The World's Greatest Sinner
To kick off 2025, the From Below Microcinema presents The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962) on Thursday, January 2nd, at 7 pm.
*Here is the link to reserve a seat. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10! *
While the end of the holiday season and the hanging of a new calendar often marks the time of resolutions and aspirations for the year ahead, usually connoting some changes to higher-minded habits for the mind and/or body, the From Below remains committed to good ol-fashioned sinnin’ with imposing character actor Timothy Carey’s one and only directorial effort, The World’s Greatest Sinner.
This film is a rather astounding object: a grimy transmission from the cracks in the façade of early 60s American Christian conformism, which combines a Beat countercultural energy with sweaty tent revival religious fervor and the strong pulse of a rockabilly soundtrack (the score for the film was one of the first studio projects of one Frank Zappa). In it, Timothy Carey himself stars as an insurance salesman sick of his exploitative role in society, who decides to ‘drop out’ and found a new religious sect called the Eternal Man’s Party, which promises a way to live forever and never die. Sporting a truly hideous soul patch, Carey’s Clarence ‘God’ Hilliard soon finds himself at the center of a growing political movement, bolstered by the truly bizarre erotic attention being paid to him as well.
Carey was a frequent but stormy collaborator with directors such as Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes (including an episode in which he faked his own kidnapping from the Paths of Glory set in order to bring attention to his role/character, resulting in his firing), and this film uniquely saddles his, erm, eccentricities, into a film that feels almost dangerous and certainly unprecedented for its time in its assault on orthodoxy, the cinematic equivalent of a swampy blues song (akin Screaming Jay Hawkins) for its ability to meld twilit evil with holy fervor.
This film also represents a bit of a culmination of a covert film series that we’ve been running for much of the last month, examining the various inflections of films directed by actors, starring themselves. For Flaming Ears, this is a manifestation of the collective spirit of production in which filmmaking roles are not so strictly segregated. For Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, being the director and star comes as a result of pathfinding how to execute their singular, complex vision of taxing physical comedy. Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tokyo Fist is, in some ways, an evolution of this approach of self-infliction, moving from purely comedic to more psychologically destructive and embodied forms of genre cinema (who better to take the brunt of this damage than the director himself?). In What Happened Was…, Tom Noonan takes advantage of the 90s indie boom to helm a feature that gives center stage to character actors (himself included) often relegated to roles several lines lower on the call sheet.
The World’s Greatest Sinner is perhaps a more stereotypical actor-turned-director project in that, at least in some ways, represents a bit of a vanity project from Timothy Carey; he does, after all, rename himself God over the course of the film. At the same time, it’s an apotheosis of our studies in this vein, combining elements of the previous films’ relationships to the dual role. Like Tokyo Fist, it is a fantastic self-destruction of the subjectivity of the God-Director; like What Happened Was… it gives Carey, admittedly sidelined for interpersonal reasons as much as anything else, a role that can dig into his unique proclivities and talents; like Chaplin and Keaton, it shows how those proclivities can be transmuted into a finished film far more personal and idiosyncratic than a piece of studio filmmaking. *As a reminder, What Happened Was… is screening tomorrow night (Sunday 12/29) and there are seats available! Here is the link
to reserve your spot.*