Search for the Gods (1975)

Young Willie Longfellow (Stephen McHattie) - scion of a the Boston Longfellows, I have you know – is travelling the world on a very 70s rich boy kind of search for himself. After a stint in Central America, he has followed the trail of good old liar Carlos Castaneda (repeatedly name-dropped and an obvious inspiration for the film’s brand of the “druggy wisdom of the native people” shtick) to Taos, New Mexico. There, he stumbles into a proper adventure concerning a golden medallion a dying shaman entrusts to him, made from a mysterious unearthly medal a shadowy figure and his main henchman Raymond Stryker (Raymond St. Jacques) want to acquire by all means necessary.

Also involved are ancient aliens, Genara Juantez, the granddaughter of the shaman (Victoria Racimo), the somewhat shady Shan Mullins (a baby-faced Kurt Russell), and an inspiring elderly exposition machine (Ralph Bellamy). There will be a peyote-based test of Willie’s spirit, betrayal, extremely dubious science, and as much adventure as a mid-70s TV film meant as a pilot for a show about Willie’s further adventures finding more medallion pieces that never happened can afford.

The enjoyment one derives from Jud Taylor’s Search for the Gods will most certainly depend on a viewer’s tolerance or love for the kind of pseudo-science and pseudo-religion the decade it was produced in loved so particularly well; this is basically a more honestly fictional episode of In Search Of… with a bit of harmless villainy and violence thrown in.

So if you’re allergic against magical natives, white boys finding themselves through them, absurd ancient alien theories and dynamite-based archaeology, you’ll not find much to like here. Me, I like this sort of things quite a bit, particularly in a case like Search for the Gods where a movie may be a bit silly and a bit cheap, but is actually trying its best with its tropes. So while I rather doubt its depiction of the Taos people is terribly close to their actual cultural beliefs, the film is respectful towards them, certainly not avoiding all magical native business (that would be rather difficult in a film like this, really) but also not landing too far in that particular kind of fantasy. Plus, I just can’t complain about a good peyote-based test of the spirit, authenticity be damned.

It certainly helps that Willie comes over as a genuinely thoughtful and nice guy, not so much a white saviour as a white dude who accidentally asks the right questions at the right time; there’s also nobody to save, really. The film’s treatment of Genara is surprisingly sensible, too, giving her room enough to breathe and be a person, and while not completely avoiding clichés (this is not the sort of film that does that or wants to), providing her with a much more interesting character arc than you’d expect from a native American woman in a mid-70s TV movie. Even the romance between her and Willie is at least half thought through, both characters having mirrored experiences as people who are not at home where their home is supposed to be. The later-born cynic will of course add that Willie’s not being at home as a rich Bostonian is probably a rather easy cross to bear, but you can’t really expect a deep analysis of class structures from a mid-70s TV movie about a possibly alien medallion, nor does this detract much from the film’s general pleasantness. Plus, McHattie turns out to be just as good at playing the soulful nice guy as he is in the rather less nice roles he’s now specialized in, so all this never actually damages the character much.

Racimo as Genara is fine too, keeping a straight face in the sillier moments and nicely avoiding a too melodramatic turn otherwise. The cast’s main weakness is actually Kurt Russell, who surprisingly enough just doesn’t have the charisma yet to play the sort of half-trustworthy rogue he is supposed to be in a convincing manner. Really, he mostly comes over as whiny.

The film’s pacing tends a bit to the meandering side, but Taylor makes much out of the locations (at least in part this was actually shot in Taos), clearly realizing that the desert landscape is one of his greatest assets here. The “people with torches wandering through the desert” set-up for the peyote ceremony is particularly atmospheric, as all scenes of that kind tend to be, but the ceremony itself is pretty fun too, using very simple means and some excellent eye-bugging from McHattie to be trippy and mildly threatening without a budget for special effects.


Apart from the absence of actual aliens on screen, there’s little more you could ask of Search for the Gods, giving its circumstances, so if this sort of thing is like catnip to you, as it is for me, or if you at least think this sounds interesting beyond the cast, you will probably find a nice little TV movie here.

Some words concerning His Girl Friday (1940)

As you know, Jim, Howard Hawks’s classic comedy concerns a newspaper editor’s (Cary Grant) attempts – most of them immoral, illegal, or unethical in various combinations – to prevent his star reporter and ex-wife (Rosalind Russell) from leaving town and her job to marry the most boring man alive (Ralph Bellamy), whose main attraction probably is that unlike our editor, he isn’t a total prick. Or really, it nominally concerns this plot, for the narration spends as much time on – rather bitterly – satirizing the fourth estate (lying hyenas without conscience), politicians (lying, corrupt hyenas who haven’t even heard of a conscience), and generally pretending there are no cynical elements in here at all, no Mister Hays, sir.

The case Grant’s Walter Burns uses to drag Russell’s Hildy Johnson back into the fold is the sort of thing crime melodramas were (and still are) made of but the characters – even Hildy who comes closest to a person with an actual conscience here – treat the whole thing with bluff cynicism that only goes near compassion when it’s time to get the newspaper readers to weep or put one over on the competition. There’s a suicide in the film the characters at best shrug off, for Cthulhu’s sake. It’s not as if the film doesn’t know its main characters are pretty shitty people, either; in fact, this seems to be rather one of the points of the whole affair. There’s an interesting tension in the movie here. As everybody knows, Hawks was all about showing professionals at work doing said work well, generally presenting this with the true admiration of a fellow professional. So there are scenes in here, particularly when Hildy drifts off into writing trance or handles three problems at once, when Hawks can’t help himself but love her for it, even though he’s not blind to her considerable character flaws. Of course, say what you will about Hildy and Water, they do share one virtue: they very much prefer putting down the big guy than the little one, and are therefor earn Hawksian admiration as people who do their jobs in spite of their flaws.

This is very much Rosalind Russell’s show, by the way, making this also a film about a professional woman standing at the crossroads between a job (and a man) she’s oh so very good at but that brings out the worst in her and the sort of cloying conservative domesticity she couldn’t survive for year. What can we say about Bellamy’s character who apparently loves her, but can’t even understand this most obvious of things about her?


The film is incredibly good at distracting its audience from all this though – clearly it distracted the censors or otherwise nothing of this could have flown – by the sheer virtue of how incredibly funny its morally dubious protagonists are together. Especially Russell is throwing herself into the ever faster overlapping dialogue of Charles Lederer and Ben Hecht with abandon and precision. All the while, the film demonstrates her increasing departure from her future of boring domesticity through the decreasing state of her hat. Particularly the film’s final third uses its era’s love for overlapping dialogue to incredible effect, sometimes having discussions about three different things going on at once, winning comedic effect at once from this structure, the sharpness of the writing, and the sheer energy surrounding the characters.