Nowadays, addicts of religion get their nightly fix via TV from celebrity evangelists, but back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, they gathered in churches and under outdoor tents, lining up with jittery fistfuls of cash to be healed and blessed by itinerant preachers.

Marjoe performed a marriage ceremony at the age of four, with newspaper and television coverage securing him high status on the preaching circuit for the duration of his career. The TV footage of him preaching as a little kid is unnerving, with calculated melodramatic, forced eye-contact and fast-paced, ritualistic body language turning him into a dexterous wind-up doll, albeit an unerring one. 

This eponymous documentary, released in 1972, catches up with him in his mid 20s, still a preacher, and eerily similar to those now randomly populating triple-digit TV stations on the nightly. Now jaded and surprisingly candid, Marjoe admits to the filmmakers that he’s a fraud, tricking people out of their money and believing not a drop of his perfected stage act.

Obviously knowing the film would out him as a conman and tired of the business, Marjoe was ready to give up preaching to try the slightly more ethical, usually less profitable worlds of acting and rock music. Also, by this point Marjoe’s parents had tellingly taken off with most of his money, but with his shows still bringing in decent numbers, it wasn’t financial desperation that stirred a career change - instead it was a shred of morality (or sheer boredom) that made him want out. 

The film intercuts his interviews with on-stage preaching, where he copies arm movements from Sir Mick and even uses a special ink to make a cross on his forehead change colors as he sweats! Off stage, he laughs about the people he “heals,” who occasionally drop to the ground in cliches of divine shaking after he touches their foreheads. 

The film itself is equal parts comical and sad. It evokes imagery characterizing timeless national divide: packed theaters of liberal New Yorkers in hysterics and theoretical art houses filled with small-town church folk shaking their heads in disapproval. 

Off stage, Marjoe is inarguably charismatic, unraveling his life’s sham work with an enthusiastic smile. Fittingly and scarily, his mojo wasn’t faked on stage. While never offering a signature religious idea to enchant the masses - as he was never an aficionado of anything except crowd pleasing – Marjoe’s bubbly persona managed to win over a room with ease. Consider him the perfect puppet regime politician, able to present any idea laced in the murky elixir of captivating emotion and power. 

Essentially, Marjoe was a drug dealer, injecting doses of hope into those who needed it most, never partaking in his own supply, and racketing profits from people who likely didn’t have a whole lot to spare. That’s the universally tragic part, because the only act these naïve people were guilty of was humble trust, and Marjoe instinctively pounced on them like a guy out of Boiler Room in a silly Napoleon Dynamite wig. 

The humor blooms out of such ridiculousness, as Marjoe tells the camera “Glory je to Besus” and recites the Gospel as whole heartedly to his dog at the film’s end as he does preaching to a room of excited senior citizens.

It’s a joke to suggest broadcasting transformed evangelism into a virtuous profession, and so, watching this film, one can picture Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham counting greenbacks backstage with sweat dripping off the chin. Marjoe was not the last of a dying breed, but instead, one of the first and only self-induced whistleblowers in a controversial profession that’s currently packing stadium-size arenas complete with pyrotechnics on Sundays.  

After this film won an Oscar in 1973, Marjoe did actually work as an actor, appearing on TV series like Kojak and T.J. Hooker, and appearing in films like Hellhole and, praise the lord, American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt. He’s been gone from the public eye since playing, yes, a preacher, in Walter Hill’s 1995 western Wild Bill. Three decades later Marjoe has seen the light on DVD, but still hasn’t found a larger following to spark debate that might finally unseat these millionaire kings from the table of the biggest façade in show business.

-Shawn Wines