If you've seen Don Knotts movies like The Incredible Mr. Limpet or The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, you'll know that there's something quaint about them, much the way that I described the movie Yours, Mine, and Ours as an unashamedly square movie that stood the test of time much better than 1960s movies that tried to be hip. Knotts did eventually get cast in one of those movies that was trying to be hip, and that movie, The Love God?, ran on TCM not too long back.
We don't see Knotts until several minutes in. The movie instead starts with Osborn Tremaine (Edmond O'Brien), a publisher of dirty magazines that includes nearly-naked pictures of women, including his wife Evelyn (Maureen Arthur). Osborn has gotten in trouble with the law on several occasions for sending obscene materials through the mail, and as the movie opens he's before the court yet again. He gets another suspended sentence, but there's a bigger punishment for him: the Postmaster General revokes Tremaine's fourth-class mailing privleges. This is the class that allows magazine publishers to send in bulk at significantly reduced rates, and losing that privilege means Tremaine won't be able to send out his subscriptions at an economic price.
As the Tremaines are traveling back home, they enter the small town of Peacock Falls, founded several generations back by the Peacock family that is falling on slightly hard times thanks to current generation member Abner Peacock IV. Abner is an avid bird watcher and has been producing Peacock magazine, which in theory is supposed to appeal to bird watchers, but doesn't seem to have much of a subscriber base. And since it's published from an old building, the other siblings have decided to liquidate this money-losing asset unless somebody can come up with the nearly $50,000 to save it.
This gives Tremaine an idea. He doesn't want the magazine so much as Abner's fourth-class mailing permit. Osborn comes up with the ridiculous idea of buying the rights to publish the magazine and distribute it with the permit, while Abner will remain the publisher of record, since Abner has no clue that Osborn can't be a publisher. This also serves Osborn well, as the authorities wouldn't be coming after him, but after Abner instead. And to keep the authorities from coming after Abner, Osborne sends him on a wild goose chase (no pun intended) to find a famously reclusive bird in the Amazon rain forest, far, far away from civilization.
Abner returns to America, and unsurprisingly gets picked up on an obscenity charge that he knows nothing about since of course he's been in South America for months while Osborn has been the de facto publisher togther with a gangster, J. Charles Twilight. An obscenity trial is held, and an ambulance-chasing civil liberties attorne gloms on to the case. This makes Abner a national celebrity, although he vows to clear his name from the smut allegations.
However, Osborn, Twilight, and their editor Lisa LaMonica (Anne Francis) realize that Abner has to keep publishing smut in order to keep the magazine profitable and protect civil liberties. To this end, they attempt to turn Abner into a swinger, not that Abner could ever actually live like a swinger. Besides, he's got an equally square girlfriend back in Peacock Falls who is still waiting for him....
The Love God? is the sort of movie where it's easy to see why some studio execs and stars, especially those who want to be seen as adjusting to the new times without a Production Code, would think this is great material. And in some ways, casting Don Knotts is a stroke of genius, as he's about as far from a love god as anybody could cast in late 1960s Hollywood. However, Knotts turns out not to be the right person for the role, which I think needs someone who can let everybody be funny around him -- think Henry Fonda in Yours, Mine, and Ours. Instead, Knotts' nebbish persona that worked so well in previous movies leaves him looking shrill here, and the humor seems terribly dated instead.
So The Love God? is one of those movies that should probably be seen as a sort of product of a time and watched just to see how such a movie could go so wrong. But if I were recommending Knotts to someone new to movies, I'd start with one of his other movies like the two I mentioned at the start of the post.
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