Gone with the Pope

Duke Mitchell spent most of his life in nightclubs. As a Singer and an Actor, Duke struggled to showcase his talent. Throughout the movie, it's hard to decipher between Duke Mitchell and the character Paul for whom he portrays. Both men are victims of the life they chose. Each is fighting to survive and are living on the run. Duke would die from lung cancer at the age of 55. Its hard not to remind yourself while watching the movie as Duke smokes countless amounts of cigarettes. Duke's character deals with being a prisoner, having a burden and feeling cheated. He is angry and manipulates many of his close friends. Wanted to be loved, the only real woman in his life is distant and a minor character. The so called "leader of the band" or head gang member, Duke always tries to stay in charge and be one step ahead of everyone else. You could say that Duke lived like this for most of his life. The ending is very powerful as well as unexpected. You need to ask yourself if Duke is running away or running after something. The ending show's his true fear and that he has been running his entire life. He is angry at America, his friends, and even his Faith. For the low budget / grind house picture that it is, Gone with the Pope meant much more to Duke Mitchell then you think. Having accomplished what it did not set out to do, the movie showcases timeless images of Los Angeles and Las Vegas from the 1970's. The wardrobe alone makes this movie worth watching. For an entertaining movie, any grind house fan will not be disappointed. Then again, for a deep hidden message, Duke's final message to the audience is one that many might not be able to witness.

In the 1950s, Martin & Lewis were the hottest comedy team on the planet. Not surprisingly, their success encouraged likealikes...such as Mitchell & Petrillo. This pair was clearly a knockoff version of the famous team, with Mitchell impersonating Dean Martin, and when they managed to get a film contract, it was for a horrible cheapie called "Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla". Amazingly, it's worse than it sounds and Mitchell & Petrillo (especially Petrillo) were simply awful.

I had no idea that Duke Mitchell managed to make a few films after his Lugosi debacle. I learned of this movie, "Gone With the Pope" when I was recently visiting Hollywood...where I saw a poster for this film in a retro theater. And, when I realized it was the same Duke Mitchell, I knew I had to find it. Fortunately, it's currently available on several channels on the Amazon Fire...and that's how I saw the movie.

The story behind this ultra-cheap film is a lot like what you'd expect from an Ed Wood movie. Mitchell scraped together a miniscule amount for a movie ($25-35,000 according to IMDB) and made it piecemeal over a couple years. Then, it appears he ran out of money and died a few years later. When cleaning out his things following his death, this very incomplete film was found in boxes....and someone decided to finish and release the movie...about three decades after Mitchell's death. Talk about a strange pedigree!

Paul (Duke Mitchell) was just released from prison and he isn't exactly repentant and ready to live the straight and narrow. After murdering a room full of mobsters, he comes up with a bizarro idea. He wants to kidnap the Pope and then charge every Catholic person $1 to get him back!

Much of the film was filmed using Mitchell's friends and associates. They clearly were NOT professional actors. You can tell this by the acting as well as the budget for the film. As far as the story goes, apparently there was no script. It is gritty and filled with expletives, racist comments and nudity you might not expect from a 1970s picture (that's when it was filmed).

Now I am NOT saying the movie is completely terrible. It has a few redeeming qualities and at least manages to be better than "Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla"! On the plus side, there is a gritty realism about it and you get a chance to see 1970s Vegas and Rome. Also, for better or worse, the story IS original! On the negative side, the film looks cheap...really cheap. It also appears in places to just meander without any apparent thought to a plot. Overall, a bad film but not a terrible one...and mostly of interest to the curious.

By the way, at one point the gang is talking about getting a Citroën Maserati. This is referring to the Citroën SM...a Citroën with a Maserati engine...hence the name.

Being a major fan of Duke Mitchell's film Massacre Mafia Style, I couldn't wait to see Gone With the Pope, and I was not disappointed. Seeing the pristine, restored print in a theater was great fun, and Bob Murawski, who won the Academy Award for editing The Hurt Locker, did a great job resurrecting Duke Mitchell's lost masterpiece. Bringing Gone With the Pope to the world has been a passion of Bob's and it shows. Grindhouse Releasing has done some amazing re-releases, especially Cannibal Holocaust, I Drink Your Blood, and now Gone With the Pope is the next hit on their roll.

