When approaching Marty Feldman's religious satire four decades after the fact, it's hard to understand why the film didn't meet with a more positive reception. If televangelism's hold on the public imagination has faded with time, the methods of relieving the faithful from their wallets have only expanded by way of megachurches and digital marketing. Feldman, who plays sweetly naïve Trappist monk Brother Ambrose, doesn't condemn religion as a whole. If anything, Ambrose attempts to hold up his end of the bargain. Since he took a vow of silence, he screams into a burlap sack when he accidentally hits his thumb with a hammer. Having honed his command of physical comedy through BBC shows and Mel Brooks movies, Feldman builds as many Buster Keaton-type gags into the premise as possible, and most pay off splendidly. He also handled the bulk of his stunts, which grow increasingly perilous. When the monastery runs into financial trouble, Abbot Thelonious (My Fair Lady's Wildrid Hyde-White) sends him down the mountain to secure the necessary funds. He ends up in seedy Los Angeles, where he meets traveling preacher Dr. Melmoth (Feldman's Young Frankenstein costar Peter Boyle), who becomes his friend, and smitten hooker Mary (Mary Hartman Mary Hartman's Louise Lasser), who becomes something more. His mission kicks into overdrive when he sets out to extract some coin from televangelist Armageddon T. Thunderbird (Taxi's Andy Kaufman in peak form), head of the Church of Divine Profit. After all, A.T.T., who recalls Vegas-era Elvis, believes in the Lord, too--or does he? (Clearly, the initialism was no accident).
In Feldman's conception, A.T.T. has a direct line to Richard Pryor as General Organizational Directivator, i.e. G.O.D. By aligning himself with A.T.T., Ambrose ends up exposing the cult-like leader's greed. He also comes perilously close to losing his soul. In the process, Feldman exposes America's hypocrisy regarding the separation between church and state, not least because A.T.T. has political aspirations. In the years since its original release, other satires have explored similar terrain, like HBO's Righteous Gemstones and Fox's Filthy Rich. Because Feldman's 1977 directorial debut, The Last Remake of Beau Geste, was a hit, he successfully negotiated final cut on In God We Trust. Though it tested well with preview audiences, he refused to remove a pointed reference to MCA, Universal's parent company, and the studio dumped it. It didn't help that prominent critics, like Roger Ebert, gave it a thumbs-down. Feldman's five-picture deal ended at that point, and he died of a heart attack two years later. Despite these disappointments, his reputation as a comic performer remains undiminished.
With the reappearance of his directorial work on Blu-ray, including the reappearance of Harry Nilsson’s rousing "Good for God" theme song, his reputation as a filmmaker only seems likely to rise. In their richly contextual commentary tracks, screenwriter and Feldman friend Alan Spencer (Sledge Hammer!) and journalist Bryan Reesman don't suggest that In God We Trust is a masterpiece, but they agree that it's a prescient film worthy of greater consideration. Recommended.