CARNAL KNOWLEDGE 1971

“The who, the how, the why…they dish the dirt, it never ends.”

Girl Talk   Neal Hefti/Bobby Troup -1965

“Don’t come any closer. Don’t come any nearer. My vision of you can’t get any clearer.”

Girls Talk    Elvis Costello - 1979

In Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge, college buddies Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) and Sandy (Art Garfunkel) engage in an awful lot of girl talk. Or, more to the point, a lot of awful talk about girls. 

Each weighs in on what qualities constitute the “ideal woman." Then, they lay odds on their chances of “getting laid.” They rate women’s body parts to determine their sexual desirability, aka worth. They rate and evaluate intimate physical encounters as though discussing sports statistics...charting the speed of numbered bases reached (1st base, 2^nd base, home run) vs. the number of dates logged. They equate a woman’s susceptibility to their seduction ploys as evidence of her virtue: if she succumbs too easily, she’s a slut; if she resists for too long, she’s a ballbuster. And they bemoan the fact that, no matter how perfect, a woman is never beautiful enough, submissive enough, or ANYTHING enough to sustain interest over an extended period of time. 

Jonathan & Sandy: Amherst College, Massachusetts - Late 1940s

The casual dehumanization serving as the sexist throughline in all of Jonathan and Sandy’s incessant girl talk is attributable, at least in part, to the callowness of youth (when introduced, both boys are virginal teens at Massachusetts’s Amherst College) and reflective of the repressed sexual mores of the American middle-class during the late-1940s (their creepy sexual banter is similar to the same kind of talk played for nostalgic/sentimental humor in Summer of '42, released the same year). However, as Carnal Knowledge follows the fault-finding Jonathan and ever-questioning Sandy through some 20 years of friendship, we come to see that neither the passage of time nor America’s evolving sexual landscape does much to alter the content, timbre, and tone of the conversations between these two perennial hard-y boys.

Older, But Not Wiser
Sandy & Jonathan: New York - Early 1960s

As each fumbles and stumbles their way through dating, marriage, “shacking up,” and parenthood—with love and tenderness making only fleeting appearances, and then, more often than not, couched in erotic desire—the overall impression we’re left with is of two men who’ve approached sexual exploration not as a journey of discovery, but as a quest to have already-established ideas about women confirmed or disproved. Self-reflection and introspection play no part, for the male gaze is ever outward and always infallible.

Faced with the option of uncomplicated fantasy over unpredictable reality, men who grow old without benefit of growing up invariably opt for holding onto the wish for the unattainable, unsullied, idealized dreamgirl. Proving that carnal knowledge is perhaps one of the few forms of education one can acquire without ever learning a single thing.

Jack Nicholson as Jonathan Fuerst

Ann-Margret as Bobbie Templeton

Arthur Garfunkel as Sandy

Candice Bergen as Susan

Carnal Knowledge screenwriter Jules Feiffer (Little Murders, Popeye) conceived of his dark comedy of sexual bad manners as a stage play, but director Mike Nichols told the famed cartoonist/author/playwright that he saw it instead as a film. As such, the movie has a stylistically theatrical feel to it, both in the dominance of language (the script is sharp as a razor) and the frequently used device of making it appear as though a character is breaking through the fourth wall and speaking directly to us. In addition, the cramped framing and preponderance of close-ups make the world of Jonathan and Sandy seem strangely underpopulated, isolated, and self-centered (in the way dreams and memories often appear to us) while simultaneously feeling confessional and all too intimate.

Most distinctively, Carnal Knowledge retains a classic theatrical three-act structure that neatly divides the arrested-developmental stages of its two leads into chapters mirroring America’s shifting sexual mores. Each era is designated by the significant woman in the life of Jonathan, the film’s chief chauvinist.

It's Complicated
Susan and Jonathan connect behind Sandy's back

Act I: Susan (Candice Bergen) The late 1940s  * "The Kinsey Report"  Alfred Kinsey 1948

Jonathan and Sandy fall hard for Susan, a neighboring student at Smith College who looks like the WASP dreamgirl: i.e., she superficially embodies the era-specific attributes deemed ideal for assuming the role of girlfriend, wife, and mother. But Susan is no passive male fantasy figure. She's postwar woman emergent. Straining against gender constraints and just as uncertain of how she is supposed to "be" in the uncharted territory of sex and relationships, Susan is intelligent, opinionated, ambitious, and conflicted. In short, an actual complex human being during an era when all that’s expected of her is ornamental perfection. Things between these three get messy in a hurry.

