Exorcist resources

Four books provide essential reading: the novel that started it all, William Peter Blatty’s ‘The Exorcist’ and its sequel ‘Legion’. Mark Kermode’s critical study is one of the most readable titles in the BFI Classics series, free of the academic tone that typifies many of the BFI’s publications and packed with background information and intelligent analysis. Bob McCabe’s ‘The Exorcist: Out of the Shadows’ provides a wealth of behind-the-scenes material.

‘The Exorcist’ fansite is your one-stop internet resource on the film. The word “fansite” normally sets alarm bells ringing with me, but this really is one of the best examples you’ll find.

Wikipedia articles on all five of the films provide easily digestible distillations of information available elsewhere and were indispensable in refreshing my memory while writing these pieces.

Finally, for some light relief after a week spent wrestling with the forces of darkness – be they Pazuzu or studio executives – click here to see the Starz Bunnies re-enact ‘The Exorcist’ in 30 seconds.

Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist

With the verdict swiftly in on Renny Harlin’s ‘Exorcist: The Beginning’ – to quote the immortal words of Bill Hicks: “piece of shit, say it and walk away” – the clamouring began for Paul Schrader’s original version to be released. Only to meet with a perplexing degree of critical indifference when it finally debuted on DVD under the unfortunately clunky title ‘Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist’.

Despite one essential (but minor) problem, ‘Dominion’ is far superior film to ‘Beginning’. The performances are generally better (Skarsgård has real gravitas in Schrader’s film whereas he sleepwalks through Harlin’s), the pace is more measured, the philosophical enquiry into the nature of good and evil is more pronounced (which isn’t to say it’s on the level of the original – it just seems more pronounced in ‘Dominion’ because it isn’t there at all in ‘Beginning’) and the exorcism is creepily effective and certainly the second best in the whole series.

Let’s clear up the matter of that one essential problem. Special effects. Mercifully, the budgetary limitations that denied Schrader a proper stab at post-production visual effects doesn’t debase the exorcism sequence. That could have been the film’s death knell. What it does spoil is some shots of wild dogs menacing Merrin as he goes to the aid of a leper shunned by the other tribesmen. Merrin looks properly fearful but sadly what he’s reacting to resembles some crazy version of Basil Brush with a crack problem and a grudge against humanity. Elsewhere, what should have been a heavenly radiance illuminating the firmament during the exorcism, calming the bloodlust between the British troops and the indigenous populace and bringing a traumatised and suicidal character back from the brink, just looks cheap and twinkly.

Schrader’s use of this device piles on the sanctimony a little too much, suggesting divine intervention. It’s one thing to have a priest – a servant of God; a vessel for HisHis will – casting out Satan, it’s something else to hint that He is opening the heavens and giving Merrin a bit of a helping hand. So much of ‘Dominion’ revolves around Merrin’s crisis of faith. Merrin has to come back to belief, to faith, himself.

Still, better this and the cooling of tensions between soldiers and tribesmen than the horrible blood ‘n’ guts for the sake of it massacre that blights Harlin’s film. And better still the nature of exactly who is possessed.

SPOILER ALERT

Forget the cheap emotional manipulation of Harlin’s version: it’s a little boy who’s possessed! No, it’s Merrin’s would-be girlfriend! In ‘Dominion’, we’re introduced to Cheche (Billy Crawford), a leper in his late teens shunned by the tribespeople for his deformities. His face is twisted into a perpetual grimace. He resembles somewhat the death mask that haunts Karras’s dream in the first film. No surprises that he becomes possessed. But ‘Dominion’ isn’t about surprises – it can’t be; the perameters in which it can operate were established by Blatty and Friedkin thirty years previously – it’s about inevitability.

Merrin is concerned with Cheche’s salvation; Rachel is convinced he can be healed medically. His possession seems to mock their hubris. Particularly since Merrin’s nemesis Pazuzu, making his first appearance, stage-manages the onset of his possession as a miracle. He heals rapidly and without a trace of scarring from an operation on his limbs. His deformities seem to disappear. He consents, at Father Francis (Gabriel Mann)’s behest, to baptism. Merrin, still in denial of his faith, leaves Francis to it. Francis quickly discovers that Cheche is possessed: his appearance transforms into an image of homo-erotic beauty. “I am perfection,” he sighs. His movements become graceful, panther-like, and finally supernatural as he glides into and out of sight.

Francis determines to perform an exorcism; but when he is brutally and terminally prevented from doing so, the task falls to Merrin.

SPOILERS END

There is something that ‘Beginning’, for all its faults, achieves to a small extent; and ‘Dominion’ realises perfectly: for the climactic exorcism to work dramatically and contextually (the context being the dynamic established in Friedkin’s film), it can’t just be about a demon being cast out of a possessed individual’s body; there also has to be an inherent and narratively established antagonism between exorcist and demon which goes beyond their immediate differences of theological affiliation.

“He will lie,” Merrin warns Karras in ‘The Exorcist’, “but he will mix his lies with the truth.” ‘Dominion’ (and ‘Beginning’ much less effectively but at least Harlin picks up on it) demonstrates that Merrin has learned this through bitter personal experience. The demon attacks Merrin using his complicity in Nazi reprisals, his wavering faith, his sexual attraction to Rachel. There is doubt in Merrin’s soul and the demon hammers away at it. Merrin looks genuinely tormented, genuinely frightened during Schader’s account of the exorcism. This is his testing ground; this defines whether Merrin loses his faith altogether, or whether it strengthens. This is where the Father Merrin of ‘The Exorcist’ is forged.

“You have made an enemy of the demon,” one of the tribesmen tells Merrin at the end of ‘Dominion’. “He will pursue you now.” Think of that blood-curdling roar from the upstairs room of the MacNeil house as von Sydow arrives: “MERRRRRRIIIIINNNN!!!”

‘Dominion’, not Harlin’s weak revamp, is the true beginning.

Exorcist: The Beginning

Nearly a decade and a half between ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ and ‘The Exorcist III’. Nearly as long again between ‘Exorcist III’ and ‘Exorcist: The Beginning’.

In 2002 Morgan Creek lined up ‘Exorcist: Dominion’, with John Frankenheimer slated to direct. The script was by William Wisher and Caleb Carr and took as its starting point the throwaway line in ‘The Exorcist’ that Merrin once performed an exorcism in Africa – “something to do with a young boy”. Their script was a mood piece: reflective and sombre. It detailed Merrin’s abandoning of the priesthood after being forced into complicity in a Nazi atrocity in the war; his crisis of faith; and his encounter with ancient evil in a buried church. Liam Neeson was onboard to play the younger Merrin.

Then Frankenheimer fell ill and died shortly afterwards. Paul Schrader stepped into the breach at the eleventh hour. Stellan Skarsgård replaced Neeson. French actress Clara Bellow was cast as Rachel, the doctor Merrin strikes up a friendship – and very nearly a romantic relationship with – at the archaeological site where he comes face to face with his otherworldly nemesis. British character actors par excellence Julian Wadham and Ralph Brown played the Major and Sergeant Major of a British outpost whose colonialist views and heavy-handed presence exacerbate tensions with the indigenous population.

