And after Herschel hears the Voice of God on the mountain he begins doing an impression of the Supreme Being. When he comes to the part where Herschel and Zerelda are about to go on a journey the scroll reads, “He set his wife upon her ass.” meaning her donkey of course. ![]() He intermittently narrates the entire flashback story. Harvey, in what was then present day Israel, is reading from the scroll he and Zoey have discovered. Laraine Newman may be practically forgotten today but she does provide a few of the best moments. He tells Herschel that “trees” were his idea but what can you do? He complains about the fact that he gets no credit for his help in Creation. And I have always found Paul Sand's uncertain stammering quite amusing. I laughed when he seasoned his food by rubbing a bit off of Zerelda who, like Lot's wife, had been turned into a pillar of salt. James Coco is quite good as Herschel's father. To be fair some of the jokes hold up better than others. How are you?" “Let's do lunch sometime.” Upon casually departing they immediately resume staggering through the desert. They stop and chat like old friends, "It's been ages. He comes upon another man, played by Dom DeLuise, who is likewise staggering through the desert in the opposite direction. Take the scene where Dudley Moore -as Herschel- is staggering through the desert. The jokes reminded me more of a throw-back to some Borscht Belt vaudeville routine. ![]() Scott compared it to a series of Saturday Night Live sketches but to me it now seems far older and more quaint than the type of humor that groundbreaking television show was doing at the time. Wholly Moses! seemed like a laugh riot, and a fairly risque one at that (there are a few jokes about a giant's penis-size and an orgy scene (minus any nudity) after all), when I was fourteen. Some movies just don't live up to our memories of them. It's in every way inferior to that other film, but silly enough to provide a few cheap laughs.ĭudley Moore and Richard Pryor in Wholly Moses. Wholly Moses is silly and lowbrow enough that it never generated equal controversy. Upon its release, Life of Brian was protested by religious groups as heresy. Not every joke works, but there are so many of them that the ratio of good to bad jokes means that when you're groaning at one, you'll be laughing at another one before long. Even now, some 30 years later, I still found it tolerably amusing. HBO of the early 1980s seemed to have a limited number of movies to show and this one was featured heavily in its rotation. This was a movie I saw many times as child. The casting director seems to have been the hardest working person of the production.Īlthough it's of a rather low quality and many of the jokes don't work, quite a few of them do. The film tends to move from scene to scene, introducing a new guest star in each. Each of the scenes contain a few laughs, but often they go on a little long. Some of them work and some of them don't. Of the original cast of Saturday Night Live, her's was the least successful career.ĭirector Gary Weis worked as a director on Saturday Night Live and this film in many ways feels like a series of sketches from that show. Laraine Newman plays the female lead opposite Moore and if anything could be greater evidence of the 1970s, I'm not sure what that would be. The always reliable Madeline Kahn also has a small part, but even she is unable to do much with her short scene. ![]() The biggest guest star is Richard Pryor as the adult Pharaoh, who has a small, mildly amusing scene. The film is filled with a large cast of character actors of the period, most of whom would go unrecognized by someone watching the film for the first time today, unless they'd lived through the 1970s. Along the way, the film parodies such bible stories as Sodom and Gomorrah and David and Goliath, among others. When he overhears the burning bush speaking to Moses, he mistakenly believes it to be speaking to him and so sets out to free the slaves of Egypt. Like him, Herschel was set adrift in a basket, but instead of being found by the Pharaoh’s daughter, he is picked up by a family of idol makers. However, despite some funny moments, it never approaches the heights of heavenly hilarity of the Gospel according to Monty Python.ĭudley Moore stars as Herschel, a contemporary of Moses. Wholly Moses wants to be to the Old Testament what Monty Python's Life of Brian is to the New.
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