This Month

Perhaps the only true heir to the American maverick Sam Fuller, Larry Cohen has always made his own way. Having honed his craft in episodic television, writing for such popular weekly series as The Defenders, The Fugitive and Arrest and Trial, and creating the short-lived but well-regarded Branded and The Invaders, Cohen turned in time to features, writing screenplays for Return of the Seven (1966) and Daddy's Gone A-Hunting (1969). Seeing his ideas compromised in the transition from page to screen, Cohen turned to directing with the wily home invasion drama/social satire Bone (1972), starring Yaphet Kotto, using his own Beverly Hills home as a location. Cashiered into service for the evolving "blaxploitation" market, Cohen helmed the Warner Bros. homage Black Caesar (1973), starring Fred Williamson (but written for Sammy Davis, Jr.), and the film's sequel, Hell Up in Harlem (1973), which he shot back-to-back with It's Alive (1974), a throwback to atomic age science fiction thrillers, with giant insects supplanted by mutant killer babies spawned by Big Pharma. Accustomed to following his own lead, Cohen found inspiration for his next film while wandering through London's National Gallery, where the violence inherent in religious paintings prompted him to imagine an alien entity, raised by humans, who believes he is the second coming of Christ.

God Told Me To (1976) stars Tony Lo Bianco as Peter Nicholas, an NYPD detective investigating seemingly random homicides whose perpetrators all claim to have been acting at the behest of the Almighty. A tortured Catholic wracked by guilt for juggling a mistress (Deborah Raffin) and a wife (Sandy Dennis), Nicholas discovers that "God" is in fact an extraterrestrial being (Richard Lynch), beget by the nonconsensual union of alien and human. Complicating matters are the machinations of a Wall Street cabal whose members worship the alien as a prophet, as well as revelations about Nicholas' possible kinship with the being. A wry retooling of the Superman myth, God Told Me To was one of few American attempts to carry the torch passed by Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - and one of the last, as the release of George Lucas' Star Wars (1977) a year later changed American appetites for science fiction, shucking deep-think and soul-searching for a pulp abridgement of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Even in 1976, Cohen's film struggled to find an audience. Released to no business under its original title, it was rechristened Demon by distributor New World Pictures in a doomed attempt to attract some customers from Richard Donner's hugely successful The Omen. Critic Roger Ebert did Cohen no favors when he damned the release as "one of the most confused feature-films I've ever seen."

Gold Told Me To eventually earned New World some revenue but was lost in the shuffle of Cohen's wildly diverse writing-directing career, which included such cult favorites as The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977), starring Broderick Crawford in one of his final feature film roles, and Q (1982), in which David Carradine faces down a giant winged serpent nesting in the needle of the Chrysler Building when it isn't flying circles around Manhattan biting the heads off of window washers and sunbathers. (Cohen was also hired by 20th Century Fox to write and direct their modern day Micky Spillane adaptation I, the Jury [1982], starring Armand Assante as Mike Hammer, but was fired after one week for budget overages and replaced by Richard T. Heffron). The film's relative obscurity makes it ripe for reappraisal and a fresh look reveals a wholly unique storytelling vision, yet one that is fully in synch with Cohen's established passions and paranoia - centered as it is in a world being pulled apart by conspiracy and chaos. Shooting without permits in and around Manhattan, Cohen impressively stages two mass shootings - one in the midst of the St. Patrick's Day Parade (featuring comedian Andy Kaufman in his feature film debut as a deranged cop) and elsewhere marshals an impressive supporting cast that includes Hollywood vets Sam Levene, Sylvia Sidney, Mike Kellin, and Robert Drivas. Cohen's most intriguing bit of casting is of New York actor Dan Resin, best known at that time for playing the miniature yachtsman in TV spots for Ty-D Bowl toilet cleanser, as a member of the shadow cabal.

By Richard Harland Smith

Sources:

Horror Film Directors, 1931-1980 by Dennis Fischer (McFarland & Company, Inc., 1991)
Larry Cohen interview by Andrea June and V. Vale, RE/Search: Incredibly Strange Films, no. 10 (RE/Search Publications, 1987)
Robert Forster interview by Keith Phipps, The A/V Club, April 2000