Carnal Knowledge explores how both men and women can feel
pressured into engaging in sexual activity 

Act II: Bobbie (Ann-Margret) Early 1960s * "The Feminine Mystique"  Betty Friedan 1963 

Jonathan is now an accountant of some sort, single, embittered by a string of unsatisfying relationships, and still searching for his “perfect woman” -- that ideal whittled down by this stage to an exacting checklist of physical specifications. Sandy, now a physician, is married to Susan and lives in a passionless suburban rut he takes great pains to justify. Susan, though unseen, sounds as though she has matured into precisely the kind of vaguely dissatisfied Smith-graduate-turned-suburban-housewife Betty Friedan surveyed as the basis for her groundbreaking feminist tome, The Feminine Mystique. 

Although in the film, 29-year-old Bobbie is an enticing older woman to 20-something Jonathan, in real life, Ann-Margret (who really WAS 29) was four years younger than co-star Jack Nicholson's 33. 

Into Jonathan’s life comes Bobbie, a TV commercial model who is the physical embodiment of the Playboy ideal, and Jonathan’s fantasy girl come to life. Unfortunately, since Playboy magazine failed to disclose just how one goes about living day-to-day with an individual one needs to objectify for sexual arousal, things begin to head south for the pair rather rapidly. The pliant, none-too-bright bombshell who only wants to get married and have kids proves an easy and willing emotional punching bag for Jonathan’s aggression, scorn, and callousness.

"I wouldn't kick her out of bed!"
Jonathan's favorite expression of female endorsement is realized in its most literal, ironic terms with Bobbie, the  sexualized dreamgirl whose depression and willing subjugation results in her rarely getting out of bed 

That the blossoming and eventual disintegration of their relationship plays out almost exclusively within the confines of their bedroom (a playroom turned prison) underscores the realization that Jonathan's and Sandy's quest to align adolescent sexual fantasy with adult reality is a task far beyond either of their capabilities. Easily the most emotionally brutal and devastating section of the film, Act II of Carnal Knowledge lays bare the battle of the sexes in a way that spares no one. As the men approach middle age, wondering whether their teen ideals will ever be realized, it becomes evident that neither has learned any more about women since their days at Amherst.

Divorced, indecisive, and easily bored, Sandy finds temporary solace with Cindy (Cynthia O'Neal), a woman whose self-assurance suits his sly passive-aggressiveness

Act III: Louise (Rita Moreno) Late '60s/'70s * "The Female Eunuch" Germaine Greer 1970 

The college buddies have grown older, but only chronologically. Sandy, sporting sideburns, shaggy mustache, and potbelly over his bell-bottomed jeans, has found a kind of restless peace in his midlife romance with a hippie young enough to be his daughter (Carol Kane). Jonathan, very successful, very alone, and something of a drinker (and looking uncannily like '80s-era Robert Evans), is reduced to regaling guests with a self-narrated slideshow titled “Ballbusters on Parade!” in which the sad spectacle of a lifetime of empty sexual conquests are trotted out and disparaged in escalatingly vulgar terms (sort of like the published autobiographies of Tony Curtis and Eddie Fisher).

As the film nears its conclusion, we’re left with a sense that Sandy’s endless searching (ever external, never within) might eventually lead to some level of fulfillment; after all, he at least concedes that there is a great deal about love he doesn’t know. But Jonathan, firm in the cynic’s resolve to mistake mislearned lessons for wisdom, thinks he has it all figured out. What he has gleaned from twenty-some years of acquired carnal knowledge is revealed in the memorized, methodically recited, misogynist monologue delivered by Louise, the prostitute the now-impotent Jonathan must regularly visit.

The Misogynist's Maxim
Able to achieve arousal under only the most compulsively controlled circumstances, Jonathan has Louise ritualistically recite a carefully prepared (pitiful) speech designed to reassure him of his male dominance. 

