SHIRLEY YOU CAN'T BE SERIOUS.......NEITHER IS "JOHN GOLDFARB, PLEASE COME HOME"

John Goldfarb, Please Come Home (1965)   Paydirt hit!  The Mother Lode!

                  The very oddest of all 1960's oddities!

                   Five years before 20th Century Fox tried to push the offensiveness envelope with "Myra Breckinridge" and "Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls", they let this one escape........

                   .......and for sheer repulsive lunacy, misbegotten filmmaking and humiliated actors, it leaves "Myra" and "Beyond" in the dust.......

                      Before William Peter Blatty's mega-success as "The Exorcist"s novelist and screenwriter, he toiled as a 'comedy' scripter.    Let's put it this way:   "The Exorcist" was ten times funnier than any attempted 'comedy' Blatty ever committed to paper.......

                      Blatty's goal here (I can only guess).......a frenzied satire of global foibles falling somewhere between "Dr. Strangelove" and a Keystone Kops silent slapstick wingding........

                      As Shirley MacLaine frequently mutters throughout the film.......Oy Vey.....

                     Blasting out of the gate comes the title song, composed by 'Johnny' Williams and literally shrieked out loud by MacLaine........an ominous warning about MacLaine's performance, which will be equally shrill and grotesque........(and no symphony orchestra will add this song to their John Williams repertoire......)

                     Shirley's a take-no-prisoners reporter who arranges her own trafficking (by Telly Savalas!) into the madhouse Middle East harem of King Fawz (Peter Ustinov) of Fawzia......

                      Fawzia, as conceived by Blatty, is kind of a 1950's Mad Magazine version of an Arab kingdom,,,,,,,a matte-painted 'Thief Of Bagdad' city surrounded by sudden cascades of gushing oil.....(you wonder how King Fawz accrues his wealth, since no effort's made to cap the gushers and install oil wells....)

                       Ustinov's Fawz rides around in jet propelled golf carts and babbles non-stop gibberish sprinkled with an English word or two.......and furious that his son, the Prince just got kicked off the Notre Dame football team.......more about that later.....

                       Meanwhile in Washington D.C. a entire clown car of State Department and CIA imbeciles (Harry Morgan, Jim Backus, Fred Clark, Richard Deacon, etc) plan to spy on Russia using the world's worst U-2 pilot, John 'Wrong Way' Goldfarb (Richard Crenna)......(but you gotta love Blatty's names for this bunch, including 'Heinous Overreach' and 'Miles Whitepaper')

                       True to his nickname, 'Wrong Way' and his plane miss Russia entirely and crash in Fawzia........where Fawz threatens to turn him over to the Kremlin unless he coaches the Prince and a woebegone Fawzian football team......in a game against Notre Dame........

                      Is that more than enough madness for one movie?

                       After watching this, you may think you've hallucinated the entire film.......MacClaine almost never dials it down below screeching level......especially after she's terrified to discover, contrary to rumor, that King Fawz enjoys a robust sex life with the harem......(the scene where she costumes herself as a Halloween shop gargoyle to cool Fawz's lust is way beyond description....)

                       You can practically predict every frantic gag thrown into the climactic Fawzia Vs. Notre Dame gridiron clash......rampaging camels, harem girl cheerleaders and MacLaine herself tossed skyward by another erupting oil spurt on the field.........

                      It would probably take 25 more posts to total up all the now politically incorrect moments......but you get the idea.......

                     Even in 1965, audiences (what little showed up) found all this desperate, exhausting and not even slightly funny........(particularly Notre Dame, who, without success, sued Fox to suppress the film. They needn't have bothered......the film easily suppressed itself into oblivion......

                     For William Peter Blatty, however, it wasn't a total loss.......using Shirley MacLaine and director J. Lee Thompson as models for characters in "The Exorcist"......

                    As for BQ........can't really refer to 'John Goldfarb' as a Guilty Pleasure......'pleasure' is too strong an adjective to use here.  But for all us lovers of ultra-strange, bizarre cinema.....it's at least a 2 star (**) 'see-it-at-least-once-before-you-die-preferably-with-a-pitcher-of-beer-nearby'........

                    And don't worry, Shirley's rendition of the title song will stick in nobody's head........