THE WORLD'S GREATEST SINNER

This movie is just fucking wrong. Love it or hate it, The World’s Greatest Sinner is one of a kind. It has become hard to find, but if you want to it, write in and I’ll hook you up. Timothy Carey was fairly well known as a character actor and appeared in two early Stanley Kubrick films (The Killing and Paths of Glory) before going it alone and creating his own distinctive vision in The World’s Greatest Sinner (released 1962) with the help of a very young and then unknown Frank Zappa, who wrote the music - which suffice to say, was a couple decades ahead of its time. I’m not sure whether Timothy Carey was out of his mind, joking, or some combination of the two. He looks absolutely insane in the film.

It starts with Satan as a narrator and all kinds of overwrought snake images. The basic storyline is that Clarence Hilliard, an insurance agent, gets fired for being bored with his job, and then decides he wants to be God. He gets a snappy back-up band with a hot chick saxophone player that kicks out some of the most smoking jams of Zappa’s entire career. One really amazing feature of the film is the unheard early roots of Zappa’s musical experimentation. Clarence Hilliard starts calling himself God and takes his manic preaching to the streets and gains followers by telling people they must become super human beings, promising them eternal life. Just how he’s going to accomplish that is never really made clear, but the people go for it.

Trouble with the wife and kids stirs at home when he turns away from the church more over convinced that either the only God is man or that he is God. We never see his teaching clarify the seeming contradiction that man is god and that he specifically is God, but as I said, I have no idea whether or not Timothy Carey was out of his mind or joking when he made this film. He seduces an old woman to get funding for his political party that wear Nazi looking armbands and stage riots. Then he seduces young girls. He becomes abusive and neglectful of his family, because he’s all wound up in his whole “I’m God” trip. People buy into his trip though, but his inner anguish grows.

I’ll have to say this much for Timothy Carey’s acting; he looks out of his fucking mind! Another comical aspect is that through the entire movie he is so obviously just a dude from Long Island that got fired from selling insurance, but he tells people what they want to hear, and then there you go, he’s God. He fucks fourteen-year-old girls. Old ladies, fourteen year old girls, early Zappa rockabilly - this is one out of control rock and roll cult leader! It’s just plain wacky. It reminds me of the whole Church of the Subgenius Bob Dobbs thing except twenty years earlier and with the Church of the Subgenius I know that Ivan Stang and the gang were joking. Timothy Carey, who fucking knows. I think the very frightening possibility exists that Timothy Carey was dead serious when he made this film.

The end is a little bit ambiguous – it looks like he desecrates the sacrament and then the real god smites him and sends him to hell, but God is just sort of represented by a huge white light, and Timothy Carey cries out in remorse. I like this film a lot actually. I don’t know if I’m just disenchanted with the New York art world so I’ve become drawn to campy rockabilly b-movie from outer space type shit or whether it does have some real artistic legitimacy in that Timothy Carey looks authentically fucking out of his goddamned mind in this film. Maybe it’s just because I want to date some rockabilly chick down at Beauty Bar on Freemont Street here in Vegas. Is it because I relate to Hilliard’s angst and fall from grace? There could be a little of that in there, but I chuckled at the film several times, whether or not it was meant to be funny. A bad film for me is a boring film. This film drags a little at the end but is generally very colorful. Timothy Carey was a pretty good actor even if he does talk in that thick Long Island accent the whole film. Zappa was an excellent musician. This is pure B-movie mayhem, no questions asked.

- William Wheaton, April 2010

For more from Wheaton, visit his Myspace