The Love God? Pt. 3

It’s A Sign Of The Times

Why did I bother listing so many of Universal’s other films released during this time period?

As mentioned, Universal had just as tough a time as many other studios in figuring out what the emerging culture of the 1960s and early 70s wanted.

They did better in television.  Generic family friendly fare worked well there, but the medium also offered opportunities for cutting edge contemporary material.

Universal’s series The Name Of The Game regularly tackled contemporary topics in a thorough manner that showed the complexity of the issues involved.  It was possible to do stories that reached modern audiences but Universal’s leadership at the time lacked the courage and / or insight to do so.

One can understand it from a purely accounting POV.  Television in those days was cheaply done and audience responses judged almost immediately.  Studios and producers could respond to audience likes and dislikes very quickly.

But movies cost more and the responses came not in the form of Nielsen ratings but in ticket sales.  By the time Universal found out how audiences responded to a given movie…

…it was too late.

As a result Universal tended to badly undercut their own efforts, either in production or distribution.  This in turn skewed results, leading to more bad choices.  By the time the culture calmed down to a new normal in the mid-1970s, Universal figured out how to strike a happy medium for modern audiences, Goldilocks-like productions that weren’t too edgy, weren’t too old fashioned, but just right.  The Airport / Jaws / Back To The Future / Jurassic Park / Fast & Furious and other franchises serve them quite well.

In the days before widespread cable and home video, Universal imposed one last insult on The Love God? with their severely truncated for-broadcast-TV edit.

They gutted the core of the story, rendered several scenes incomprehensible if left in at all, and padded it out by repeating choral scene where Knotts makes bird calls as a choir sings.

In the theatrical cut, the scene pays off when the gangster shows up, causing Knotts’ character to panic and completely freak out.

Okay, that payoff works, but there’s no need to repeat the original scene at the end as the TV edit did.

Because no one had access to the original theatrical cut but only the gawd-awful TV edit instead, The Love God?’s reputation quickly sank.

And it shouldn’t.

It’s not a great film, but dammit, it’s a good film, and it hits all the notes it wants to hit.  It’s a brilliantly simple idea with pitch perfect casing, but it’s also nuance enough to actually make audiences think.

It’s still freaking people out.  When the MPAA for rid of the M rating some time ago, True Grit got a G-rating while The Love God was reevaluated as PG-13!

It’s a worthy film everyone should see.  Knotts would never be better, and the carefully crafted story plays better than other far more simplistic films of the same time.

© Buzz Dixon