In the new comedy Bruce Almighty, Jim Carrey stars as Bruce Nolan, a discontented television reporter for whom a high-profile job, a des res and a girlfriend who resembles Jennifer Aniston are simply not enough. When Bruce is passed over for the news anchorman job he covets, he turns his gaze heavenward and curses God for his ill fortune. And lo, God appears in the form of Morgan Freeman, who, endowing Bruce with divine powers, tells him that if he thinks he can do the job any better, here's his chance.
So far, so high-concept. But what is worth noting is that in this role Freeman joins what is a very select group: performers who have played that most mysterious of parts, God, on film. Portrayals of Jesus Christ have abounded, but the Lord Himself has only rarely graced the silver screen. Everyone has their own idea of God, and Hollywood is usually keen not to cause offence, especially when it's trying to sell the world an otherwise innocuous summer comedy. Indeed, many religions - Judaism, for example, though not Christianity, whose reading of the second commandment ("Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above...") is not so strict - forbid the portrayal of God in corporeal form.
Film-makers usually get round the problem of depicting the Almighty by having somebody deputise for Him, such as the heavenly administrator Mr Jordan in Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941) and its remake, Heaven Can Wait (1978), or Gabriel in A Life Less Ordinary (1997). Alternatively, they can employ a figure not named as God but open to interpretation as Him, such as the Judge in A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and the Supreme Being in Time Bandits (1981). More commonly, they favour a disembodied voice.
It was in 1936, in the film adaptation of the 1930 Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Green Pastures, that the Lord - or, as He is here, "De Lawd" - made what was arguably His cinematic debut, played by a notable black actor of the day, Rex Ingram. A series of Sunday school stories brought to life by an all-black cast, Pastures presents what is to modern sensibilities a rather racially stereotyped view of the gospel religion of the Deep South - heaven is depicted as a cotton plantation, and Babylon as an insalubrious backstreet bar - but, made as it was by Warner Bros in the face of planned boycotts by many southern theatre owners, it was undoubtedly a brave project in its day.
The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, or Hays Code, had stipulated that "no film or episode may throw ridicule on any religious faith", and so effectively confined God's fledgling movie career to overtly religious dramas such as Pastures. Film-makers, however, came up with increasingly inventive ways to feature Him indirectly. In The Next Voice You Hear (1950), Mr and Mrs Joe Smith and their fellow residents of Anytown, USA - though, significantly, not the viewer - hear the voice of the Almighty emanating from the radio every night for a week, and, though fearful at first, soon find themselves responding to His pronouncements. (The all-American Mrs Smith was played, incidentally, by Nancy Davis, the future Mrs Ronald Reagan.)
Obviously it was perfectly acceptable for the Lord to make His presence felt in the biblical epics that became popular in the 50s and 60s, though nobody was prepared to render Him as a physical entity. In Cecil B DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) (DeMille's second go at the story of the Exodus, after his 1923 silent version), God is featured twice, once in the burning bush sequence and again when Moses receives the commandments, as a deep, intimidating voice. This was credited, in his obituary, to Delos Jewkes, though a rumour persists that it was actually that film's Moses, Charlton Heston, who spoke the lines.
Again, in John Huston's The Bible (1966), only the Almighty's resounding tones are heard - this time supplied by the director, who also provided the voice of the serpent and played Noah to boot. Commandments was perhaps God's greatest hit, nominated for seven Oscars and grossing the equivalent of over $750m in North America alone in today's money. The Bible, however, a decade later, flopped both critically and commercially, signalling the end of the big-budget religious extravaganza. "A bad film of a good book," quipped one reviewer at the time.
In the 70s, with the Production Code defunct, and perhaps as a light-hearted riposte to the fashion for satanic horror (The Omen, The Exorcist) during that decade, the Lord popped up for the first time in a comedy. Carl Reiner's Oh God! (1977) has genial, wise-cracking old-timer George Burns playing the Almighty as, well, a genial, wise-cracking old-timer, who appears to John Denver's mild-mannered supermarket manager and asks him to spread the Word. Fleshing God out using an actor whom audiences knew to be Jewish might have seemed a risky undertaking, but Burns's good-natured portrayal was never likely to offend anybody and, accordingly, it played well enough to spawn Oh God! Book II (1980), in which He enlists a child's help to remind the world He's not dead, and Oh God! You Devil (1984), which, as the title suggests, bore the gimmick of having Burns also play Satan.
Unfortunately, Oh God! and its indifferent sequels seemed to open the door to a ragbag of weak comedies and fantasies. In the poorly received In God We Tru$t (1980), Marty Feldman stars as a Trappist monk who, seeking to save his monastery from bankruptcy, asks G.O.D., as He is here, voiced by Richard Pryor, for the necessary funds. The reviled Wholly Moses, from the same year, has Dudley Moore as a shepherd who overhears God (the vocal talents of Walker Edmiston) speaking to Moses at the burning bush and thinks the Almighty is addressing him instead. And in the flop fantasy Two of a Kind (1983), the Lord, here a glowing light with the voice of Gene Hackman, decides to annihilate the errant human race, and it is only if bank robber John Travolta and corrupt teller Olivia Newton-John can be reformed that He will reconsider. ("This movie should have been struck with a lightning bolt," lamented American critic Roger Ebert.)
