‘Sinner’: Personal but Primitive

Timothy Carey’s “The World’s Greatest Sinner,” which screens Wednesday only at the Nuart, is best viewed as primitive art, a sort of hick morality play whose incoherence mirrors the confusion of its hero’s mind. Even those who would dismiss it as simply a bad movie would have to admit it’s decidedly different, a personal work filled with real places and people.

Best remembered as the scared scapegoat soldier facing execution in Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory,” Carey made his film over a four-year period (1958-61) for $100,000. In brief, the film is about a man who calls himself God and ends up believing it himself. He gives up selling insurance for guitar-twanging and hip-wiggling, promising to all who will listen, youth, riches and eternal life on Earth. So successful is his rabble-rousing that he’s ready to run for President. Carey has described the character he plays as “an Elvis Presley who becomes a Billy Graham who becomes a Father Divine.”

By conventional standards “The World’s Greatest Sinner” is pretty awful and often amateurish, but it does move rapidly. Carey himself is--to understate it--vivid as the long-haired, heavy-lidded and slurring Satan in satin suits. It’s safe to say, like it or not, that there’s nothing quite like “The World’s Greatest Sinner.” Carey will appear in person. Information: (310) 478-6379.

Partly Stroheim: About halfway through the shooting of Universal’s “Merry-Go-Round,” which will be shown at 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Silent Movie, 611 N. Fairfax, producer Irving Thalberg removed its writer-director Erich Von Stroheim and replaced him with the less-prodigal Rupert Julian, who was later to direct the Lon Chaney “Phantom of the Opera.” Consequently, the 1922 film is not truly a Stroheim film, yet it most certainly bears the stamp of his personality, if not his style. It’s not very good, mediocre in its performances and awkward in its structure and pacing; in short, it cries out for Stroheim’s tragic vision and bravura to wrest it from its extravagant emotionalism.

As it is, it’s essentially a tear-jerker about star-crossed lovers, a Viennese count (Norman Kerry, who replaced Stroheim himself) and a poor carnival girl (Mary Philbin); alas, Kerry is engaged to a steely, cigar-puffing aristocrat (Dorothy Wallace) and even commanded to marry her on a certain date by Emperor Franz Josef (Anton Wawerka), to whom he is a key aide. “Merry-Go-Round” lacks much of Stroheim’s characteristic ambivalence toward the sensual, corrupt ruling class, which he seemed to envy as much as despise, and toward aristocratic cads who seduce innocent maidens only to fall hopelessly in love with them. But Stroheim’s lavish, evocative sets and costumes (which he designed with Richard Day) remain intact, as do some random touches and details that could only be his. For the cineaste, “Merry-Go-Round” is fascinating for what it anticipates in later Stroheim films, “The Merry Widow” and “Queen Kelly” in particular. Information: (213) 653-2389.

A Timeless Silent: Beyond Baroque, Venice’s literary/arts center at 681 Venice Blvd., Thursday at 8 p.m. will present Yasujiro Ozu’s timeless, gently comic 1932 silent masterpiece, “I Was Born, but . . . ,” in which we see the world through the eyes of two singularly appealing boys (Hideo Sugawara, Tokkan-Kozo), who have moved to a modest home in the suburbs with their parents. Ozu spends much time allowing us to get to know the brothers and their elders so that we are caught up short when the boys make the painful, inevitable discovery that their father (Tatsuo Saito), an affable, hard-working office clerk, is a nobody. The larger truth that the boys must learn, of course, is that while their father may be humble in the eyes of the world he is actually a remarkably good man deserving of their full love and respect. Although “I Was Born, but . . .” is imbued with Ozu’s characteristic calm, loving acceptance of life in all its inequities and disappointments, it is a buoyant, positive film, a contrast to the director’s later works, which possess an overwhelming sense of life’s fleetingness. Information: (310) 822-3006.