If, as Mike Nichols once remarked, Carnal Knowledge is about the fact that men just don’t like women very much, I’d say the only thing surprising about that statement would be anybody attempting to refute it. Certainly not in today's world where the crude, dehumanizing sentiments attributed to Jonathan (a character whose woman-hating harangues brand him shallow and contemptible) sound eerily like what America shrugged off during this recent shitstorm of an election as appropriate “locker-room talk” from “boys” well into their sixth decade running for the highest office in the land.

Has "Boys Will Be Boys" always meant
"Boys Will Be Hollowed-Out Husks of Shame & Self-Loathing"?

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

My strongest memory of Carnal Knowledge when it first came out is how shrouded in secrecy it was. Beyond its provocative title and the prestige implied by the collaboration between highbrow satirist Jules Feiffer and Hollywood wunderkind Mike Nichols (his Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? -The Graduate winning streak took a hit with the costly flop of Catch-22), little to nothing was known about the film’s content in advance of its release.

Nichols’ reputation for extracting unexpected performances from his actors made Carnal Knowledge’s unusual cast a prime focus of interest. For who but the man who deglamorized Elizabeth Taylor to an Academy Award win would have the nerve to assemble in one film: getting-along-in-years up-and-comer Jack Nicholson; high-pitched pop-singer Art Garfunkel; beautiful but glacially aloof “actress” Candice Bergen, and, most intriguing of all, maturing sex kitten and industry punchline Ann-Margret. 

After having a 1972 obscenity verdict overturned, Carnal Knowledge was re-released in 1974 with new poster artwork. In 2001 Mike Nichol's Closer recreated that ad's quadripartite portrait design

Carnal Knowledge was promoted with a minimalist ad campaign so calculatingly discreet—white text against a stark black background, the title in scarlet letters—it proved tantamount to wrapping the film in a plain brown wrapper. Imaginations ran wild as the public (essentially doing the studio’s work for them) envisioned a film of such sexual explicitness and candor, no advertising dared elaborate. 

I was 14 at the time and desperately wanted to see Carnal Knowledge. Imagining it to be just the kind of cerebral smut my parents would begrudgingly allow me to see (provided I name-dropped a few choice critique sources like Saturday Review or The New York Times), but no such luck. My parents had active imaginations, too, and I’m afraid I underestimated the combined effect Ann-Margret and the word “carnal” would have on their faith in my adolescent maturity. Forbidden from seeing the film, I had to content myself with borrowing a copy of Feiffer’s published screenplay from the local library. I didn't get around to actually seeing Carnal Knowledge until the 1980s.

Carnal Knowledge is not one long misandrist harangue about how terrible men can be. But, as J.W. Whitehead notes in the book "Mike Nichols and the Cinema of Transformation," the women are also prone to exploitation and are often subtly complicit in their objectification.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

My oft-expressed fondness for movies that give vent to brutal, blistering, peel-the-wallpaper emotional pyrotechnics places Mike Nichols Carnal Knowledge high on a list of favorite films that include: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, The Day of the Locust, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Last Summer, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Maps to The Stars, Carnage, and, of course, the Nichols’ own Closer and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Taking the position that the ability to lie to oneself is the greatest special effect known to man, and that nothing is more exciting or dramatically compelling as emotional conflict; these films are my action movies, my superhero flicks, my adventure sagas, and (non) CGI thrill rides.

I’m drawn to films of emotional violence because I consider physical violence is mere kid’s stuff by comparison. Americans have always found facing a gun easier than facing themselves. When they are as honest and insightful as Carnal Knowledge, these movies are very humane in their perspective and bracingly insightful in their compassion. And like all good art, they have the potential to lend an air of poetry to what in real life is often merely chaos and banal cruelty.

Never Trust Anyone Who Begins a Sentence with the Words "Believe Me"
In 1971, a line of dialogue branding Jonathan contemptible and superficial. Today (2016), likely a 3am tweet by a 70-year-old cretin occupying the highest office in the nation

What inspired my revisit to Carnal Knowledge is the degree to which the baby-man words and behavior of a prominent celebrity in our recent election (he is no political figure by any stretch of the imagination, and his name will go unmentioned on these pages) exposed and solidified the unassailable reality that America’s misogyny (like its racism) is so systemic, deep-rooted, and essential to the perpetuation of the status quo; we as a culture actually reward men for never growing up. I agree with the assertion by Feiffer and Nichols that Carnal Knowledge is about the fact that men don't seem to like women very much. But, to that, I'd also add that, in the end, men clearly dislike themselves even more.

