Second coming attractions

In the early 1970s, a few years before Jaws, another movie was freaking out tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people across the country. The film was A Thief in the Night and, like the drug-scare films of the ’30s (Reefer Madness) or the grisly auto-accident films many saw in driver’s ed, it was intended to give its viewers pause and provide a warning. Instead of “marihuana” or drunken driving, though, Thief was warning about the danger of not having accepted Christ before the Rapture comes.

A Thief in the Night, which opened Doc Films’ series on evangelical films last Thursday, was the first of four films on the Rapture and Tribulation made by two independent filmmakers based in Iowa. Russ Doughten had been making Christian films since the 1950s. Lifelong film buff Donald Thompson learned the craft while in the Air Force. He worked in television in Los Angeles before taking a job with public TV in Iowa.

Thompson had become a Christian only a few months before meeting Doughten and had felt a calling from God to put his talents to use in the service of his faith. The two talked about it, jotting notes on a napkin, and decided to form Mark IV Pictures and to make a film on the Rapture. Thompson was still unclear what it was all about but had been inspired by a children’s performance on the Rapture he saw at church.

A Thief in the Night was a hit, playing in churches and religious venues all over the U.S. At its height, Thompson tells us, they were receiving more than 1,500 bookings per month. They even turned down distribution offers from Hollywood. Over the next 15 years, Mark IV would produce a dozen films, including the three sequels to Thief and religious-themed Westerns (The Paradise Trail), crime thrillers (Blood on the Mountain) and screwball comedies (Whitcomb’s War). Most were directed by Thompson, who had a keen eye for location shooting and a clear understanding that his films had to work as entertainment as well as religious instruction: “It’s kinda hard to make a Christian film. If you preach to people, it turns them off.”

The series curators, Rebecca Hall and Joe Rubin, became interested in the films from different vantage points. Hall is an undergrad in anthropology at the University of Chicago and has focused her research on evangelicalism. She sees these films as texts from a little-known subset of American religion: “It’s relatively rare for secular people to get to see evangelicalism from the inside, the way a religious person would see it. And these films…give you a chance to do that.” For Rubin, a 16mm-film collector and researcher specializing in independent, regional and exploitation filmmaking of the 1950s–80s, the Mark IV films touch on a number of his interests: “These particular works, both due to their literal distance from Hollywood (many were shot in Des Moines) and their functionally existing as exploitation films, of a sort, made them immediately fascinating to me.”

While the films clearly fulfill the evangelical goals of the filmmakers, they also stand up as taut, extremely well-crafted entertainment. The Rapture films are in fact riveting. Thompson and Doughten have incorporated the End Days instruction well; the moments of explication work to clarify the narrative instead of feeling like the “preaching” Thompson was wary of. The narrative cores of The Paradise Trail and Blood on the Mountain could easily have come from a Budd Boetticher or Don Siegel film, respectively. Both films deal with themes of revenge and personal redemption. It’s not hard to imagine Thompson thriving in a 1950s Hollywood studio setting.

But these are films not found in traditional film histories. Whether one finds value in their religious message (as Thompson and Doughten would hope) or just as solid examples of independent regional filmmaking, they suggest how little most of us still know about the breadth of American cinema.

Cinevangelism: Evangelical Films from the ’70s and ’80s continues at Doc Films Thursdays through May 27.

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