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OH, GOD!
Rating:  ½
USA. 1977.
Director – Carl Reiner, Screenplay – Larry Gelbart, Based on the Novel by Avery Corman, Producer – Jerry Weintraub, Photography – Victor J. Kemper, Music – Jack Elliott, Art Direction – Jack Senter. Production Company – Warner Bros.
Cast:
John Denver (Jerry Landers), George Burns (God), Teri Garr (Bobbie Landers), Paul Sorvino (Reverend Willy Williams), William Daniels (Mr Summers)
Plot: Supermarket manager Jerry Landers receives a letter in the mail asking him to come to an interview with God. God, a bespectacled old man in windcheater, plaid shirt and fishing cap, tells Jerry that He wishes him to preach His message to the world – that people should get together to solve the world’s problems. But Jerry’s attempts to communicate this message are not very successful – he is ridiculed by the media, mobbed by cranks and fired from his job. But then when God tells Jerry to tell charismatic preacher, Reverend Willy Williams, that he is a fraud, Williams responds by suing Jerry. Jerry’s only recourse is to call God to the stand as a witness in court.
Oh, God! was perhaps an attempt to give equal time to the other side after the considerable success The Devil had had at the box-office throughout the last decade with the likes of Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976). It’s an oddly anachronistic satire, one that really belongs more in the heyday of the light fantasy in the 1940s. It’s an amiable, well-turned fantasy, although a rather easy and uncontroversial one. The God shown here is the decidedly ecunemicized God of the humanist movement rather than the Baptist movement – there is pointedly no mention of Devil, hellfire or sin throughout. In fact the evils of the piece are actually seen as being the charismatic religious movement. George Burns makes for a gently, charming God – his most impressive miracle is a series of card tricks and he dismisses all the rest as Hollywood special effects, and as an article for faith to convince Jerry, he only creates a rainstorm inside his car so as not to spoil everyone else’s day. It’s a gentle and rather easy religious vision that, for all it’s being mounted as a satire, has nothing particularly challenging to say about religion and only takes aim at a fairly innocuous target.
While John Denver’s All-American boy/man persona suits the film, his nervously whiny, stammering performance does not and remains the film’s singular pill of discontent. Teri Garr is cast in the same role of the longsuffering wife doubting her husband’s fantastical encounter that she also played in the same year’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and plays appealingly.
The film was written by Larry Gelbart, the well-known comedy writer and creator of tv’s M.A.S.H. (1972-1983) and author of the play A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1963). It was directed by former comic Carl Reiner, best known for his subsequent directorial collaborations with Steve Martin – The Jerk (1982), Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), The Man with Two Brains (1983) and All Of Me (1984) – and as the father of Rob Reiner. Reiner later returned to genre material with the psycho-thriller spoof Fatal Instinct (1993).
There were two lame sequels, both featuring Burns, Oh God Book II (1980) and Oh God, You Devil (1984).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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