Rita Moreno as Louise

PERFORMANCES

I've met young film fans who, having grown up with the Ann-Margret of Tommy, The Return of the Soldier, The Two Mrs.Grenvilles, and A Streetcar Named Desire, were more surprised by her sex-kitten past in Bye Bye Birdie and Kitten With a Whip than by her startling, career-rejuvenating turn in Carnal Knowledge.
She is indeed outstanding and gives a very moving performance that confirms the rightness of her Golden Globe win and Academy Award nomination. But looking at the film today, I'm more surprised that Jack Nicholson's performance escaped Academy notice. He's undoubtedly the oldest-looking college boy on record, but he is electric to watch and plays Jonathan with a naked complexity I can't believe many others could mine so effectively. In truth, everyone in Carnal Knowledge shines brightly, and the performances have only grown richer with time.

Carol Kane as Jennifer

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
In our heteronormative culture, we've devised names for men who hate women (misogynists) and women who hate men (misandrists); but I've yet to come across a suitable word for the parallel cultural phenomenon of gay men who hate other gay men (the word homophobe doesn't cut it for me). I bring this up because, as a gay man, I only see Carnal Knowledge as being partially about the battle between the sexes.

Ken Russell's Tommy (1975) reunited Jack Nicholson and Ann-Margret   

When I can listen to Jonathan and Sandy talk in derogatory terms about women and associate those exact same dehumanizing phrases with experiences I've had listening to gay men talk about other gay men in locker rooms, dance studios, bars, gyms, and supermarkets; I recognize toxic masculinity is not limited to straights. While definitely one of cinema's most acerbic visions of male-female sexual politics, the ragingly heterosexual Carnal Knowledge also has a lot to say to the gay male viewer about the ways our culture teaches ALL men that sex, masculinity, and "maleness" has to do with dominance, objectification, and a disdain for vulnerability.
But that's for another essay at another time.

BONUS MATERIAL

In 2001, Vanity Fair reunited the cast and director of Carnal Knowledge 
for this spectacular group portrait by photographer Annie Leibovitz 

In November of 1988, at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, Jules Feiffer revived his theatrical version of Carnal Knowledge. 

YouTube: Mike Nichols talks about Carnal Knowledge: 2011 Film Society of Lincoln Center

"You want perfection."

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2016

MAGIC 1978

Richard Attenborough’s atmospherically tense adaptation of William Goldman’s 1976 bestseller, Magic, doesn’t seem to come up much in conversation these days; although when it does, it’s inevitably in reference to those nightmare-inducing, kindertrauma TV ads that ran at the time of its release. There’s scarcely an adult of a certain age who can’t be reduced to a quivering mass of jelly upon hearing this poem recited (preferably in a shrill, nasal voice with a New Yawk accent):

Abracadabra,

I sit on his knee.

Presto chango,

and now he is me.

Hocus pocus

we take her to bed.

Magic is fun;

we’re dead.

Being 21-years-old at the time, I was (alas) too old to be frightened by those TV commercials. I only remember being so taken with the eerie effectiveness of the ad (even if you weren't watching the screen, that weird voice seriously sent chills up your spine), I could barely wait for the movie to open. 

A masterpiece of minimalism, the entire 30-second teaser-spot consisted of nothing more than a slow zoom into the face of an intensely demonic-looking ventriloquist’s dummy whose dead eyes stared maniacally into the camera as it recited the above poem in a high-pitched, not entirely human-sounding voice. Without showing a single frame of footage from the film, this unsettling confluence of dramatic lighting, ominous music, and the built-in necromantic creep-out of being confronted by an animate inanimate object, incited the outcry from concerned parents of traumatized tots across the nation, to have the ads taken off the air.

I’d read Magic sometime in college when it was still on the bestseller list, but only because I’d read in the trades that producer Joseph E. Levine (Harlow, The Carpetbaggers) had secured the film rights for the tidy sum of $1 million, enlisting Goldman to adapt his novel to the screen. What excited me was the early talk citing Roman Polanski as director and Robert De Niro starring as the magician/ventriloquist with the dark secret. After Polanski bailed, Steven Spielberg, Mike Nichols, and Norman Jewison were each attached to the project at various times, with actors as disparate as Jack Nicholson, Chevy Chase, Gene Wilder, and Al Pacino considered for the lead.

