# Movie Review: Marjoe **URL:** **By** Ron Schwarz **Published:** November 1, 1972 --- “faith healers are only a slight exaggeration of our society’s respected and established religious institutions.” New York has never been particularly fertile ground for faith healers. Despite occasional appearances here, they remain more a Southern and Western phenomenon (not particularly surprising, and due to our greater degree of sophistication, we like to tell ourselves). Certainly, this strangeness is greatly responsible for the box-office success of _Marjoe_, a documentary on a faith healer, which is now completing a rather lengthy engagement in New York area theaters. Contributing even more to the film’s success, however, is the personality of the faith healer himself, who is appropriately named Marjoe, a contraction of Mary and Joseph (I’m sure you remember who They were). Marjoe has decided to quit the faith-healing business, and moreover, to use the opportunity presented by the making of this documentary to describe his activities as a faith-healer with amazing candor. The curious tent-Revival meetings at which he performs, are filmed with hand-held, constantly moving cameras, which effectively convey the tumultuous nature of these sessions. Interspersed with these are other, more static shots of Marjoe and his cohorts backstage, counting the take in that day’s offering, prior to dividing it up, as well as other shots of Marjoe describing his background and experiences in late-night dope-smoking sessions with the film crew, which acts as a sort of substitute audience for us, in reacting to Marjoe’s revelations. The film doesn’t hesitate showing its crew at work, where need be, which indicates a nice balance in documentary style between the film-as-made-by-unseen-agents on the one hand, and the overdone film-about-filming-a-film tendency on the other. And what of Marjoe himself? He’s in his twenties, with rather long, curly blonde hair, and an attractively cynical attitude. He’s been doing the Revival thing since early childhood, when he was his preacher father’s “boy wonder” gimmick, earning the old man a fortune, little of which the boy ever saw (ah, charity). Such a background makes Marjoe’s decision to quit faith-healing somewhat more significant, although the film fails to present his precise motivation for doing so. Since the film suggests that he has been turning on, the consequent change in values this entails may have been a factor, along with the desire he expresses to become an actor, or perhaps because he has been “tainted by the devil,” as David Wilkerson, one of his former colleagues, asserts. One’s first reaction to Marjoe’s _shtick_ is surely a negative one: repulsed by the mysticism, the fraud, the irrationality. Marjoe, however, sees himself as an entertainer, deliberately imitating the gestures and mannerisms of Mick Jagger, and indeed, if received in this light, a much more sympathetic picture emerges. The people attending certainly get their money’s worth: as far as audience participation is concerned, Marjoe’s technique is superb. We see Marjoe singing, moaning and shrieking on stage, with almost the entire audience (mostly old) out of their seats, either dancing with joy in the aisles (in a rather grotesque parody of the dancing style of dope-smoking young people) or are moaning and writhing on the floor (in what looks suspiciously like sexual ecstasy). However, since dope and sex are virtually unknown in most areas of rural America, such behavior is definitely cool for those who are Possessed by the Spirit of the Lord. Besides, I venture to say that witnessing a genuine miracle _must_ be one of the grooviest things a person can do in, say, Dubuque or Council Bluffs. There are enough people around with psychosomatic illnesses, who can be touched by the hand of God (watch ‘em fall), and rise up healed. Anyway, who’d have the nerve to admit that God wouldn’t heal them? I’m reminded of a faith-healer I saw on television in Los Angeles doing a live telecast from some stadium. After laying ‘em in the aisles (literally), he approached an old woman, who complained of ear trouble. After praying and laying on of hands, and lots of shouting (she didn’t fall), he pronounce her ear cured, and began thanking the Lord. The woman (barely audible) was heard to murmur “But it’s my other ear!” Without missing a single amen, the healer assured her that God certainly knew which ear to cure, and quickly moved on to the next infirmity. Of _course_ faith healers are ridiculous mystics; most people realize that. What is more important to realize, however, is that faith healers are only a slight exaggeration of our society’s respected and established religious institutions. Certainly both groups share the same basic premises and values; they differ only in that faith healers are less hypocritical than the others: they really believe what the Bible says. In many ways, one can respect them more than the “respectable” churches. They defraud the gullible it’s true, but give them a great show, and then go away and leave them alone afterwards. Established churches defraud the people just as much, but what’s worse, instill in them a perverted and damaging moral code. It’s no coincidence that the most frequent church-goers are also the least tolerant and most psychologically repressed segment of our society. It’s in the nature of every religion to regard its particular dogma as the One and Only Truth and to teach its adherents first, not to question anything, but to accept it all on faith; second, to regard any other ideas as not only untruthful, but often dangerous; and, third, that it’s a moral duty to enlighten non-believers to the Truth, often whether those non-believers want to hear it or not. Certainly faith healers are more interesting and more colorful than their straight counterparts. Marjoe amply proves this. Indeed, so much so, that at times it is hard to believe the film is non-fiction. See it for yourself; you’ll probably find it fascinating, and perhaps enlightening as well. ⓔ