Weird Wednesdays: Gone With the Pope

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

So here's what you need to know: '50s crooner Duke Mitchell, who was the singing voice of Fred Flintstone and was actually sued by Jerry Lewis for ostensibly ripping off his Martin & Lewis act, started making low-budget, self-financed movies in the twilight of his career. One of those movies was Gone With the Pope, in which mobster Paul (Duke Mitchell himself) goes on the run after a troublesome hit and sails to Rome with his associates. He cooks up an ambitious new scheme: kidnap the Pope. Why? To demand a dollar in ransom from every Catholic in the world. His associates point out the absurdity of the scheme. Paul briefly considers the implications, then compromises with his final offer: 50 cents. 

A '70s low-budget vanity project from an aging cabaret performer sounds like something interminable and slack, released on 500 copies by some foreign VHS label, never to be seen again until showing up on Youtube in some smeary, unwatchable way. Remarkably, that's not at all what happened.

Gone With the Pope had been scrapped, never being finished or released on any format. While researching Mitchell's earlier film Massacre Mafia Style, Oscar-winning editor (and owner of the distributor Grindhouse Releasing) Bob Murawski contacted Mitchell's son to see if he might have additional elements. That didn’t turn out to be the case, but Mitchell's son did open up the garage and emerge with canister after canister of Gone With the Pope, which had technically been completed, including an early, scrapped workprint.

You may be familiar with Murawski from his work with Sam Raimi - Army of Darkness, Darkman, Drag Me to Hell and Raimi's Spider-Man movies. All of those films share Raimi's gift for snappy, visceral impact, as does Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker and the posthumously released The Other Side of the Wind by Orson Welles. They were all edited by Murawski.

Murawski was able to get the Gone With the Pope negative restored, follow the rough outlines of the workprint (and other notes, apparently with many written on cocktail napkins) and assemble the movie into a final release that seems greater than the sum of its parts. This is no documentary of what this movie could have been, this is a movie that could seriously have played the grindhouse circuit back in the mid-'70s.

The final version of the movie tends to be propulsive even at its most ridiculous, with perfectly executed drops of Mitchell's own tracks, along with some harder early '70s pop tracks by his son Jeffrey. That said, it often pauses to luxuriate in mid-'70s lounge lizard style, as scenes take place in Vegas casinos, nightclubs, lounges, pools and on the seas, showcasing authentic period locations that are now lost to the sands of time. It sometimes evokes a similar feeling to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where Tarantino imagines Los Angeles in 1969 by way of driving montages and obscure AM radio hits.

Mitchell was generally just shooting a single shot per line of dialogue for cost reasons, and some shoots didn't fare as well as many - there are times where technical problems rear their ugly head. An early scene set in a prison is dreadfully out of focus in a way no amount of restoration would fix, and it's said that the poor quality of this scene is what caused Mitchell to kill the project. However, the pristine 35mm negative (and print) often seem to be far beyond what would be possible with a low-budget production. Unfortunately, certain other shots - usually darker, indoor shots - still suffer and can briefly break the mood.

But what of the rest of the film? There's a strange, contradictory pleasure in seeing Mitchell attempt to have his cake and eat it too, swinging wildly scene to scene from attempts at legitimate lounge-lizard likability to providing one of the crudest, hare-brained portrayals of an anti-hero of the 1970s. The dialogue is wry and often intentionally funny, but often tries so hard to be hard-boiled that it just ends up being derogatory slurs. On the other hand, Mitchell's character Paul is sometimes shockingly cogent, for example where he delivers a pointed and weirdly hilarious monologue on church hypocrisy and the need to use the church's wealth to fight discrimination directly to the Pope. In other scenes, you expect the Pope (Lorenzo Dardado) to get down on his knees, look to the skies, and actually say "Christ... what an asshole."

There's a serious content warning here: there's both a scene of race-baiting a prostitute, and another of weight shaming of a random woman, both of which seriously deflate the hard-boiled idiosyncrasy of the rest of the film into depressing misogyny. While Murawski left these in the cut as part of Mitchell’s intentions, they're not OK, and could potentially have been excised without impacting the story and larger film.

In spite of that, Gone With the Pope is a testament to the power of independent filmmaking, tight editing and modern negative restoration. It takes a low-budget film that was literally discarded by its maker only to have it become eminently watchable. It’s often quite fun, and is a remarkable time capsule of sight and sound.

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