Ultimately, directing chores went to British actor/director Richard Attenborough (Séance on a Wet Afternoon), with the lead going to Welsh actor, Anthony Hopkins. After several years in the business, Hopkins was suddenly very hot stateside, appearing in several major films in rapid succession: Audrey Rose (1977), A Bridge Too Far (1977), and International Velvet (1978).

William Goldman has always maintained Magic’s central female character, high-school dreamgirl Peggy Ann Snow, was inspired by and written with Ann-Margret in mind. So when it came time to cast the film, I’m not sure if any other actresses were considered, but it didn’t hurt Magic’s boxoffice chances any that the '60s ingénue was experiencing a career resurgence at the time, thanks to her Oscar nominations for Carnal Knowledge (1971) and Tommy (1975). With Burgess Meredith (The Day of the Locust) on board as the Swifty Lazar-like talent agent (a role once slated for Laurence Olivier) and $7 million allocated for the budget, advance buzz on Magic augured a Hitchcockian psychological thriller with an A-list pedigree.

Anthony Hopkins as Charles "Corky" Withers 

Ann-Margret as Peggy Ann Snow-Wayne

Burgess Meredith as Ben Greene

Ed Lauter as Ronnie "Duke" Wayne

Fats

That 20^th Century Fox was able to successfully market Magic on the strength of a single, non-disclosive graphic, is only in part attributable to the popularity of Goldman’s bestseller. The other contributing factor was audiences already knew what to expect simply because the story involved a ventriloquist and his dummy. Magic’s boon and bane have always been the fact that any thriller with a ventriloquist at its center is bound to utilize one of two fairly standard and overused plot possibilities: 1) The deranged ventriloquist who schizophrenically imagines his dummy to be real (The Great Gabbo, Dead of Night); 2) The supernatural take on the same theme, in which case the dummy indeed proves to be a sentient being (Devil Doll, The Twilight Zone episodes, “The Dummy” & “Caesar & Me”) usually of malevolent motive. Magic falls into the former category. 

Corky Withers (Hopkins), a failed, personality-minus magician, finds success when he adds a foul-mouthed ventriloquist’s dummy named Fats to his act. An act in which the outspoken, self-assured Fats (who resembles a grotesque caricature of Corky) hurls comically lewd, X-rated invectives at the audience while his mild-mannered human half engages in minor feats of legerdemain.

When savvy theatrical agent Ben Green (nicknamed “The Postman” because he always delivers) lands Corky an opportunity to crack the big time, the sheepish showman balks at a TV network’s request for a physical exam and hightails it out of New York. He finds refuge and an indelible part of his past when he checks into a rundown Catskills lake resort belonging to unrequited high school crush, former cheerleader Peggy Ann Snow (Ann-Margret), now a sad-eyed hotelier unhappily married to one-time high-school sports hero, “Duke” Wayne (Lauter).

15 years has served to narrow the gulf once dividing Corky and Peggy, mutual discontent now inflaming a mutual attraction brokered on the unexpressed hope of rescue and reclamation.

But for Corky’s long-nurtured, once-thought-impossible dream to come true, he has to overcome a few obstacles. Peggy’s husband isn’t a problem, for although he still loves her, Peggy has grown tired of his drinking, philandering, and verbal abuse. And Corky’s agent, nosy and over-protective though he may be, really only wants what’s best for Corky. Doesn’t he?  

No, there is really only one obstacle standing in Corky’s way...but it’s a big one.
Fats won’t like it.

Yes, Corky is mad as a hatter. And his schizophrenia has taken the form of seeing Fats as a separate, possessive entity out to control his life and force him to do very bad things.

"You can't believe how much people want to believe in magic."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Ventriloquist dummies are so inherently creepy I’m certain a fairly terrifying horror film could be made simply by training a camera on a roomful of them for 90 minutes. If you doubt it, try doing a Google Images search of “ventriloquist dummies” sometime. You’ll be sleeping with the lights on for a week. 

