THE WORLD'S GREATEST SINNER

THE WORLD’S GREATEST SINNER is one of the great American outsider films, and one of the strangest visions of populism and demagoguery ever put to screen. Timothy Carey wrote it, directed it, produced it and stars in it as Clarence Hilliard, an insurance salesman who turns himself into a political and religious leader under the name “God Hilliard.” 

By the late 60s, Carey was already known as a volatile, unforgettable character actor from films like THE KILLING and PATHS OF GLORY, but it's this film where he built an entire world around his own manic presence. The result is not polished studio satire. It's raw, unstable and quintessentially American, a film about ego, delusion, performance and the terrifying ease with which public spectacle can slide into a cult of personality.

Another interesting bit of lore around the film is Frank Zappa’s involvement. He was credited for the music and was still years away from the Mothers of Invention, which makes this an especially fascinating early chapter in his career. He was barely in his early twenties when Timothy Carey hired him for the project. His score gives the film an even stranger pulse, and parts of it would echo through later Zappa compositions including “Oh No,” “Dog Breath,” and material that fed into “Holiday in Berlin” and even “Inca Roads.” If you dig Zappa, SINNER is a rare chance to hear him first experimenting with ideas that he’d continue returning to for many years.

Martin Scorsese has gone on the record calling SINNER it one of his favourite rock and roll films, and this recent restoration which we'll be screening has helped bring it back into view as a genuinely singular object in American independent cinema.