A Man Called God

A Man Called God is a remarkable movie that has its roots in the 1970's in the careers of two men: Blaxploitation actor Christopher St. John, whose best-known credit is probably as the leader of the "Lummumbas," the Black nationalist group who work with Black detective John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a Black businessman in the original 1971 Shaft. He was married to a white actress and had a son, Kristoff; then they broke up and he married another white actress, Maria, and the couple raised Kristoff. In 1972 Christopher St. John wrote, produced, directed and starred in Top of the Heap, but then got a reputation in Hollywood as a troublemaker and got blacklisted. At loose ends, Christopher and Maria St. John drifted into an involvement with Eastern religion and eventually became devotees of a guru named Sathya Sai Baba. For anyone whose mental image of an Indian guru is an old guy with long hair and an unkempt beard -- the appearance of Paramhansa Yogananda, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Meher Baba and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh -- the first sight of Sai Baba in this movie is going to be startling: he was baby-faced, clean-shaven and, quite frankly, looked more African than Indian: he had a broad nose and his hair was in a tall "natural." He always dressed in an orange robe -- at least during his public appearances -- and though his background was Hindu, he claimed to be synthesizing all the world's major religions in his teachings. He also literally claimed to be God on Earth and to have (presumably in a previous incarnation) fathered Jesus Christ. Christopher and Maria St. John got so involved in Sai Baba's organization that they ended up living in his main ashram in Puttaparthi, India -- the tiny village where Sai Baba had been born and which turned into a major religious center as his movement grew. Because he had movie-making experience, Christopher St. John was hired by Sai Baba to make a documentary film that would hopefully recruit more people to the movement. The bulk of the film consists of the footage Christopher St. John shot during his months at the ashram, which came to an abrupt end right after Sai Baba's elaborate 55th birthday celebration in November 1980; when Sai Baba threw him out he demanded that St. John leave all his film behind, but the elder St. John got the film out of India with him and resettled in Hollywood -- where the footage sat for over two decades until his son finally hit on the idea of making a movie out of it and telling his own tale of his life in the ashram and how and why it ended. Kristoff St. John and Marc Clebanoff (who's credited on the postcard announcing the film merely as co-editor but clearly had a key role in writing the script and working out the film's overall structure) at first they show the positive aspects of Sai Baba's movement, including the money they put into hospital construction and social improvements, but later they start dropping hints of the darker side of the story. Kristoff recalls how dazzled he was by Sai Baba's purported power to materialize objects, including rings, medallions and sacred vibhuti ash, out of thin air. As a boy in Sai Baba's ashram, Kristoff was jazzed when Sai Baba gave him a silver medallion he had supposedly created out of thin air; only years later, after his and his family's disillusionment, did Kristoff realize that this was a simple sleight-of-hand trick that any stage magician could do. Things got worse as hundreds of thousands of people, mostly from India but also from all over the world, thronged the ashram for the three weeks of celebration before Sai Baba's birthday in 1980 -- and Christopher St. John, with his film credits as both actor and director, was ordered to direct a play about Jesus Christ. Though Kristoff recalls that there were certain parts of the ashram he and his crew were not allowed to film, they did get to record one of the rehearsals for this play -- the scene in which Jesus is throwing the moneylenders out of the Temple -- which looks as wretched as you'd expect given that he was working with a nonprofessional cast and an awfully stiff script. Then the St. Johns learn about Baba's darker secrets, including at least one that affects them personally. Though I could have wished for a bit more material in A Man Called God about what attracted people in general and the St. Johns in particular to Baba's cult (to me that's the most interesting aspect of cult stories: why do people get involved in these things in the first place; and once they're involved, how do they rationalize staying in even as they learn some of the cult's darker secrets?), the film as it stands is a chilling tale which alleges that Sai Baba could do literally anything he wanted, confident that his connections with some of the most powerful people in India would ensure that his crimes would never even be investigated, much less prosecuted. Like most cult stories, A Man Called God is another illustration of how power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely; once you're surrounded by people who literally believe you're a prophet, or a god, or some other sort of "special" person (the entourages of celebrities, especially notoriously reclusive ones like Michael Jackson, are not that different from the literal cult shown in this film), and who have essentially granted you the power of life and death over them, they will do just about anything to stay in your good graces -- and you'd have to be an extraordinarily humble and saintly human being not to take advantage of that for some sinister purpose or another. AKA: A Man Called God