Paul Wendkos’s best films –The Burglar (1957), Face of a
Fugitive (1959), Gidget (1960) – are all about outsiders on the fringes of
society: criminals, surfers, the poor. Angel Baby (1961) is a gritty
film about tent-show preachers and their audience. It was filmed in the South and includes many
sharecroppers and farmers similar to those in James Agee and Walker Evans’s
book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).
George Hamilton is appropriately intense as the preacher, picked out of
the choir by Mercedes McCambridge, in love with one of those he cured by faith
healing and turned into a preacher, played by Salome Jens.
The movie is filmed in beautiful black-and-white by Haskell
Wexler, who supposedly used roller skates to produce the tracking shots of
revival meetings, parking lots and swamps in Georgia and Florida. The traveling preachers hold out what hope
there is for those without money or indoor plumbing and the revival meetings
have strong emotional moments of fervor that sometimes lead to lust and
fakery, as well as greed that leads to violence. The end of the movie does suggest the slight
possibility of redemption and God’s compassion.
A kind word for George Hamilton, whose film Your Cheatin’
Heart(1964), directed by Gene Nelson, was a more interesting version of Hank
Williams’s life than the recent I Saw
the Light, with Tom Hiddleston directed by Mark Abraham. Nelson at least delved into the influences on
Williams – including African-American blues – and his creative song writing –
especially of the lovely I Can’t Help It If I Am Still in Love with You – while
with Abraham it was mostly about Hank’s drinking and infidelity.
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