God’s Angry Man

January 30, 2008 by Jim Spickard.

Film Title: God’s Angry Man — by Werner Herzog (1980) — 44 minutes

Distributor: ???????

Summary: A documentary about Dr. Gene Scott, televangelist, who used ranting anger to raise money on his nightly Festival of Faith. Tom Sutpen, in a review posted at Bright Lights Film Journal, writes:

A good deal of Herzog’s film is taken up with scenes of Scott live on the air, angrily rifling through pledges from viewers that were just called in — none of which are ever less than three figures — eventually flying into a hardcore Old Testament fury at the foul stinginess of the apostate public when he sees they haven’t coughed up that extra thousand he told them he needed. … In other hands, scenes like these would be used to advance the ever-fashionable cliché of television evangelists as mammon-obsessed charlatans…, but Herzog’s portrait of Dr. Gene Scott isn’t concerned with exposing hypocrisy … . God’s Angry Man is neither an exposé nor a malediction, and Scott is never branded a crackpot…. And for all his volcanic on-air bluster, he reveals a great deal of genuine vulnerability when he’s interviewed by Herzog.

Read the whole review here.

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