If you're unfamiliar with the work of Duke Mitchell, just wait until you see Massacre Mafia Style, which Grindhouse will also have on DVD soon, and if Gone With the Pope comes to your neck of the woods, be in, don't be in the way.

Saw a midnight screening of Gone with the Pope at the New Beverly. They usually screen it once a month and I hope it's a mainstay there for a long time. It is a BLAST! It's not Goodfellas so leave your cynicism at home. Gone with the Pope is grindhouse/independent filmmaking at it's best. It's a gritty, don't give a toss mobster masterpiece that is hilarious on so many levels. Loaded with unforgettable scenes and quotable lines that I'll leave up to you to go out and experience for yourself. You can see how much love and effort went into making this film outweighing any of it's imperfections. Big thanks to Bob Murawski and Sage Stallone for tracking down this gem and getting it out to the masses.

This is a film that, yes, was technically released for the first time in 2010. But it's also a kind of Grindhouse example of Metropolis, another movie that was restored this year. New footage was found and meticulous care was put to editing something that people had never seen before. One was a testament to man and his inner quest for self-knowledge set against an oppressive world, and the other was Metropolis.

But I jest. This was shot by real (and I mean REALLY) no-budget director Duke Mitchell, who made only one other film in the 1970s, and did shoot the footage for this film (you can tell, all HUGE warts and out-of-focus shots and all). But it was never finished due to lack of funds. Years later (as in two years ago) some former friends and people at the Grindhouse DVD company, got together and took all the footage Mitchell had shot and made a movie as competently as they could.

Frankly, that it turned out as well as it did is something of a miracle because, quite frankly, this stinks. But it stinks in a way that is friendly to fellow bad-movie lovers. The craftsmanship is so terrible, the acting so non-existent, the story so WTF, that I wondered at certain points if Torgo from Manos the Hands of Fate would make an appearance. All I could really gather about anything relating to a "story" was that Paul (also Mitchell) is released from jail, kills some gangsters, and then takes a boat trip with some friends from California to Rome to kidnap the Pope and hold the world hostage: every Catholic pays 1 buck. That's a lot of bucks.

From the dialog that is at best decent street-tough stuff to at worst really racist and sometimes just dull dialog - and the racist stuff especially, as Paul makes wisecracks (and not the subtle kind) to a black prostitute who, somehow, takes it in stride, is hilariously painful to hear spoken - to the cinematography that gives cinematography a bad name (FOCUS, goddamn it, FOCUS!), to the one or two actors such as Paul's wife or Giorgio, who both look like they were picked up from the local deli counter, to the very mixed messages sent about religion (a very *nice* Pope who somehow gets everyone except Paul on his side! and a polemic speech by Paul at one point that rivals ANY of the preachifying in Machete), this is trash cinema at its base level.

It's not a good movie really. If you're looking for things like, say, motivation on the character's part, be it things like killing lots of other people we haven't seen before (sometimes with telephones) or to a random "prank" scene with a huge fat woman getting naked and surprising one of Paul's friend asleep and proceeding to lock her in the room for a good, it's more than absent. It's almost like Mitchell seemed to forget what a movie makes - albeit he is awe-inspiring at making montages, such as one with him and his wife frolicking at a park - and was more transfixed by his own sideburns than anything else. When he tries to get genuine laughs, such as the fat woman scene, it feel so awful that you just recoil in your seat. The movie also disappoints, if in one major way as a Midnight Movie, in not having more craziness with the religious angle. Without saying too much, the film needed to be more like the last scene, which did leave me with a big smile and almost clapping with the rest of the audience.

But for all of the dull moments, and believe you-me there are plenty, and the cringe-worthy performances, it's a very funny movie without knowing that it is. It's also commendable to the editors and producers of this finished version that there are some scenes and transitions that move to a cool beat, maybe in ways Mitchell himself never envisioned. Song selections vary; some are genuinely fantastic, while others go along with the hokey nature of the film. It frustrates and entertains, and it actually has a sense of admiration for the Pope (!) in all his cardboard-performing glory. Then again, his dead-pan is just what's needed on the flip-side of Mitchell's mugging.