Later that decade, George Plimpton featured as a God who advises a fired ad man to start up his own business, only for him to go forth and found a religion predicated on selfishness, in A Fool and His Money (1988), a film now notable only for providing an early role for Sandra Bullock, as the ad man's girlfriend. The following year, in what was no doubt intended as an arch piece of casting, former Moses Charlton Heston got to play the man upstairs in yet another barely remembered comedy, Almost an Angel, in which hospitalised petty crook Paul Hogan becomes convinced that, having been refused entry to heaven, he has been given the opportunity to redeem himself back on earth as a probationary angel.
We then waited for years for another screen portrayal of the Almighty, and then, possibly as the result of some pre-millennial fervour, three came along at once. Val Kilmer supplied His voice in the hit animated take on the Moses story, The Prince of Egypt (1998), and that same year Sandra Bernhard rattled off a few one-liners, in voiceover, as God in a little-seen romantic farce starring Rob Lowe, One Hell of a Guy. Rather more newsworthy was Kevin Smith's Catholic satire Dogma (1999), which languished in limbo for months before release, Disney-owned Miramax coming in for much criticism from conservatives for having produced this tale of an abortion clinic worker (Linda Fiorentino) who, as a female descendant of Jesus Christ, is recruited to prevent two fallen angels (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) from exploiting a loophole in Catholic law in order to re-enter paradise. (The film was in the end sold on to Lion's Gate.) When God appears, at the end of the film, He (for the first time on screen, not counting Bernhard's vocal contribution) is a She, played as a serene, smiling flower child by the then queen of twentysomething angst, Alanis Morissette.
By contrast, Bruce Almighty is ruffling few feathers, and the film has turned out to be God's (as well as Carrey's) most successful project for quite some time, on course to gross well over $200m in the US alone. And the fact it presents the Lord as a black man - though, of course, it is not exactly breaking new ground in this regard, The Green Pastures having given us "De Lawd" almost 70 years ago - has generated little controversy. In fact, many black religious leaders in the States have praised the picture for its choice of deity, claiming that its box-office success demonstrates how comfortable white audiences now are with African-American spirituality.
That may be true to some degree, but the reality behind this portrayal is probably rather more prosaic. While Bruce Almighty's God does embody some of the main tenets of black Christianity, identifying as He does with the poor and dispossessed (when Bruce first encounters Him, he is humbly mopping a warehouse floor), His appearance here as an African-American owes more to the simple wish to cast Freeman than one to explore racial or theological issues. (But then, were we really expecting a big-budget American comedy to grapple with such subjects?) Steve Oedekerk, one of the film's writers, says that the creative team's principal aim was to present God as a more "personal" and less "generic and pious" figure, and that His being black was not a demand of the screenplay. Rather, it was on account of his track record in playing authority figures (being cast as the president of the United States in both Deep Impact and The Sum of All Fears, for instance), together with his gift for conveying wisdom and sense of comic timing, that Freeman was considered, from very early in the movie's development, an ideal actor to take on the role.
Some commentators, however, have criticised Bruce Almighty for merely fuelling the cinematic tradition - extending back to Tom ministering to little Eva in the 1927 film adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin - of the virtuous black man being on hand to tend to the relatively insignificant problems of a white lead. (Freeman, some might say, has played such a part before, in 1989's Driving Miss Daisy.) And the reason that white audiences in particular have been drawn to this movie is, according to cultural critic Gerald Early of Washington University in St Louis, that, subconsciously, they "like their black folk non-threatening and supportive".
Box-office analysts would, meanwhile, no doubt attribute the film's mass popularity to the presence of a major star in the sort of light comic vehicle that best showcases his talents. Just as the issue of race didn't feature in the screenplay, it probably didn't featured very largely in the minds of ticket-buyers either.
That's not to say Freeman's casting, or indeed his performance, is without merit; US critics are generally in agreement that he is well suited to, and most convincing in, this role. "If God were to take human form," commented USA Today in its review of the film, "one imagines he might be just like Freeman". And it should be noted that Bruce Almighty has gone further than many of the films discussed above in actually daring to present Him in any kind of human form, rather than copping out in favour of a booming voice or blinding light.
In other respects, though, Freeman's God - a non-denominational, almost secularised sage in a white suit - seems a terribly safe one, being as He is reduced to a plot device in a star-driven Hollywood "what if?" scenario. Somehow, one can't help feeling that the vengeful Old Testament theatrics employed by Mr DeMille were, if rather less sophisticated, rather more arresting.
· Bruce Almighty opens in the UK next Friday.