That’s why given Magic’s overall impressiveness as a taut psychological thriller wrapped in a character study; it’s so frustrating Attenborough & Co. weren’t better able to capture that unsettling aspect of magic and ventriloquy which seems to intentionally flirt with the bizarre and grotesque. Between the dark demons fueling Corky’s madness (the novel hints at Corky being a serial killer) and the mysteries shrouded in the truth/illusion world of magic, the story offers ample opportunity. But the filmmakers are content to rely on Fats’ spectacularly chilling puppet design to do all the heavy lifting, horror-wise.

In a way, Magic, by virtue of being yet another reworking of the predictable “ventriloquist with a split-personality” plot device, is forced to wring suspense out of audience concern over whether it will add anything new to the over-familiar mix. While Goldman’s script dutifully takes us through updates of dominant dummy vs. overpowered ventriloquist sequences we’ve seen countless times before; suspense is generated by a wishful certainty on our part that a cast this stellar and production values this first-rate cannot possibly yield a retread of material Michael Redgrave and his dummy, Hugo, fairly nailed back in 1945.

Yet that’s precisely what Magic does. I saw Magic when it opened in 1978, and when I first saw it, I tied myself in knots waiting for it to live up to those TV ads (it didn’t), and wondering how Goldman was going to handle the novel’s “big reveal” (It's jettisoned. The book is told from Fat’s perspective, so we don’t even find out until near the end that what we thought was a two-person narrative is actually a memoir). My expectation of what I hoped the film to be blinded me to what it was.

Only after returning to see Magic again was I able to appreciate how well William Goldman adapted his novel in cinematic terms. It’s not without its flaws, but it’s an engrossing--albeit familiar--story very well told and exceptionally well-acted. The Catskills setting has a chilly foreboding about it that is significantly enhanced by Jerry Goldman’s (Coma, The Omen) ingeniously spooky score, and the character conflicts are skillfully buttressed by several nicely-realized suspense set-pieces.

"Kid, I have lived through Tallulah Bankhead and the death of vaudeville. I don't scare easy."
After a string of eccentric roles, it was nice to see Burgess Meredith playing a regular person again

PERFORMANCE

Anthony Hopkins gives a remarkable performance in Magic, virtually flawless in its versatility and depth. He brings a modulated authenticity to a character we have to simultaneously dread and sympathize with. His character runs the emotional gamut from cripplingly shy to theatrically assured; from touchingly vulnerable to deviously maniacal. He has a full-tilt mental breakdown scene that could easily have veered into camp or ridiculousness, that instead becomes an object lesson in how to ground extreme behavior in something real (Faye Dunaway would have done well to take notes before doing Mommie Dearest).

All that being said, Hopkins is terribly miscast. Instead of casting for Corky’s stage persona and wresting a tortured performance out of a charming showman whose stage charisma blossoms in the presence of his wooden alter ego, Attenborough seems to have cast for Corky: the mental case. Hopkins is great as the haunted, hunted Corky, but I don't buy him for a minute as a successful stage performer. As Pauline Kael perceptively wrote, “Hopkins has no light or happy range and doesn’t show a capacity for joy.” Comics are often said to be exceedingly dark personalities offstage, but you never could guess it from watching their act. I think Magic would have been far more chilling were there a clearer sense of Corky having a deceptively light side to mask the dark.

One of the very few scenes in Magic to feature Hopkins smiling

When looking back and taking the entire film in, for me Magic's most valuable player is Ann-Margret. The role of Peggy Ann Snow may have been written expressly for the talented actress, but Goldman doesn't exactly give her a lot to work with. What she does with it is a thing of beauty.

In the manner of many male writers who betray with each female character they write, just how little they know about women; Goldman's way of letting us in on Corky's deep feelings for Peggy is to have him reference her physical beauty, ad nauseam. Her breasts, specifically. 

And true to the adolescent roots of Corky's/Goldman's infatuation, the breathtakingly lovely Peggy doesn't think she's beautiful at all and clings to male reassurance. Yeah, that happens a lot.

To make matters worse, an inordinate amount of Peggy's dialog is relegated to "girl-isms" like "Coffee's on!', "Do you want the asparagus tips or french cut green beans?" By the time she made reference to a bubble bath, I thought it would turn out that Peggy Ann Snow never existed at all, and that she was just a male fantasy figure...another one of Corky's delusions. 

