Angel Baby wants to be both a sleazy exploitation flick and a righteous movie about honest religious faith. It's an uneasy combination, made particularly so by the fact that about half the cast (Burt Reynolds, Joan Blondell at times, and Mercedes McCambridge) are acting in the former, while everyone else is sedately making the latter, particularly George Hamilton and Salome Jens (as preachers Paul Strand and Angel Baby), who appear to be making a nice romance about two good kids who super love God.

The wildly divergent tones and approaches make the movie difficult to digest, and all the more challenging to figure out what, exactly, we're meant to take away from it. Ultimately, the nice, faithful girl is loved and protected by God in exchange for her faith, and the nice, faithful boy experiences the same, so they can go off together into the sunset. But all of that occurs only after a tent meeting that devolves into something just short of fire and brimstone, with McCambridge, who plays Sarah, the jilted, fanatical wife of Strand, calling the wrath of the Lord down upon her sinner husband and Angel, the fake (until she's not) healer for whom he's left his wife. As McCambridge loudly preaches over the din, the occupants of the tend stampede, people wail, and fires are set — it's right out of the most lurid, most cynical film on religion.

It's also frustrating that the two main female characters are so simplistic. Angel was mute for years thanks to her abusive father's violence but, once she's healed by Paul (of course), she becomes entirely devoted to both God and him, leaving behind her former life for one of purity and devotion. She dares to declare her love to Paul, but does nothing further, respecting his vows and the rules of the Lord whose gospel she now preaches. She is, in effect, a saint, from the moment her voice returns.

The opposite of Angel's voice of light is Sarah, an uptight woman (I would say she's also a lesbian but McCambridge always reads as a lesbian, so I can't tell whether or not it's intentional) who is scared of sex and desire, and therefore condemns anyone who has the former or feels the latter, and tortures her husband in the process. Her relationship with Paul is entirely celibate — he's far younger than she is, and their union is purely for preaching and saving — except for when she offers herself to him for a sex act endorsed by God, that would save him from the damnation of the lustful feelings she accuses him of having for Angel. McCambridge, of course, puts her whole back into every one of Sarah's outrageous moments, and it's ultimately effective in that we believe in Sarah's abject misery, and the depth of the suffering that drives her to the actions in the final scene, something which ultimately acts against the film, which prefers to see Sarah as a spectacle and burden, not a human being.

It's no fun to watch the way Sarah is portrayed, and Paul and Angel are terribly uninteresting in their perfection. Mollie and Ben Hayes — an alcoholic couple who play sort of support roles for traveling evangelical shows — though, are a delight. Played by Joan Blondell and Henry Jones, the pair seem like human beings, despite the often hokey lines they're forced to deliver, and the way they're asked to deliver them. There's genuine affection between the two, and the way they listen to and support one another offers a lovely little oasis of sanity in a movie that has no idea what it wants to be.

Ultimately, there are many much better exploitation movies that role religion into their seedy stews, and I'd argue movies like The Miracle Woman and The Miracle Man both do a far better job than Angel Baby at engaging with honest faith in corrupt environments. By not being able to choose between the two directions, this effort falls short in both, at least for me.

(Also, the wikipedia entry for this movie includes the following quote from Burt Reynolds — who plays a bad man, and is shirtless and malevolent almost through — which reflects my exact reaction to the scene in question: "George Hamilton beat me up in the film. Does that tell you anything?")

Thanks to Stephen recently and Cineurbe long ago for putting this on my radar!