I sincerely hope that Lisa Marie Bowman will forgive me for muscling in on her (I assume, at any rate) recently-completed “44 Days Of Paranoia” series here at TTSL, but I just couldn’t let it wind up without drawing attention to what is (hopefully) the single-most paranoid flick ever made, namely Ron Ormond’s 1971 Red Scare/Come-To-Jesus religious exploitation number If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do?
Ormond was a veteran of the B-movie scene who’s probably best remembered for Mesa Of Lost Women, but at some point in the late ’60s he got scared to death of the emerging youth/anti-war culture and underwent a religious conversion of the “hard turn to the right” variety. Withdrawing from “the business” to his home in Nashville, Tennessee, he founded an outfit known, ever-so-modestly, as “The Ormond Organization,” and set about making evangelical films with his brother and wife as his principal “employees.” The war for our nation’s souls was on, and the Ormonds were determined to do their part by spreading the celluloid gospel.
Enter the Reverned Estus W. Pirkle, hailing from , as you’d probably expect with a name like that, the one-horse town of New Albany, Mississippi. Pirkle was an old-school preacher of the “fire and brimstone” variety who was dismayed by all those pesky civil rights “agitators” who were showing up and disrupting God’s plan for a racially segregated South. He was also worried to pieces about the so-called “Red Menace” He found a way to amalgamate all of his various paranoias into one succinct little book, the title of which you can probably already guess being that this film is based on it, and became a big hit on the traveling revival circuit and at Southern Baptist churches throughout the Bible Belt.
Obviously, when you team up the “talents” of an Ormond and a Pirkle, the end result is going to be a pretty combustible mix, indeed. But you can’t know just how combustible until you see the fruit their collaboration wrought.
The film version of If Footmen tire You What Will Horses Do? takes the form of an extended screed from Pirkle to us lowly mortals in the audience from his position in the pulpit, and, using a “lost soul” teenager named Judy (played by one Judy Creech) as our “point of entry,” shows how Godlessness and moral corruption have wreaked havoc on the lives of our young. What Judy’s doing that’s so wrong is never made clear, mind you, but hey — we know that she does have a boyfriend.
Judy looks especially forlorn when Pirkle talks about the evils of liquor, dancing, and television (he avoids calling out civil rights and anti-war demonstrators by name, but he does inveigh against “riots on campus” and “unwholesome” ideas taking root in the minds of our young), but she’s been unaware of the larger plot that her morally fast-and-loose ways have been playing into — the Communist takeover of these United States.
A lame series of “documented” re-enactments of scenes that “took place in other countries” (where everybody’s got a southern accent) show us what will happen after the dastardly Reds conquer America in, according to Pirkle’s estimation, 16 minutes flat — you can count on, among other atrocities : Commie soldiers breaking into your home to have their way with your wife; kids being forced to pray to Fidel Castro in the public schools in exchange for candy; Christians being shot in the streets and their bodies being left to rot in the baking sun; sons being forced to kill their own mothers if they won’t renounce Christ; and, perhaps most insidious of all, 12-to-16-hour work days, seven days a week, 363 days a year (funny, but that sounds more like a union-busting capitalist’s wet dream than a Communist one).
Dead kids are a mainstay throughout If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do?, and when Ormond and company run out of youngsters volunteered by their parents to lay down, pretend not to be breathing, and get splattered with Red Karo syrup, they often resort to using shop mannequins as stand-ins to pad their “mass slaughter” numbers. One scene where no plastic dummies are used, however, is perhaps the film’s most disturbing : a struggling young boy has his eardrums pierced with a bamboo stick so “he can no longer hear the word of Christ” and pukes all over himself while fake blood gushes out of his ears in rivers. Yeah, I know the red stuff’s not real, but the vomit most certainly is, and if the evangelical blow-hards who made this propaganda had any sense of shame they’d at the very least blush for resorting to on-screen, and very real, child abuse in the furtherance of their “holy” cause.
And that’s where Ormond, Pirkle, and the rest of the Holy Rollers who participated in this thing lose me. On the one hand their film can easily be dismissed as the delusional ramblings of the truly insane, but the scary thing is that this is just a celluloid reflection of what many Americans truly felt at the time (and feel now, with Muslims taking the place of Communists), and they were willing to do real harm to a kid in order to dramatize their dipshit point of view. Without that one scene I could have easily laughed my way through If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do?, but that single, solitary instance shows that there was, indeed, genuine evil at work here — and those pesky Reds weren’t the source of it.
Look, let’s not kid ourselves — Communism didn’t work out too well anywhere it was put into practice (although Cuba is far from the dictatorial hell-hole that most right-wingers are still trying to convince us it is), and Stalin and the like were, indeed, responsible for countless atrocities. But it’s not like anti-Communism necessarily has clean hands, either. Just ask the people of Vietnam. Or Nicaragua. Or El Salvador. Or Laos. Or Bolivia. Or — the list goes on and on. And we definitely lose any sort of moral high ground we might claim over our purported “enemies” when we resort to the very same tactics in combating them that we accuse them of utilizing.
If Footmen tire You What Will Horses Do? offers a pretty good example, in microcosm, of exactly what I’m talking about. It’s propagandistic nonsense born out of irrational fear that has no basis in factual reality whatsoever and is willing to make a kid throw up on himself just to add an exclamation point to its absurd claims. It could have been fun, hokey, stupid shit — and most of the time it is — but the sick minds of Ormond and Pirkle took it seriously enough, and were willing to traumatize and harm one of the young souls they were supposedly out to “save” in order to prove just how serious they were.
This flick was largely played on 16mm projectors at churches and revival halls, where it was presented as, of course, God’s honest truth. And while all that may seem hokey today, the audiences who watched it at the time lapped it up. In fact, an entire generation was raised on this horseshit. So next time you hear one of the blowhards on Fox “news” or right-wing talk radio blathering on about the “evils” of Communist, Socialist, Islamic, etc. propaganda, consider how far the “good guys” have been willing to go when it comes to brainwashing their own youth. Here’s a YouTube link to the full movie so you can make up your own mind:
