The World's Greatest Sinner

Regarded by some as a masterstroke of underground cinema, and for good reason...TWGS is a gritty and highly recalcitrant walk on the wild side, gently flouting just about every vested American institution of respectability and reverence...that may not sound like a such a big deal in present times(when even TV cartoons have an insolent streak), but the America of 1962 was a very different world.

Timothy Carey, a legendary and enigmatic Hollywood outsider, performs vibrantly in this nihilistic vanity project. He portrays a disenchanted American family man whose eccentric ideologies galvanize a small following, leading to his gradual ascention as a gold-digging lothario, frenetic rockabilly performer, and, lastly, dissentious political hegemon. The fall is always faster than the climb, however...delusional grandiosity takes hold, and he soon finds himself abandoned and detached in a sad ivory tower of deified ipseity.

It's a conceptually alluring exercise in ideoplastic rabble-rousing, without question...frustratingly, however, the overt bearings of an impossibly vagabond production peg this project as an edgy, inordinate, and admittedly very ambitious home movie. Accepted on these terms, it's a chimerical wonderwork, and some will find its dodgy appeal enhanced by the unvarnished minimalism of a breadline budget.

Mainstream viewers are unlikely to surrender gently to this earnestly hand-hammered anomaly, though it's certainly worthy of investigation(as is evident by its sizable legion of fans...a number of whom, I suspect, might not like the film quite as much as they like the *IDEA* of liking it).

5.5/10