When Schrader tendered his cut of the film, Morgan Creek voiced their unhappiness. They wanted something faster paced; something scarier. They permitted Schrader one preview, denied him sufficient resources to complete special effects work and used the negative audience response to have him ousted. In late 2003 the studio announced that an extra budget was being raised for reshoots. Renny Harlin was on board to direct the additional material.

A few months later, however, the official line was that Schrader’s film was being junked in its entirety and was being entirely reshot, from a reworked screenplay by Alexi Hawley - now entitled ‘Exorcist: The Beginning’ – with Harlin directing from scratch. Skarsgård returned, as did Wadham, but Bellow was replaced by former Bond girl Izabella Scorupco.

I’ll be considering Schrader’s version tomorrow. For now, let’s examine Harlin’s film on its own merits. This’ll make for a short paragraph.

The cinematography’s not bad.

Told you it’d be short. Now let’s examine the flaws. Firstly, Hawley’s script strips away all the psychological nuances of Wisher and Carr’s screenplay, reorders certain events and ramps up the melodrama to the nines. The reordering of events particularly damages the film where the flashback to Merrin’s forced involvement in Nazi reprisals is placed late on in the film and followed almost immediately by a clash between British troops and armed tribesman which degenerates into wholesale slaughter, which in turn is superceded by the exorcism itself. In other words, Merrin is shown to have lost his faith as a result of witnessing military brutality, then to regain it after witnessing more of the same.

After a fairly restrained (but still frequently clichéd) first half, Harlin embraces Hawley’s melodramatic contrivances wholeheartedly and throws in a visit to an asylum, a couple of graphic suicides and …

SPOILER ALERT

… a ludicrous switcheroo ending revealing that it’s the doctor (here renamed Sarah) who’s been possessed and not the young boy hitherto seen flailing about Regan-like on his bed. Remember that Merrin’s backstory is the exorcism being depicted here (“something to do with a young boy”). Using the possessed boy as a red herring and following up with the exorcism of an adult woman constitutes a discontinuity from the original film which is all the more jarring given that Harlin loots visual tropes and leitmotifs from ‘The Exorcist’ left, right and centre: a pendulum stopping, a statue of Pazuzu, wild dogs snarling, a startled woman holding a candle, a medallion falling, a bed juddering and moving seemingly of its own accord.

SPOILERS END

The worst is yet to come. Morgan Creek rejected Schrader’s film for not being scary enough: his exorcism scene is at least creepy. Harlin’s is just risible, packed with enough sloppy stunts and dodgy CGI to make the average episode of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ look like an exercise in documentary realism.

It would be a cheap jibe to round off this post by saying that ‘Exorcist: The Beginning’ sucks cocks in hell. But that’s pretty much all it deserves.



SOURCES
‘Exorcist: The Beginning’ – production timeline on Mania.com

The Exorcist III

In refusing any involvement in ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’, William Peter Blatty’s opinion was “Karras fell down the steps; he’s dead – the story is over”. However, despite Boorman’s sequel doing the equivalent of a particularly eager kamizake pilot at the box office, Warner Bros were still keen on a third film. Blatty prepared a treatment intended, despite their differences over the final cut of ‘The Exorcist’, for Friedkin to direct. Friedkin’s ideas for a sequel diverged from Blatty’s and the project came to nought.

Blatty reworked the treatment into a novel, ‘Legion’. Arguably a more accomplished literary work than ‘The Exorcist’, it’s a measured, challenging and cerebral work that channels Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ in its enquiry into the nature and reality of evil offset by mankind’s facility for redemption. ‘Legion’ was published in 1983. Lieutenant Kinderman and Father Dyer are the principal characters. The novel does not contain any scene of exorcism.

In 1980, Blatty made his debut as director with an adaptation of his earlier novel ‘The Ninth Configuration’, an offbeat but curiously mesmerising story set in a military psychiatric unit. Part parable, part satire, entirely unexpected, ‘The Ninth Configuration’ is a true one-off. Little shown and largely overlooked, it’s a film ripe for rediscovery and reappraisal.

A decade later, with production companies Morgan Creek and Carolco vying for the rights to ‘Legion’, Blatty went with the former (Carolco had suggested script changes Blatty wasn’t happy with) and ‘The Exorcist III’ went before the cameras with Blatty directing for the second (and thus far last) time in his career. It wasn’t to be plain sailing.

With Lee J. Cobb dead and Father O’Malley too busy to reprise his role as Father Dyer, Blatty cast George C. Scott and Ed Flanders respectively. Scott suggests Kinderman rather than impersonating Cobb’s characterisation, but Blatty seems unable to rein him in at times and he hams it up a bit too much in some key scenes where underplaying would have proved more effective. Ed Flanders fares much better, making Dyer his own, but …

SPOILER ALERT

… shuffles off his mortal coil about a third of the way in. Early, slow-moving, dialogue-heavy scenes between Kinderman and Dyer, which seem to have no narrative function, pay off with Dyer’s demise: Blatty gives over enough screen time to the two men’s relationship to make the audience care. Kinderman, already investigating a series of murders which Dyer’s killing seems inextricably linked to, takes things personally …

SPOILERS END

… but when his investigations lead him to a mental hospital, the case takes on a supernatural element. An unidentified amnesiac, known only as Patient X, eerily resembles Father Karras (Jason Miller). When Kinderman quizzes him, his appearance changes to that of a notorious mass murderer, the Gemini Killer (Brad Dourif). He knows things that only Karras could know; things that only Kinderman could know; and things, most chillingly, that only the Gemini Killer could know. Also, he knows all about the string of murders that have ravaged Georgetown. And he knows exactly how the murder was done that’s most upset Kinderman.

Brad Dourif is the ace up Blatty’s sleeve. Next to two scenes of exquisite, squirmy, Hitchcockian tension – one involving the hospital corridors by night (a scene as brilliantly constructed and shocking in its payoff as anything Hitch put his name to), the other taking the old saw of ‘the race against time’ and injecting a palpitating urgency into it – ‘The Exorcist III’ really delivers when Dourif is onscreen. His is a portrait of eloquent, mocking, sardonic, seductive evil that’s worthy of comparison to Malcolm McDowell in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and Anthony Hopkins in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’. Dourif is simply frickin’ magnificent and makes the film buzz with devilish energy.

Shortly after Blatty delivered his final cut, the working title of the film flitting between ‘The Exorcist 1990’, ‘Exorcist: Legion’ and ‘The Exorcist III’, the producers started fretting that here was a film with “exorcist” in the title (Blatty felt that, like the novel, it should simply be titled ‘Legion’*) that didn’t actually feature an exorcism. Against his better judgement, but working on the assumption that if he said no, they’d only bring in some hack to film it anyway, Blatty consented to reshoots including an all-out, effects-driven exorcism scene.

