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The absolutley best portrayal of God was in The Next Voice You Hear, a 1950 film starring James Whitmore and Nancy Davis. The plot of the movie is that God starts talking to people over the radio (there weren't many TVs in homes in 1950). The first message is a simple one, something like "This is God. I'll be talking to you over the next few days." At first people generally blow it off as a hoax or strange product advertisement, but it was all stations at the same time in all countries. After the second message, people start taking it seriously at home and at work. By the time the seventh message is due, people fill houses of worship (of all faiths) with radio hookups.
The great gimmick is, you never hear the voice! The first message, Whitmore and wife Nancy are in the kitchen and their pre-teen son comes in from the living room to tell of this "weird thing" he's just heard on the radio. Another night, the film follows Whitmore on a "angel of mercy" mission to help a friend through a crisis and gets home after the broadcast. This sort of thing reoccurs time after time so the movie audiences hear people talking about what God said but never hear the voice themselves. It's a great film with a great ending; actually it's less about God or religion and more about people doing the right thing, helping each other, doing the sort of good things in everyday life that all religions have been preaching for thousands of years, the lessons we never seem to learn.
Another great rendition of God was in The Whole Shebang, a 1991 TV play from the General Motors Playwrights theater in which a married couple (Terri Gar and Martin Mull) is suddenly taken from their home to some giant classroom. There a college-age God--called simply the Student and portrayed by Mark Linn-Baker--is undergoing an exam by several professors on his class project, which in this case is earth and the human race. God meant to swoop up another couple as his best example of humans, but by mistake retrieve a less than perfect couple and has to wing it. Very funny yet thoughtful. I understand a movie was later made with the same title but if it was based on the TV script, it was drastically changed.
Another great portrayal of God was a stage play that appeared on TV but I think never was made into a movie. Can't even remember the title now (The Waiting Room?) but the premise is that several people (including one female) are dressed in towels are in this turkish bath steam room, with this Puerto Rican janitor mopping the floor, who turns out to be God. None even know at first that they're dead, but as they tell their stories, they recall how they died. And one by one they are summoned into the next room for unknown reasons, the steam room being purgatory and the next room being wherever one goes after purgatory. Meanwhile, God explains that although he created the universe, not He or anyone else is running it. But he does tweak lives various ways via a telephone through which he gives instructions. For instance, for a young man who has just become a paraplegic, he sends in "that nice-looking older night nurse with a good heart" to give the kid a sexual experience that might give him more hope. On the other hand, he creates an auto accident for a man driving down a roadway while his wife through the car window moons passerbys. Then he adds an item for a guy who's walking down the roadside and witnesses the wreck--he's glad that the wreck didn't get him, too, so God has him get hit by the woman's butt (apparently part of the flying wreckage).
Last edited by rufnek; 06-01-09 at 04:26 PM.
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