In spite of these hurdles, Ann-Margret gives a movingly sensitive performance that transcends the inanity of her dialog. She turns a puerile fantasy of a woman into a living-breathing person, centering the genre pyrotechnics with an earthy naturalism and melancholy sadness.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
I wonder if young people seeing Magic today find the idea of a nationally-famous ventriloquist to be more far-fetched (and terrifying) than a wooden figure come to life? I grew up at a time when ventriloquist acts like Shari Lewis, Willie Tyler, Wayland Flowers, and Paul Winchell were staples of TV variety shows. As were borscht-belt comics with Corky Withers-type names like Shecky Green, Sandy Baron, and Morty Gunty. (I even had a ventriloquist's dummy as a child. I named him Eddie Arnstein because he looked like a cross between Eddie Cantor and Omar Sharif in Funny Girl.)

If magic is problematic on television because you can't misdirect the camera; ventriloquism in the movies always opens the question of post-dubbing.  Much was made at the time of Hopkins learning ventriloquism and doing the voice of Fats. Other sources have since cited Magic's ventriloquist consultant  Dennis Alwood as not only manipulating Fats, but serving as his voice as well.

I bring this up because I think my familiarity with this almost vaudevillian style of show biz act is what makes Magic's nightclub scenes so cringe-worthy for me. William Goldman is a talented writer but he's not a gag-writer. Anthony Hopkins is a great actor, but he has absolutely no comedy timing. This collision of limitations is fine when Corky is supposed to be awful, but when he's supposed to have struck paydirt with Fats, I found myself wishing Goldman had hired a genuine comedy writer to do these scenes. They just sit there...startling in their unfunniness. And the fact that the act is so lousy is only exacerbated by the film constantly cutting away from this terrible act that we can see with our own eyes, and having characters say (not laugh, but say aloud) "Now that's funny!"

I do have to say that Fats did make me laugh, but only once. When introduced to a TV executive wearing a very obvious toupee (David Ogden Stiers), Fats slips and accidentally-on-purpose calls Mr. Todson "Mr. Wigston." I'm laughing just thinking about it.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
The set-pieces I made reference to earlier comprise my favorite Magic moments. The collaborative efforts of the actors; director Attenborough; cinematographer Victor J. Kemper (Xanadu, Eyes of Laura Mars); editor John Bloom (Closer); and composer Jerry Goldsmith; represent Magic at the top of its game.

Amateur Night Breakdown

Meeting of the Minds

"Make Fats shut up for five minutes."

The Thing in the Lake

In 1978, audiences were left disappointed by Magic not living up to the horror suggested by the commercials. The audience I saw it with left the film in frustration...all you heard as you filed out the exit was people ask one another "What did she say?"---the film ends on Ann-Margret's near-unintelligible closing line: [Delivered in a voice imitative of Fats] - "You may not get this oppor-fuckin-tunity tomorrow!”

Nowadays, thanks to cable and DVD, audiences no longer coming to the film from being terrorized by those TV commercials seem to appreciate Magic for its modest triumphs. As an entertainingly engrossing, mature thriller effectively employing the rote devices of the genre while providing a moving parable about the cost of using illusions to mask our vulnerability.

 THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

Actor Jerry Houser, who made his film debut in The Summer of '42 (1971), plays the cab driver in Magic.



BONUS MATERIAL

The television spot that launched a thousand nightmares
(reportedly pulled from NYC TV stations after only one broadcast)

Serving as proof that the longstanding narrative tradition of associating ventriloquism with personality displacement has yet to hit dry dock, take a look at Kevin Spacey in the excellent 2012 short film The Ventriloquist.

Jay Johnson, who played ventriloquist Chuck Campbell on the 70s sitcom, Soap, read for the role of Corky in Magic when Norman Jewison was set to direct. And while I have no idea how serious a contender he was, I must confess I find Johnson to better conform to my mind-eye image of Magic's schizophrenic protagonist. Anthony Hopkins, although remarkable in the role, comes across as more than a little unhinged from the start. Johnson, on the other hand, possesses that faint quality of sadness and anger present in so many comics, shrouded by a cheery, superannuated boyishness capable of conveying outward charm masking all manner of internal conflict. I don't know if Johnson could have matched Hopkins' dramatic virtuosity, but I'm absolutely certain his stage act would have been a damn sight more entertaining.
Here's a clip of Johnson from his 2006 Tony Award-winning Broadway show, The Two and Only.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015