‘The Exorcist III’ would be close on a masterpiece if it weren’t for the exorcism. If only Morgan Creek had taken the long view that they didn’t even need the fucking word in the title. Imagine the poster, iconic enough with a shadowy picture of the steps down which Karras plunged, a tie to the original film already established in the tagline “dare you walk these steps again?” – all they needed was a banner saying “The story of ‘The Exorcist’ continues in … ‘LEGION’.” Job done. Simple as that. But, as we’ll see in tomorrow’s post, this wasn’t to be the last time Morgan Creek made a fundamentally bad decision vis-à-vis the ‘Exorcist’ franchise.

In order to shoehorn the exorcism into the narrative Blatty wrote in a new character, Father Morning (Nicol Williamson). Never mind that Williamson has the kind of gravitas, seriousness and granite-like presence von Sydow evinced in the original, he gets just one scene prior to the exorcism, seemingly turns up out of nowhere to conduct it, and the taunts Patient X subjects him to – visions of snakes slithering over him; the crucified and suffering Karras surrounded by the Gemini Killer’s victims – have no real impact since we learn nothing about Morning. Is he afraid of snakes? Was he a friend of Karras’s? In ‘The Exorcist’ the demon attacks Karras by using his guilt over his mother’s death; he does so to drive Karras out of the room so that an old score can be settled with Merrin. This gives the original film its power. ‘The Exorcist’ is only superficially a film about a young girl who’s possessed. It’s actually about a demon who possesses a young girl in order to destroy two priests.

If the exorcism weakens the film – and with footage excised from Blatty’s original version now lost, there seems little hope of a director’s cut – there are a couple of inconsistencies that niggle. Kinderman describes Karras as “my best friend – I loved the man”, when in fact the two men barely knew each other in the first film and it’s Dyer with whom Kinderman strikes up a friendship. Also, a young black boy murdered early on is described as the son of the woman who figured out that the tape recordings made by Karras of Regan MacNeil speaking in tongues were English being spoken backwards. But in ‘The Exorcist’ the sound engineer who determines this is a caucasian male, not an African-American woman.

However, there are enough moments in ‘The Exorcist III’ that are genuinely shocking, creepy, powerful and thought-provoking to outnumber thoroughly its flaws. In a photo-finish with ‘Dominion’, it’s joint second best entry in the series and so confidently and consummately crafted it’s a shame that Blatty didn’t dabble in directing more often.



*From The Gospel According to Mark: “And Jesus asked him, “What is thy name?” And he answered, saying, “My name is Legion, for we are many.”



SOURCES
‘Legion’ by William Peter Blatty (Simon & Schuster, 1983)

‘The Exorcist: Out of the Shadows’ by Bob McCade (Omnibus Press, 1999)

Exorcist II: The Heretic

To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that all studios in possession of a financially successful property must be in search of a sequel. William Friedkin’s ‘The Exorcist’ made over $66 million in its first year’s release in America*, an impressive return on a total budget (including prints and advertising) of $15 million.

A follow-up was inevitable. Friedkin and Blatty were approached but refused. Retaining the services of playwright William Goodhart to script, co-producer Richard Lederer went scouting for a director. Initially, Lederer conceived the sequel as a quickie cash-in, perhaps even utilising footage from the original that didn’t make the final cut. Again a priest would be the central character but his role would be investigative, probing the circumstances of Merrin’s death. It would be low-budget and make Warner Bros an easy profit.

At least that was the theory.

John Boorman, who felt that ‘The Exorcist’ was little more than a film about the torture of a child, was an odd choice to direct, but Goodhart’s treatment piqued his interest. Goodhart wanted to explore the theories and theology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and archaeologist on whom Blatty had based Father Merrin. Teilhard believed that mankind was moving towards an evolutionary stage where telepathic communication would engender global consciousness. This dovetailed with Boorman’s ideal that ‘The Heretic’ “would be the antidote” to ‘The Exorcist’ instead of a sequel; a metaphysical drama instead of a horror film. (It’s telling that Boorman’s autobiography refers to the film as simply ‘The Heretic’, pointedly leaving the word “exorcist” out of the title.)

So far, so dubious. A producer looking for a low-budget hit; a director who didn’t like the original; a writer in thrall to philosophical theorising.

It started going wrong with Goodhart’s first draft. Boorman wasn’t happy with it and states, in his autobiography that “long discussions were required to get him to change a comma”. Boorman and his writing partner Rospo Pallenberg did uncredited rewrites, the script undergoing almost continual revision as production approached. Originally, Kinderman had a prominent role; after Lee J. Cobb’s death, the script was rewritten. Main character Father Lamont was conceived as an idealistic young priest inspired by Merrin’s life and work; when Jon Voight, Boorman’s first choice, turned the part down, the script was revised to make him an older, world-weary character. Richard Burton was cast.

Linda Blair returned as Regan, but Ellen Burstyn had no interest in reprising her role as Chris. Accordingly, Kitty Winn found herself with more screen time as Sharon, formerly Chris MacNeil’s secretary and now apparently Regan’s guardian. Max von Sydow was convinced to reprise his role as Merrin (in flashbacks) even though he had tried to distance himself from ‘The Exorcist’ after it started generating so much controversy.

Blair, Winn and von Sydow are an auto-pilot throughout the whole film. Burton is magnificently indifferent to the material, barking his lines and scowling and looking very much like he wants to get off the set and into a pub as expediently as possible. Louise Fletcher, hot off her Oscar-winning turn in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ seems to have been cast for her resemblance to Burstyn. Paul Henreid, as the Cardinal from whom Lamont receives his instructions, mumbles his way through his few minutes of screen time. And pity James Earl Jones, reduced to playing most of his scenes decked out in a witch-doctor type get-up – the worst costuming since some doofus decided to put Sean Connery in a nappy/bandolier combo in ‘Zardoz’. (Said doofus was John Boorman, btw. Coincidence? I think not.)

In the six autobiographical pages he devotes to ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’, Boorman blames (i) illness, (ii) an overambitious script and (iii) Richard Burton for its box office failure. The prosecution wishes to re-examine in order to establish that: (i) Joseph Losey was ill during the filming of ‘The Servant’ and that film’s a masterpiece; (ii) unless “overambitious” is an accepted synonym for “incoherent”, this evidence should be deemed inadmissible; and (iii) Burton’s is certainly not the worst performance on display.

Let’s consider the issue of incoherence. Here’s my attempt at a plot synopsis. I use the word “attempt” advisedly. I’ve seen the film exactly twice: at a midnight screening double bill with its considerably more illustrious predecessor (I fell asleep during the mid-section of ‘Heretic’) and just a couple of days ago on DVD when I sat aghast through its two-hour running time, mouth agape and eyes bulging at the sheer, unmitigated, wanton, unapologetic, colossal, spectacular awfulness of it.

