Whipped Cream Difficulties

This post over at Andy Ihnatko’s site reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to blog about. I’m going to put that after a jump, and politely suggest that you read Mr. Ihnatko’s post first, because what I’m going to discuss will ruin his elaborately set up punch line.

S’awright? S’awright?. S’awright? S’okay.

(You know, as a kid, I didn’t get Señor Wences. As an adult, I miss him.)

Weekend before last, we had movie night at the home of our good friends who frequently host movie night. (Hi, good friends who frequently host movie night! Thanks for hosting!)

The theme of the night turned out to be…Don Knotts. Mostly because Lawrence and a couple of other folks wanted to see “The Love God?”, which our friends had as part of a Don Knotts DVD collection. (I’m not sure if this is the DVD collection they own, but the linked one does include both of the movies we watched.)

Anyway, “The Love God?” is a curious and oddly entertaining relic of the 1960s. Wikipedia describes it as “an attempt to integrate Knotts into the type of adult-related films that dominated the late 1960s and early 1970s“.

Knotts is the meek and mild-mannered publisher of a birdwatching magazine. He’s a small-town boy who has been dating the preacher’s daughter for a long time. And when we first see him, his predatory relatives have foreclosed on the magazine and left him with nothing of value.

“Nothing of value,” that is, except a fourth class mailing permit. You see, “The Love God?” is set in a time where people actually printed pictures of naked women on paper, bound them together, and sent them through something called “the US Mail”. It is also set in a time where “pictures of naked women” were actually considered “obscene”, and sending “obscene matter” through the “US Mail” could result in the revocation of your mailing privileges.

Cutting (sort of) to the chase, Knott’s permit is of value to a publisher of such magazines. The publisher makes Knotts his front man, and there’s another obscenity trial; which, for some reason, the meek and mild-mannerd Knotts wins, getting a ruling that “his” magazine isn’t obscene. Don’t worry; that’s not a spoiler, that’s just the first third of the movie.

In order to capitalize on this ruling, the actual publisher needs cash, quick. So he makes a deal with a mobster, “Icepick Charlie”, who in turn brings in an ambitious female editor (played by Anne Francis). The three of them have a theory that they can make the Don Knotts character not a spokesperson for “filth”, but one for the modern man and woman; a spokesperson for the sexual revolution. In other words, the major plot (and comic value) of the movie centers around Don Knotts pretending to be Hugh Hefner.

And it mostly works. Whoever designed Knotts’ costumes (IMDB says Helen Colvig) did a fantastic job of milking comedic value out of Knotts’ wardrobe. Maggie Mancuso is sweet as his long-suffering (and perhaps not terribly bright) girlfriend. And Knotts is actually quite convincing as the small-town boy turned playboy. There’s a scene where he accidentally overhears a conversation between the editor and the mobster, demeaning him as a bumpkin and fool; the hurt on his face when they turn around and realize he’s overheard them comes across as genuine and heartfelt.

“The Love God?’ might be a PG movie today; at worst, PG-13. There’s no “real” sex and no nudity. (Knotts’ character has a harem, but it is said that he spends his time teaching them birdcalls.) There’s a false crisis involving the question of whether he maintains his honor (despite the predatory Francis character throwing herself at him). But all is resolved in the end: the bad guy goes is arrested, the Knotts character turns out to have maintained his honor and marries his sweetheart…

…and the movie ends, leaving questions unanswered. Such as: will Francis and the publisher keep the magazine going now that their figurehead is married? Does Knotts move back to small-town America? And if so, what does he do? Does he move his wife into his digs in the big city (complete with chalkboard over the bed)?

Perhaps I am overthinking it. While I do so, let me say a word about the director, Nat Hiken, who had a decent career as a writer, producer, and songwriter. “The Love God?” was his first film as director…and he died of a heart attack after finishing it, but before it was released.

(The other movie on the agenda that night was “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken”, which I can’t comment on; I left about halfway through the movie.)

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2013 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.