Oh, God! (Warner Bros., 1977)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. yesterday (Thursday, December 11) I put on Turner Classic Movies for a screening of one of my light-favorite movies of the late 1970’s, Carl Reiner’s Oh, God!, a supernatural comedy in which Jerry Landers (John Denver, whom I never particularly cared for as a singer but turned out to be an effective deadpan comedian) receives a series of visits from God (George Burns at his avuncular best). Jerry is an assistant manager of a supermarket in Tarzana when God starts sending him messages, first as an unsigned, unstamped letter requesting an “interveiw” (so spelled) on the 27th floor of an L.A. office building that only has 17 floors. (In today’s world that can’t help but remind me of the scam Donald Trump pulled on unsuspecting prospective tenants in Trump Tower; he put out that the building had 10 more floors than it actually did. One wonders what he did with people who actually asked for space on one of the nonexistent floors.) Jerry at first assumes the invitation is a prank from a friend of his with a penchant for practical jokes, but when he actually shows up on the 27th floor and finds the building’s elevator won’t let him go anywhere else, he starts to believe. Oh, God! is based on a novel by Avery Corman, and to write the screenplay Reiner got Larry Gelbart, a fellow veteran of Sid Caesar’s writing room along with Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen. According to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz (whom I’ve referred to as “a nodule off one of Hollywood’s most illustrious family trees” – he’s the grandson of Citizen Kane co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz and the great-nephew of All About Eve writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz), Reiner was originally going to cast Mel Brooks as God, which Ben Mankiewicz thought would have been terrible. Gelbart not only wanted Brooks to play God but Woody Allen to play Jerry Landers, but Allen turned it down to make his own religious-themed comedy, Stardust Memrories.

Burns was already coming off a late-in-life comeback via the 1975 film of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys. Simon originally wrote this as a stage play about “Lewis and Clark,” an old-time vaudeville comedy team who were being reunited for a TV special even though they’d long since broken up in an atmosphere of mutual hatred. The original leads were Walter Matthau and Jack Benny, but Benny died just before shooting was scheduled to start and Benny’s long-time friend George Burns took over his part. This put Burns, who’d retired from performing in 1958 along with his long-time partner and wife Gracie Allen, on the cultural map again and helped land him the role in Oh, God! – and I remember joking when the movie came out that even a committed atheist like me (or at least me in 1977) could be happy to believe in God if he looked, sounded, and acted like George Burns. Jerry Landers has an ordinary suburban existence with wife Bobbie (Teri Garr, considerably less annoying than usual – when she played Richard Dreyfuss’s wife in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a lot of people joked that if I were married to Teri Garr, I’d get on an alien spacecraft just to get away from her!), son Adam (Moosie Drier, who looked surprisingly like John Denver and was totally believable as his son) and daughter Becky (Rachel Longaker). God’s instruction to him is to let the world know that He exists and is unhappy with the way we humans have made a mess of His creation, but instead of directly intervening as he did with Noah (you remember) he’s just going to let us sort it out. This was the biggest surprise about this movie re-seeing it now: the script takes an unashamedly and unabashedly Deist view of God, who created the universe and set it in motion but left humans in charge of it to do with it what they would. I’ve made the point several times that in the current American political climate, the Deists who for the most part wrote the United States Constitution wouldn’t have a chance of getting elected today, since Americans have come to insist not only that their leaders believe in God but that they believe in an activist, interventionist God who takes an ongoing role in the actions of humanity and can be appealed to through prayer.

When Jerry Landers gets his mission from God – who compares him to Moses, which leads us to the unspoken in-joke, “John Denver doesn’t look anything like Charlton Heston!” – he first tells his wife and children. Then he seeks an interview with the religious editor of the Los Angeles Times, which merits him just a brief, dismissive squib at the end of an article about various nutcases who believe they’ve seen Biblical characters in real life. Finally Jerry Landers gets booked on The Dinah Shore Show – with Shore playing herself and the guest immediately on before her is played by the film’s director, Carl Reiner – and he becomes both a national laughingstock and a cult figure. One woman comes to his home attempting to have sex with him, another woman who’s pregnant asks him to bless her baby, and various people show up on his front lawn, some of whom are TV news crew members and others carry signs and chant repeatedly. All this unwelcome attention makes Jerry desperate that he’ll get fired from his job, especially since the head of the supermarket chain for which he works is a religious nut who thinks Jerry is blaspheming the One True God by claiming to have a friendship with him. Jerry finally seeks an audience with a group of religious leaders at a Bible college, of whom the most obnoxious is a mega-church televangelist named Rev. Willie Williams (Paul Sorvino). The religious team gives Jerry a list of 50 questions for God, all written in Aramaic so Jerry can’t read them himself, and lock him in a hotel room whose TV is playing The Dick Van Dyke Show, a classic 1960’s TV series produced by Carl Reiner. (God looks at the TV and kvetches, “Too many repeats.”) God shows up in the guise of a room-service waiter and dictates answers to Jerry, who writes them down and assembles them in a packet which he intends to give Rev. Williams at a big revival meeting he’s holding at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium. Before Jerry confronts Williams at the Shrine, God has told him to denounce the reverend as a huckster who’s just making money off his congregants, and if he wants to make money he should sell shoes instead.

Jerry gives Williams God’s message, and he’s not only thrown out of the event but sued for slander by Williams. The case goes to trial and Jerry defends himself, much to the consternation of Judge Baker (Barnard Hughes). He calls God as his one and only witness, and after a bit of suspense as to whether He will really appear (it’s previously been established that only Jerry can see God), He does. There’s a great line in which George Burns is being sworn in as a witness, and when he’s supposed to repeat the line, “So help me God,” he says, “So help me, me.” God appears in court and speaks from the witness stand, but later when the official tape recording of the session is played back, God’s voice disappears not only from the tape but also from the official court stenographer’s record. Jerry finally gets fired, but he and his family set off in their AMC Gremlin (a truly bizarre car that becomes a character in itself) for parts unknown as God compares him to Johnny Appleseed, spreading seeds of faith wherever he goes. Produced (more or less) by Jerry Weintraub, Oh, God! was a surprise hit on its initial release and still holds up well today. Denunciations of religious hypocrites are nothing new; the Gospels are full of them (when the Metropolitan Community Church put out a leaflet headlined, “What Jesus Christ Had to Say About Homosexuality,” and when you opened it the leaflet was blank, I joked that if they’d put out a leaflet called “What Jesus Christ Had to Say About Religious Hypocrisy,” it would have to consist of at least half the Gospels), and with the U.S. currently being run by people who insist we should be a “Christian Nation” governed by strict Biblical morality, it’s nice to see a movie which presents a more humane version of God and faith. Oh, God! did well enough at the box office to merit two sequels: Oh, God! Book Two and Oh, God! You Devil, in the last of which George Burns played not only God but the Devil, the first time an actor had appeared as both in the same movie. Before him Max von Sydow had played Jesus Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and the Devil in Needful Things (1993), and before that Black actor Rex Ingram had played God in The Green Pastures (1936) and the Devil in Cabin in the Sky (1943). I remember seeing Oh, God! You Devil on its initial theatrical run with my then-partner John Gabrish, and enjoying it even though the target of the battle between Burns’s God and Burns’s Satan, aspiring rock musician Bobby Shelton (Ted Wass, who was cute enough I had a mini-crush on him even though his acting career pretty much went nowhere and since the mid-1990’s he’s worked mainly as a TV series director), hardly seemed worth it.