But I digress. The, ahem, “narrative” goes something like this: it’s four years since the events of the first film and Regan is now a pouting teenager living in a designer apartment under Sharon’s guardianship. She’s taking dance classes (wanna see the kind of choreography that makes your embarrassing uncle drunkenly strutting his stuff at a wedding look like Busby Berkeley? look no further) and attending sessions with psychiatrist Dr Tuskin (Fletcher). Tuskin is using a machine called the Synchronizer to link people’s minds and explore their memories, a supposedly ultra-high-tech bit of kit that resembles a mug tree with two lightbulbs strapped to it, which makes an incredibly annoying sonar-like sound every time it’s used (ie. for most of the first half of the film). Meanwhile, in a scene that contains two jarring WTF moments, Father Lamont is asked to investigate Merrin’s death. WTF moment #1: why is the investigation only now being opened, four years after the event? WTF moment #2: why does the Cardinal tell Lamont the church is considering Merrin a heretic for practising exorcism when the first film clearly demonstrates that it was not only sanctioned by church authorities but Merrin was actually asked to do it?

Lamont’s investigations bring him in contact with Regan and Dr Tuskin. Despite an immediate antagonism, Tuskin lets Lamont sit in on a Synchronizer session during which he witnesses a flashback/hallucination/vision (delete as applicable) of Merrin expiring at the hands of the possessed Regan of four years ago – who then reaches across time, space and all other logical barriers and attempts to stop Dr Tuskin’s heart. The good Regan of the present tries to comfort Dr Tuskin while Lamont dons a Synchronizer headset and goes into Dr Tuskin’s mind to rescue her from evil Regan.

I swear to God I am not making this up.

Regan begins to demonstrate otherworldly powers: precognition, telekinesis, faith healing. Lamont goes to Africa (or at least a few square meters of polystyrene rocks and an artificial sun hanging over a back lot masquerading as Africa) to track down Kokumo (Earl Jones), who was exorcised as a boy by Merrin. By now there is a telepathic link between Regan and Lamont so that when Lamont is set upon by an African tribe offended by his heretical religious views, Regan plunges off stage during her tap-dancing routine, giving a whole new meaning to coming out in sympathy.

To reiterate: I am not making this up. Nor am I under the influence of narcotics.

Lamont learns that Kukumo has the power to predict a plague of locusts (I’m laughing out loud as I type this) and can repel them by whirling his fist in the air. (Parenthetically, when Blatty saw a cut of ‘Exorcist II’, he informed the producers that he could, without changing a frame, come up with an entirely new plot, dub the film into a foreign language, subtitle it with his script and market it as a comedy. Oh, that they had listened!) There’s also something to do with good locusts, but I think I was trying to slit my wrists at that point and I might have missed something.

The internal logic of the film doesn’t just get lost at this point, it hails a cab, hightails it to the airport, books a one-way ticket to the Twilight Zone and gets wasted in the airport bar while it waits for the flight to be called. I don’t know why, but the finale has Regan and Lamont on a train back to Georgetown while Dr Tuskin and Sharon catch a plane to the same destination. These various parties converge on Prospect Street. Lamont is tempted by an adult version of evil Regan in a slinky nightdress who gives him the come-on …

No, really, I’m not making this up. Honest. On my mother’s life.

… while good Regan clings tearfully onto the stair rail as the house disintegrates around her. Lamont performs an exorcism which dispenses with holy water, religious texts and such piffling requirements as invocations to the Almighty and takes the more direct punch-the-evil-nightgown-wearing-Regan-in-the-face-a-few-times-then-rip-her-heart-out route. The plague of locusts turns up, Regan flaps a hand in the air and they all die. Sharon immolates herself. Tuskin blubs a bit. Lamont and Regan wander off and the end credits role.

Not surprisingly, when the film opened, audiences rioted, hurled abuse at the screen and demanded Boorman’s head on a plate. Fortunately, he survived and went on to make ‘Hope and Glory’ and ‘The General’. Both of which are good films.

‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ isn’t.

‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ is a piece of shit. A waste of celluloid that could have been melted down, reconstituted and used as condom wrappers; then at least paying customers could have got fucked in a good way.



*Since its original release in 1974, total worldwide earnings on ‘The Exorcist’ are in excess of $400 million.


SOURCES
‘Adventures of a Suburban Boy’ by John Boorman (Faber & Faber, 2003)

‘The Exorcist: Out of the Shadows’ by Bob McCade (Omnibus Press, 1999)

The Exorcist

In 1949, The Washington Post reported that a Catholic priest in Mount Rainier, Maryland, had exorcised a young boy apparently possessed by a malignant force or spirit. William Peter Blatty, studying at Georgetown University, read of the case a year later and became passionate about developing it into a book-length study. He managed to contact a priest involved in the exorcism, but church authorities denied him permission to discuss the events, citing the potentially traumatic effects on the boy should the case become widely publicised.

Blatty embarked on a career as a screenwriter and sometime novelist, mainly penning lightweight comedies. But the exorcism case stayed with him. In 1971, he published ‘The Exorcist’. Although ostensibly based on the actual case, Blatty made numerous diversions, both in terms of the circumstances surrounding the possession and the nature of the manifestations, as well as changing the possessed child from a 13-year old boy to a 12-year old girl.

Blatty’s first compromise came when his publishers stipulated a more ambiguous ending (Blatty has always been concerned that the ending of the piece, book or film, should emphasis that evil has been defeated, normalcy has returned and all is well). When Warner Bros acquired the film rights, Blatty himself wrote the first draft screenplay, bringing it in an unrealistic 220 pages (using the industry standard rule of thumb that a page of script equates to a minute of screen time, Blatty’s preferred script would have resulted in a four hour movie).

Various directors were offered the project: Stanley Kubrick, John Boorman, Peter Bogdanovich, Arthur Penn and Mike Nichols all turned it down. Kubrick simply wasn’t interested in the material, while Penn had teaching commitments at Yale. Both Nichols and Boorman were hesitant over casting a child actor in such a demanding role. Blatty lobbied for William Friedkin, even though the director had been openly critical of one of his earlier scripts.

Friedkin began whittling down Blatty’s screenplay, truncating (or even excising) entire screeds of theological discourse, and reducing the centrality of Lieutenant Kinderman (Lee J. Cobb). Still, his original 140-minute cut of ‘The Exorcist’ earned Blatty’s approbation. It was the changes he made as the release date approached and the commercial considerations of a 2-hour running time became paramount that caused ruptions between writer and director.

Amongst the scenes Friedkin cut wholesale are the now-legendary ‘spider-walk’ (although both agreed on its deletion, given that it would have freighted an already emotional scene with a double climax); a scene where Regan (Linda Blair) is checked out by her doctor (leading to discontinuity given an allusion in a subsequent scene to Regan being prescribed pills); a conversation between Fathers Merrin (Max von Sydow) and Karras (Jason Miller) during a lull in the exorcism; and, perhaps most significantly to Blatty, the original ending focusing on the developing friendship between Kinderman and Father Dyer (Father William O’Malley). This he replaced with a more dour scene in which Dyer, having bade farewell to Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) and Regan, glances down the vertiginous flight of steps where Karras plunged to his death, then turns and walks away, alone.

