This was another example of why the Hays Code was put in as anti-religious movies were on the increase, along with everything else you see and hear in films today. Here we see a minister and followers (both mainstream and charismatic) made to look stupid and corrupt. Over 70 years later, Hollywood still thinks that's the only kind worth showing on screen. (Do you see good ones, like Billy Graham, ever on film?)
Supposedly, this story was based on a real-life female preacher named Aimee Semple McPherson. In the film, we first see a man who dies while writing his last sermon. He had been booted out of his church because he was too old and they wanted a younger man. The daughter (Semple, played by Barbara Stanwyck) goes up to the pulpit, starts to read the partial sermon, then tells what happened to her father and tells off the congregation, calling them all kinds of names. That part, frankly, was very dramatic and interesting to watch.
But then the film starts to get carried away with its agenda of a fake evangelist. A huckster, who happened by when Florence "Faith" Falon (Stanwyck), talks the bitter woman into getting back at people by using her biblical knowledge to be an evangelist, earn a lot of money and bilk the public with fake healing and the like. She does just that.
She gives sermons at her "Faith Temple" that are so New Age and unlike anything you would really hear - whether she was faking it or not - that it's an insult for anyone who knows what sermons sound like. They also make the people in the audience so corny and so unlike anyone that would attend a service that it, too, is ludicrous.
Only non-church goers would believe the stuff in this movie.
Note: before the film began, a disclaimer was put on screen with a quote from the book of Matthew warning people to beware of "false prophets." Well, I agree, false prophets have always been with all and always will be, but I also warn people to be aware of false propaganda they see in movies! Like those false teachers, don't believe everything you see on screen.
Supposedly, this story was based on a real-life female preacher named Aimee Semple McPherson. In the film, we first see a man who dies while writing his last sermon. He had been booted out of his church because he was too old and they wanted a younger man. The daughter (Semple, played by Barbara Stanwyck) goes up to the pulpit, starts to read the partial sermon, then tells what happened to her father and tells off the congregation, calling them all kinds of names. That part, frankly, was very dramatic and interesting to watch.
But then the film starts to get carried away with its agenda of a fake evangelist. A huckster, who happened by when Florence "Faith" Falon (Stanwyck), talks the bitter woman into getting back at people by using her biblical knowledge to be an evangelist, earn a lot of money and bilk the public with fake healing and the like. She does just that.
She gives sermons at her "Faith Temple" that are so New Age and unlike anything you would really hear - whether she was faking it or not - that it's an insult for anyone who knows what sermons sound like. They also make the people in the audience so corny and so unlike anyone that would attend a service that it, too, is ludicrous.
Only non-church goers would believe the stuff in this movie.
Note: before the film began, a disclaimer was put on screen with a quote from the book of Matthew warning people to beware of "false prophets." Well, I agree, false prophets have always been with all and always will be, but I also warn people to be aware of false propaganda they see in movies! Like those false teachers, don't believe everything you see on screen.