); as well as Commander Clement of the British Navy (Eric Idle), who has convinced the Queen to lend him the fleet’s fastest ship so that he can track Yellowbeard and, hopefully, claim the treasure for Her Majesty. In addition to all the hoopla about his hidden booty, Yellowbeard learns from his estranged wife Betty (Madeline Kahn) that he’s the father of a 20-year-old son. Unlike dear old dad, however, the boy, Dan (Martin Hewitt), doesn’t kill, rape or steal. Instead, he’s a gardener, employed by Lord Percy Lambourn (Peter Cook). What’s more, Betty reveals that, in order to keep it safe, she had Yellowbeard’s treasure map tattooed on the lad’s head when he was an infant!
With his son, Lord Lambourn, and physician Dr. Gilpin (Michael Horden) in tow, Yellowbeard sets out to retrieve his fortune. But will he be the first to find it?
Three of the Monty Python troupe appear in Yellowbeard: Chapman, Idle, and John Cleese (who plays a humorous version of Blind Pew, a character taken directly from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island). A number of Mel Brooks’ stock players are also on-hand, including Boyle, Feldman, Kahn, and (in two separate roles) Kenneth Mars, all of whom were in Young Frankenstein.
But that’s just the beginning.
Yellowbeard features Peter Cook (at his understated best, playing the oft-drunk Lord Lambourn), Cheech and Chong (as Spaniards who, in the opening scene, are attacked by Yellowbeard and his pirates. Their two characters appear later in the movie as well, residents of the island where the treasure is buried), and James Mason (as a Captain Bligh wannabe whose ship is manned by more pirates than he realizes).
Still, despite all the talent involved, Yellowbeard is only fitfully amusing (think of it as “Python Lite”). When I first watched it on cable in 1983, I was expecting a new comedy classic, and was admittedly disappointed when it wasn't one.
In a 2001 interview, co-star John Cleese called Yellowbeard “One of the six worst films made in the history of the world”. That’s a bit harsh. The movie does have its moments, many of which are dialogue-driven. When Betty visits Yellowbeard in prison to tell him he has a son, she leads up to it by asking him if he remembers 20 years ago, before he was arrested, when they had “a little cuddle”. “I raped ya, if that’s what you mean”, Yellowbeard bellows. “Okay”, she snaps back. “It was half cuddle, half rape”. There’s also a mean-spirited, but admittedly funny scene involving a flower girl (Ava Herela), and Peter Cook is always fun to watch.
No doubt about it: Yellowbeard should have been better. But there are still laughs to be had.