If Blatty found Friedkin’s aesthetic decisions controversial, they pale in comparison to his directorial techniques. The undisputed highlight is Friedkin’s treatment of Father O’Malley. A Jesuit priest, author and teacher, O’Malley had been hired as technical advisor; Friedkin then decided to cast him as Karras’s friend and mentor. Dyer’s big scene is his horrified and shaky administering of the last rites to Karras following his fatal plunge. A non-actor, O’Malley was unable to emote in front of the camera. Between takes Friedkin asked O’Malley, “Do you trust me?” O’Malley replied that he did. Friedkin hauled off and slapped the priest across the face, then shoved him onto the set to do the take.

Elsewhere, Burstyn and Blair sustain back injuries during physically gruelling stunt work; Friedkin discharged a blank round from a pistol to startle Miller for a key scene; and the sound effects for the exorcism sequence were blasted out at extreme volume on set without warning to create a tense, nervous, jumpy atmosphere.

The film opened to packed cinemas and round-the-block queues. Controversy was immediate. There were reports of vomiting, fainting* and miscarriages. Much was made of Friedkin’s use of subliminal imagery (the ghost face in Karras’s dream), however this is a very brief edit rather than something truly subliminal. As Friedkin inarguably put it, “if you can see it, it’s not subliminal”. True to the tendency of urban legend to attached itself to the film, this has been taken as a suggestion that there are subliminal shots in the film.

Evangelist Billy Graham went further, declaring that there was evil in the very celluloid. Why the devil would want to possess a few cans of raw film stock is something Graham failed to elaborate on, though it does explain a few things about the work of Michael Bay.

Mark Kermode’s definitive book (published as part of the BFI Modern Classics series) is essential reading. He discusses the “complex and contradictory” nature of the film, stating that in depicting the invasion of the abnormal into the normalcy of a white middle-class American home, the setting firmly rooted in a recognisably suburban environment, Friedkin pushed back the boundaries of what audiences of the time were comfortable with (particularly in terms of the horror genre, which had hitherto channelled its aesthetic from the gothic); and yet the good vs. evil narrative that ‘The Exorcist’ finally boils down to represents a highly conservative worldview “in which priests, policemen, good mothers and devoted sons” are the arbiters of what is right and sanctified.

Kermode nails it perfectly when he says, “It is in this tension between the progressive and the regressive, the divine and the depraved, the hidden and the apparent, that the power of ‘The Exorcist’ lies.”

The 2nd edition includes a transcript of a conversation between Friedkin and Blatty conducted by Kermode in 1998. Friedkin considers the film finished. Blatty – who has written alternative endings suggesting Karras’s resurrection/ascension – feels otherwise. Beyond the divergent visions of writer and director, beyond the very tensions that make the film what it is, ‘The Exorcist’ continues to haunt the imagination, permeate popular culture/consciousness and agitate the mind.



*The first time I saw ‘The Exorcist’, back when it was still banned on video in the UK, was at a midnight screening at a local fleapit. During the arteriogram sequence – a set-piece that is arguably more disturbing than any of the supernatural shenanigans – I bolted from my seat, weaved shakily to the gents and communed with the cold water tap for a minute or two.



SOURCES

‘The Exorcist’ by William Peter Blatty (Harper & Row, 1971)
‘The Exorcist’ (2nd edn) by Mark Kermode (BFI Publishing, 1998)
‘The Fear of God’ (1998 BBC documentary produced by Nick Freand-Jones)

And let my cry come unto thee / Exorcist week on The Agitation of the Mind

A couple of years ago I picked up the ‘Exorcist Anthology’ box set, dirt cheap: all five films, indifferently packaged. A raft of special features bulking out the original, directors’ commentaries on ‘Exorcist: The Beginning’ and ‘Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist’ and sod all apart from trailers on ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ and ‘The Exorcist III’.

Beyond watching the original for my write-up last Halloween, the box set sat on the shelf gathering dust. A week ago, I blew the dust off it and sat down for an ‘Exorcist’-fest. The power of Christ knows what compelled me.

William Friedkin’s ‘The Exorcist’ is visceral, cerebral and still controversial, one of the key American studio films of the ’70s – a stand-out in a decade littered with great American movies. It would be all-too-easy (and lazy) to describe the other titles as a mixed bag, beset by script and production problems. Not to mention unfair, since Friedkin’s film wasn’t exactly plain sailing in its production. Just like William Peter Blatty’s novel was essentially a compromise from his original concept of the material.

In fact, the entire ‘Exorcist’ saga is shadowed by controversy, compromise, meddling and ill-fortune.

Over the next few days I’ll be looking at each film in turn, tracing the story from the genesis of William Peter Blatty’s groundbreaking novel (it has its roots in an actual case in 1949) to production company Morgan Creek’s rejection of Paul Schrader’s prequel and astonishing decision to remake it entirely under the less-than-guiding hand of Renny Harlin in 2004.

PERSONAL FAVES: The Ring

Hideo Nakata’s ‘The Ring’, from the novel by Koji Suzuki, is the ‘Exorcist’ of Japanese cinema: a low-key horror film, shot with a documentarian’s eye for realism, devoid of any of the genre’s obvious scare tactics or gothic trappings, that became a global phenomenon. It kicked off the still-prominent J-horror movement and opened the doors, distribution-wise, for the likes of ‘Dark Water’, ‘A Tale of Two Sisters’, the obligatory ‘Ring 2’ and ‘The Eye’, bringing them to appreciative western audiences and, in many cases, their directors to the attention of Hollywood.

Then there were the remakes: Gore Verbinski’s effective take on ‘The Ring’ (Nakata himself stepped up to the mark for the disappointing ‘Ring Two’ remake), Walter Salles’ faithful account of ‘Dark Water’*, David Moreau and Xavier Palud’s pale imitation of ‘The Eye’ and Charles and Thomas Guard’s ‘The Uninvited’, a retitled and redundant rehash of ‘A Tale of Two Sisters’.

A decade down the line, the iconography – distorted faces; eerily empty corridors half-lit by flickering lights; pale women with lank black hair shrouding their faces moving slowly and unnaturally towards the camera – is in danger of becoming clichéd. Moreover, ‘The Ring’ should feel hopelessly out of date: the source of the haunting is a fuzzy sequence of non-sequitur images taped off a late night channel (who tapes anything anymore?), the victim receives a phone call seven days later (everyone in the film relies on a landline; in the age of the cellphone it’d be a case of number not recognised? dump call!), and the only way to rid oneself of the curse is to make a copy of the take (again, who tapes anything anymore?). Let’s face it: unless the curse wormed its way onto the internet and did the viral thing, there’s no way it’d claim more than a handful of victims.

And yet ‘The Ring’ retains its power to unnerve. Nakata’s slow-burn pacing establishes character, setting and atmosphere. The cinematography dwells on shadowy interiors, rainy exteriors, dark corners. Impending dread hangs heavy in every frame. Even straightforward, exposition-heavy dialogue scenes play out with the sense that something is lurking just offscreen; something nasty is just about to happen. And when those nasty things do happen – several of them – some are tossed out so casually that it’s like finding yourself suddenly impaled on a plot development that came out of nowhere, while others are agonisingly built up to. The appearance of ghost girl par excellence Sadaka falls into the latter category and it’s one of modern horror’s most creepy and indelible images.

Essentially, ‘The Ring’ plays on the horror of the normal: a blank VHS tape, a TV tuned to static, a ringing phone. It’s also one of the few movies that work better on the small screen. When you watch Sadaka crawl out of the TV set and into someone’s room, a small and frightened part of the mind will always wonder if she’ll take a few more paces and seep through the fourth wall of your TV screen.



*That Verbinski and Salles have tendered the most successful remakes is due in no small part to the casting of compelling and intelligent actresses – Naomi Watts and Jennifer Connelly respectively – in the lead roles.

Music in Film

My thanks to Viv Apple for this nostalgic and evocative piece:

Whenever I hear mention of the film ‘Dr Zhivago’, or even see the title in print, my brain immediately replays Lara’s Theme through my mind as if an automatic switch has been thrown. Such is the power of the film music written by Maurice Jarre, who died on 29th March. Jarre composed for more than 150 films, won three Oscars, two Baftas, four Golden Globes and a Grammy. He was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in February this year received a lifetime achievement award at the Berlin Film Festival.

Jarre won his first Oscar for his score in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. After that success he was much in demand from directors including Alfred Hitchcock, William Wyler, Luchino Visconti and John Huston. He always maintained that music should be a central part of any film and not just used to underline a piece of action or a love scene, and thus he, along with other composers in the field, succeeded in making great films glorious.

I was a small child when my friend Judy and I leaned out of her bedroom window one afternoon and sang at the tops of our voices, Somewhere Over the Rainbow - à la Judy Garland. It wasn’t that we didn’t have anything better to do - although, actually, we didn’t. The real reason why we let rip over the rooftops of Streatham was that we’d discovered the joy and the power of film music. ‘The Wizard of Oz’ was, and still is, a film full of extraordinary ideas and wonderful images, but would its magic have been powerful enough to capture both adults and children in its spell without the music of Harold Arlen and lyrics of E.Y. Harburg?

That’s the kind of rhetorical question which lasts throughout a lifetime of movie-going. Musicals, by definition built around their music scores, have come a long way since Busby Berkeley’s girls on winding staircases first bored the pants off small boys waiting for their cowboy features in the 1940s. ‘The Glenn Miller Story’(1953), was among the first musicals to bring realism to the genre, separating story from musical numbers whilst still using music in the development of the scenario. The film was about Glenn Miller whose life story was about his music, just as the brilliant 2005 film ‘Walk the Line’ was about Johnny Cash, whose life was about his music.

It might appear more difficult to use music in a ‘straight’ film, but the evidence is to the contrary. A good composer can conjure up excitement, sadness, fear, elation and passion in his music; a great composer can match these emotions with what is happening on the screen so exactly that we cannot see the join. Even ‘serious’ classical composers have been attracted to the art. Shostakovich composed 34 film scores, including ‘Hamlet’ (1964) and ‘King Lear’ (1970).

Vaughan Williams wrote music for about ten films, including ‘49th Parallel’ (1941), ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ (1948) and the 1941 war documentary ‘Coastal Command’ - a ‘stiff-upper-lip’ collection which might seem to belie the love of folk music for which he was better known. Eric Coates was another quintessentially English composer, and his fondness for marches came in handy when he was asked in 1955 to write the score for ‘The Dam Busters’, the story of Barnes Wallis’s bouncing bomb. His work proved to be uplifting - an inspiration to accompany 617 Squadron on their flight over the Rhur valley.

By contrast, I defy anyone to listen to Rachmaninov’s Second piano concerto without recalling that most famous 1946 screen love story, ‘Brief Encounter’. Its pent-up passion is woven into the music, which truly tugs at the heart and gives permission for the tears to flow. And in 1995, Nigel Westlake broke new ground by arranging Saint-Saens’ Third Symphony to bring tears of joy to kids and animal-loving adults in ‘Babe’ - based on Dick King-Smith’s book, “The Sheep-Pig”, the story of a small pig’s triumph over the limitations of being a pig.

But could all this be a form of manipulation, a distortion of the truth? This is dangerous ground, but I don’t believe there is anything sinister in the enhancement of a story by way of music, which in itself cannot tell a different story. The score for the 1981 film ‘Chariots of Fire’ won an Academy Award for its composer, Vangelis. Later, there were murmurs that the movie was carried to its triumphal success primarily because of its inspirational music, without which the simple story of rivalry between runners Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddle in 1920 would not have aroused much interest. But to argue this would not only be a disservice to the film, but would also be a denial of something more fundamental, to do with connections in the human brain. When that connection is made, our understanding is enhanced.

The marriage of music and film must be one of passion, the partners locked into an emotional bond from which there is no escape. As cinema-goers we feel this to be true, but it may have been proved in practical terms recently, when Bernard Herman’s score for the 1960 Hitchcock film, ‘Psycho’ was put up for sale at the auction house Bonham’s. It was expected to go for about £40,000 - but there were no takers!

Hitchcock was unsure about the movie and wanted to cut it drastically, but Herman knew that with the application of music he could turn it into something special. And he was proved right. Hitch told Herman he wanted NO music for the shower scene, only the sound of water - and he then went away on a short break. When he returned, Herman had sneakily written the music which became perhaps the most famous horror scene theme in film history. But on its own, divorced from that horrific murder, was it just a string of notes? In this particular case, it seems so. And yet other factors, such as the present economic climate or simply the natural fluctuations of the market, may be just as much to blame here.

Would I pay £40,000 for the original score of ‘Dr Zhivago’? No. But then why should I, when I already have it in my head for ever?

by Viv Apple



in memoriam Maurice Jarre, 13th September 1924 – 29 March 2009

PERSONAL FAVES: Sideways

I first saw ‘Sideways’ at my local multiplex in February 2005; I went to see it again two weeks later. I bought the DVD on the day of release. I’ve watched it two or three times a year since then. On first viewing, I came to the conclusion that Alexander Payne was the next great American director. Simple as that.

‘Sideways’ made it three in a row after ‘Election’, one of very few films set in a high school that’s nonetheless intelligent, sophisticated and razor-sharp in its satire (seriously: if Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ distils the whole brutal ethos of the adult world into a juvenile microcosm, ‘Election’ does the same for American politics, emerging as cleverer, funnier and more acute than an entire series of ‘The West Wing’) and ‘About Schmidt’, the unlikeliest road movie this side of ‘The Straight Story’, wherein Jack Nicholson turned in a late period performance of such understated pathos that you rediscover what a great actor he is. By turns humorous, whimsical and melancholy, ‘About Schmidt’ is also honest, featuring the quietest yet the most devastatingly poignant ending.

Hard to believe it’s been four years since ‘Sideways’ and with the exception of a contribution to a portmanteau film about Paris, we’re still waiting for Payne’s follow up, ‘Fork in the Road’ from Dennis Hamill’s novel about an Irish-American film-maker’s relationship with a passionate but unpredictable gypsy woman and the correlation between life and art. With a little bit of luck, a fair wind and a huge amount of talent (and Payne has the latter, lordie yessum) ‘Fork in the Road’ could be a classic in waiting.

But for the moment we have ‘Sideways’, a bona fide classic and a production that I am convinced will be remembered as the best American film of this decade. Beautifully scripted, impeccably acted and oh the direction! In an era of film-making where most directors seem to scream at the camera “LOOK AT MEEEEEEEEEEEE! I’M DIRECTING!!!”, Alexander Payne does something radical and wonderful that I’d like to give him a great big hug and buy him a pint for: he assumes his audience are intelligent and sensitive and can think about what they’re watching instead of being told it.

This is how good the direction is: you forget that it’s a film and somebody directed it. That’s it. End of. I can’t think of higher praise. The best books I’ve read have made me forget I was turning pages and looking at printed words: I’ve lived inside them and known the characters. The best paintings and photographs I’ve seen haven’t been contained within a frame and held permanently in stasis: they’ve made me think that I’ve just blinked and still have imprinted on the retina a scene that’s even now changing and spilling out and generating a new dynamic.

I know the characters in ‘Sideways’. I’ve spent time with them. I recognise myself in them. That neither of the protagonists are, on the surface, particularly sympathetic makes Payne’s achievement – by the final frames, all sins are forgiven and you desperately care about them – all the more impressive. Miles (Paul Giametti) is a middle-aged high school teacher, would-be novelist and wine snob. He’s self-important, depressive and not above ripping off his mother for a couple of hundred dollars. His best friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church) is a once-successful actor now reduced to doing voiceovers and prepared to take a soul-destroying job in his prospective father-in-law’s real estate business.

Taking off for a week-long wine-tasting holiday before Jack finally ties the knot with his society-girl fiancée, ‘Sideways’ plays out as a finely observed study of failure, self-doubt and the occasional small moment of redemption. The humour and the melancholy derive in equal measure from the ‘Odd Couple’-style relationship between the mismatched protagonists. Miles is given to snobbery (“quaffable,” he opines of one vintage, “but a long way from transcendence”), while Jack’s retinue of comments strikes out no further intellectually than the succession of women he eyes up for his final fling (“God, that chick's hot”).

You’d have every reason not to like these guys. But they’re real. They are flawed and recognisable and all too human. The women they meet and get involved with – once-bitten-twice-shy Maya (Virginia Madsen) and uninhibited free spirit Stephanie (Sandra Oh) – throw their rumpled and compromised humanity into sharp relief. They are the real heroes of the film: women who hold out hope in the face of the failures of men.

Am I making ‘Sideways’ sound heavy? Not so. It’s intelligent. It’s perceptive. That doesn’t mean it’s not eminently watchable, very entertaining and often laugh-out-loud funny. Alexander Payne has cited Luis Buñuel as an inspiration (that shot of the ostrich means so much more in this context) and delivers an inspired sequence towards the end of the film – key components: sexual embarrassment, class barriers, quasi-voyeurism and the shock of the absurb – that would have made his idol proud.

Top ten drinkers

Billy Bob Thornton as Willie in ‘Bad Santa’

Jack Lemmon as Joe Clay in ‘Days of Wine and Roses’

Ray Milland as Don Birnam in ‘The Lost Weekend’

Dean Martin as Dude in ‘Rio Bravo’


Paul Giamatti as Miles in ‘Sideways’


David Farrar as Sammy Rice in ‘The Small Back Room’

Susan Hayward as Angie Evans in ‘Smash Up: the Story of a Woman’

Ben Gazzara as Charles Serking in ‘Tales of Ordinary Madness’

The entire cast in ‘Whisky Galore!’

Richard E. Grant as Withnail in ‘Withnail & I’

Hellraisers

There are some film books that effortlessly pin down an era in cinema history, such as Peter Biskind’s ‘Easy Riders, Raging Bulls’. There are some that chronicle in car-crash detail the disastrous consequences of a misconceived, miscast, all round flop – Julie Salamon’s ‘The Devil’s Candy’. There are some autobiographies that are so staggeringly egomaniacal (Michael Powell’s ‘A Life in Movies’) or so elegantly persuasive (any of Dirk Bogarde’s memoirs) that the truth hardly matters. There are diaries that reveal the day-to-day frustrations of even the greatest directors (Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Time Within Time’). There are biographies that so effectively get under the skin of their subject (Kevin Brownlow’s book on David Lean; John Coldstream’s on Bogarde) that they remain unforgettable.

Then there’s a book like Robert Sellers’s ‘Hellraisers: the Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed’, which is an unapologetic way-hey-the-lads celebration of the collective boozing, brawling and bad behaviour (womanizing needs to be added but I can’t think of a synonym beginning with “B” which will preserve the alliteration) of four of the most devil-may-care talents ever to grace the silver screen.

Because believe it or not, between the bars and the arrests and the brawls with paparazzi and the on-off romances (mentioning no names, Mr Burton) these boys actually made the odd film or two.

In fact, between them, they clocked up some of the most visceral, intense, challenging, dynamic and kick-ass performances in cinema: think of Burton losing it on the pulpit in the opening scene of ‘The Night of the Iguana’, Harris looking like he’s about to ask the fucking camera outside in just about every frame of ‘This Sporting Life’, O’Toole casually announcing “we have taken Aqaba” in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, Reed getting stuck into a little nude wrestling with Alan Bates in ‘Women in Love’. And that’s just for starters …

From next month I’ll be running an ongoing series on The Agitation of the Mind, celebrating the bad boys of British cinema. There will be booze. There will be blood. There will be some fucking great movies. It all kicks off first week in May but until then the bar is open at The Agitation of the Liver, so raise your glasses to these gentlemen, drink to their hellraising and rue the fact that we live in a world where Zac Efron headlines movies, launches a thousand merchandising products and doesn’t even have the common decency to trash a restaurant, shag for England (oh all right then, America) and wake up in a holding cell wondering what time the pubs open.

Top ten debonair villains

John Huston as Noah Cross in ‘Chinatown’

Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber in ‘Die Hard’

Joseph Wiseman as Dr No in ‘Dr No’


Fernando Rey as Alain Charnier in ‘The French Connection’


Clifton Webb as Waldo Lydecker in ‘Laura’

James Mason as Phillip Vandamm in ‘North by Northwest’

John Malkovich as Tom Ripley in ‘Ripley’s Game’

Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’

Dirk Bogarde as Anacleto in ‘The Singer Not the Song’

Orson Welles as Harry Lime in ‘The Third Man’

Apropos of yesterday's entry

I realised a year ago that I cheated by including ‘The Godfather’ Parts I and II as a single choice in the Personal Faves list, just so I could also shoehorn ‘Apocalypse Now’ in and not break the two-films-per-director rule.

I realise today that I’ve not so much cheated as sold myself (and the film!) short by trying to squeeze ‘The Godfather Part II’ into yesterday’s article. It deserves more thought, more consideration, more comment. I will revisit it next month.

It wasn’t personal, it was strictly laziness.

PERSONAL FAVES: The Godfather and The Godfather Part II

‘The Godfather’ is not so much an adaptation as an act of alchemy, taking the base metal (or rather purple prose) of Mario Puzo’s potboiler and rendering it into cinematic gold.

‘The Godfather’ is quite simply one of American cinema’s finest achievements, an instant classic on its original release and a film that continues to improve with age. Its sequel, if anything, is even better.

Both films (let’s leave the occasionally inspired but mostly just average ‘Godfather Part III’ out of it) are about family, honour and loyalty. They’re also about how these concepts are variously rationalised, compromised and bastardised.

‘The Godfather’ opens with an extended set-piece in which Don Corleone (Marlon Brando) is obliged, on the occasion of his daughter’s wedding, to grant favour to any who seek it. “I believe in America,” the craven Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto) declares, then goes on to ask the Don to do violence on his behalf where the legal system has failed him. Like anyone else granted favour, he is counselled that “some day, and this day may never come, I might call upon you to do me a service”. All of this takes place in a darkened room, while the celebrations unfold in bright daylight outside. Still, even as a heart-throb crooner entertains the crowd and guests applaud the bride, tension is in the air: the Don’s son Michael (Al Pacino) has arrived – in uniform.

Unlike his natural brothers Sonny (James Caan) and Fredo (John Cazale) and his adoptive brother Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), Michael Corleone has elected not to join the family business but enlist in the Marine Corps. And when the family business is crime and the credo, as the Don chastens Sonny early in the film, is “never let anyone outside the family know what you’re thinking”, this is a decidedly unSicilian thing to do. In fact, it’s downright American, patriotic and commendable. No wonder Michael’s the black sheep of the family. Oh, then there’s the matter of the white-than-white nice girl, Kay (Diane Keaton) he gets involved with.

Then there’s an assassination attempt on the Don and Michael finds himself filling the breech. What happens like is like ‘Richard III’ if the Richard III was quite a likeable and all-round kind of guy in the first act. Michael’s transition from war hero to mob boss, from hero to anti-hero, from humanity to villainy isn’t a gradual or incremental thing; it all hinges on one act. Michael proposes and carries out the execution of rival mobster Sollozzo (Al Lettieri), the guy who ordered the hit on his father, as well as Sollozzo’s partner, the corrupt policeman McCluskey (Sterling Hayden).

Michael is quickly whisked off to Italy while the heat dies down. Deserting Kay in more ways than one, he romances and marries local beauty Appollonia (Simonetta Stefanelli). When she dies in a car bomb meant for him, Michael returns to America and glibly takes up with Kay again. Sonny’s betrayal and death at a toll booth ambush (I’m not bothering with any spoiler alerts in this post – really, if you haven’t seen ‘The Godfather’ there’s no hope for you), and the Don’s retirement following a reluctant making of peace with his enemies, sees the family business turned over wholesale to Michael.

Here’s where the real ‘Richard III’ stuff kicks in: Michael becomes corrupted by power and villainy, not in an egomaniacal or even necessarily a psychotic sense, by characterised more by an utter coldness and inhumanity; a complete moral and emotion disconnection.

One of the most quoted lines is “it’s not personal, it’s strictly business” – a sentiment Michael certainly adheres to, and with bitter irony since those were Sollozzo’s words to him following the unsuccessful hit on the Don.

Coppola continues to chart Michael’s heinous premiership of the Corleone clan in ‘The Godfather Part II’, contrasting his barren life against the rise to power of the young Don Corleone (Robert de Niro). The Don’s actions, while undeniably criminal, are socially motivated (his murder of a neighbourhood crime boss is done for the betterment of the community). The seeds of the first film’s focus on family and loyalty are sown here. And also cut down as Michael alienates his wife – after losing her baby, Kay confronts Michael with the truth: “It wasn’t a miscarriage, it was an abortion. An abortion, Michael … I had it killed because all this must end … this Sicilian thing that’s been going on for two thousand years” – and, in the most shocking scene, orders the death of his brother, the weak-willed Fredo after he’s coerced into a business agreement than compels him to betray Michael. That he has this order carried out after feigning forgiveness and welcoming Fredo back into the household is the final bastardisation of everything his father held sacrosanct. It is this – and never mind the quasi-religious musings of ‘Part III’ – that completes Michael’s transition to the monstrous; that places him beyond redemption.

36

Olivier Marchal’s old-school police thriller ‘36’ takes its title from the address of a Parisian police headquarters, 36 Quai des Orfevres. The opening scene has the plaque identifying the building stolen by two motorcycle riders. They turn out to be police: the plaque is gift-wrapped and presented to a retiring detective. It’s a terrific scene, one that sets the tone for a film concerned with moral compromise, the thin line between the cop and the criminal, and the bad things that are done under the cloak of authority.

Think James Ellroy on a continental breakfast and a thirty-a-day Gitanes habit and you’re about there.

Two ambitious and unapologetically unorthodox career cops, Vrinks (Daniel Auteuil) and Klein (Gerard Depardieu) vie for a high-ranking promotion. Both have crossed the line, personally and professionally, on more than one occasion. The rivalry turns personal after Klein, trigger-happy and given to drinking on duty, spectacularly botches a take-down. The ensuing shoot-out is as jolting and visceral as the one in ‘Heat’, a film ‘36’ was justifiably compared to by most critics on its belated release (it was made in 2004 and didn’t show up in UK cinemas until late ’06).

The aftermath of this brilliantly shot and edited sequence takes ‘36’ into different territory, though. Vrinks uses Klein’s unprofessionalism against him, and the other officers send him to whatever the French version of Coventry is. Then fate intervenes and Klein finds something he can use against Vrinks … I’m going no further with the plot synopsis here. Suffice it to say that things get progressively darker and more interesting. And if the set-up seems to point to pure melodrama as the denouement approaches, don’t worry. The pay-off is as memorable as it is unpredictable.

‘36’ is dark, gritty, compelling stuff and when Hollywood gets its finger out of its arse delivers another long overdue Ellroy adaptation (‘White Jazz’, anyone?) it could do a lot worse than emulate Marchal’s blistering directorial style.

Top ten creative geniuses

Anatoli Solonitsyn as Andrei Rublev in ‘Andrei Rublev’

Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo in ‘Frida’

Colin Firth as Johannes Vermeer in ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’


Gary Oldman as Ludwig van Beethoven in ‘Immortal Beloved’


Derek Jacobi as Francis Bacon in ‘Love is the Devil’

Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dorothy Parker in ‘Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle’

Daniel Day Lewis as Christy Brown in ‘My Left Foot’

Joseph Fiennes as William Shakespeare in ‘Shakespeare in Love’

Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath in ‘Sylvia’

Stephen Fry as Oscar Wilde in ‘Wilde’