ROCKY 1976

In a first for Le Cinema Dreams, I’ve handed this week’s post over to a guest blogger! I’m pleased to introduce Roberta Steve of Steel Town Girl. A marvelous writer and ‘70s film enthusiast after my own heart. I hope you enjoy as Roberta steps into the ring with the 1976 Best Picture Academy-Award winner, Rocky.

Growing up in a small, dying mill town in western Pennsylvania didn’t afford us many luxuries, so family night at the movies was a real treat.  My dad was a steelworker, and a rather eclectic movie fan.  He cheered for John Wayne in True Grit, and grieved with Sophia Loren in Two Women.  He loved discussing the movies we saw and prodding my sisters and me for our opinions.
Throughout the 60s, the boom years for steel towns throughout the region, there were lots of movies aimed at the family audience.  But by the 1970s, movies were changing.  Swear words, nudity, and violence were things my devout Catholic parents were not going to pay for us to see.  Especially with layoffs looming and money becoming tight.  Paying for five people to see a movie meant not paying for something else.

One night my mother suggested we go to see Cabaret.  It was a musical, so I’m sure mom thought it must be wholesome family entertainment.  We piled in the car and went off to the movie theater at the mall.  I remember sensing my dad’s uneasiness early on in the movie. My sisters and I grew even more uncomfortable with the decadence and sexuality, eventually slinking down in our seats.  My mom was silently praying for Julie Andrews and singing nuns to somehow show up in the Kit Kat Club in Berlin.
The ride home was stony silence.  My dad shooting “what were you thinking” glances at my mom in the front seat, my sisters and I trying to figure out what we had just seen in the back.  I had nightmares of Joel Grey’s false eyelashes for months.

It would be years before we saw another movie all together.

One day, at the dinner table, my dad commented that he’d read about a little movie that sounded interesting. “It’s about a boxer,” he explained.  “It’s called Rocky and I think I want to see it.” Apparently Newsweek magazine had run a blurb about its word of mouth momentum.
The movie hadn’t yet caught on nationally so it wasn’t playing at the big theater at the mall.  Instead, one frigid night, we drove to a deserted downtown to see it.  The small theater was not quite half full.  I was wearing my fake rabbit fur winter jacket with my black and gold Steeler pom pom hat.  I remember being annoyed that my mom wouldn’t buy me Milk Duds or Ju Ju Bees because they’d get stuck in my braces.

After the Cabaret disaster, I was especially tense about whether or not my dad would sit through the movie, let alone like it.  I spent the first part of the movie watching it out of one eye and my dad out of the other.  I was monitoring his reactions, waiting for the first f-bomb or naked breast that would cause him to pull us out of our seats and take us home in disgust.  He not only settled in; he was watching intently.
I relaxed and turned my full attention to the screen. Rocky was sitting in the fight promoter’s office, with people urging him to accept Apollo Creed’s unbelievable offer for an unknown boxer to fight the champ.  The camera stayed on Rocky’s face.  I felt how he was both afraid to take it and afraid not to.
I never looked away from the screen again.

My favorite scene in the film. Perhaps the last time we saw Stallone underplay until Creed.

Rocky is not a great film.  It is a very, very good one. There’s a reason it became a box office smash and a modern classic. It is hands down the most memorable and exciting movie going experience of my life.

The story is simple.  A down on his luck, no-name boxer in Philadelphia is given the chance of a lifetime to fight the flamboyant World Heavyweight Champion.  At the same time he is starting a tentative, tender romance with the introverted sister of his best friend.  He discovers his dignity and realizes he finally has something to fight for.

When the film came out, many sophisticated critics ridiculed it as a derivative fairy tale, some sort of rehash of a lesser Frank Capra movie. Sylvester Stallone, who starred as Rocky, wrote the screenplay and took the brunt of the criticism.  They had a point.  It was 1976, and compared to the cynicism of Network, the paranoia of All the President’s Men and the nihilism of Taxi Driver, this little movie seemed like a naïve fantasy.

But Rocky is full of anger, grittiness and sadness.  The story’s innate sentimentality is grounded in  drab, raw realness.  Nothing is “pretty” in Rocky.  The movie looks lived in.  Characters wear clothes, not costumes. People yell at each other.  A lot.  

The street where Rocky lives. He may have been from Philadelphia, but his story
echoed with working class folks on the western part of Pennsylvania too 

Because he was an unknown, and his script had made the rounds in Hollywood for a while, Stallone had to fight to get Rocky made and fight to star in it. The trade-off was the studio insisted on a low budget and quick filming schedule.  The entire movie was shot in 28 days.
Perhaps the two best things that happened to the movie were the budget restrictions and the studio bringing in a journeyman director, John G. Avildsen.  One reviewer called Avildsen “lazy.”  He wasn’t.  He simply got out of the way of a great story and cast the movie with actors who were either unknown or barely known to audiences.  It’s telling that the biggest “name” in the cast was Burgess Meredith.  (“Well he’s always good in movies, isn’t he?  He wouldn’t be in a dirty movie, would he?” my mom sweetly asked my dad on the way to the theater.)

There is a plainness and lack of self-consciousness in the performances that made me feel I wasn’t watching actors, I was somehow eavesdropping on real people at the most dramatic moment of their lives.  Stallone is undeniably appealing.  He wasn’t handsome, and in truth, he looks meaty, lumpy and pale.  You can believe he is a third-rate fighter.  Rocky was his creation, and he brings genuine humility, humor and heart to the role.  One wonders how Avildsen was able to reign in the self-reverential preening that Stallone displayed starting with the first sequel and perfected over his 40 year career.

The Rocky who won our hearts, before faux tan, hair mousse
and plastic surgery turned him into a robotic imitation 

Rocky’s love interest, Adrian, is the repressed, frightened, old maid sister of his best friend, Pauly.  Talia Shire, who was cast after Carrie Snodgrass turned the part down, brought both sensitivity and ferociousness to a woman who had never been valued in her life.  Her bitter confrontation with Pauly is achingly painful to watch.  Even her “makeover” is believable.  It looks like a prettier, younger cousin took her to the beauty counter at Wannamaker’s in downtown Philly and then bought her some new clothes.  The pantsuit she wears at the end of the film doesn’t even fit her properly.  Similar to Bette Davis’ brilliant transformation in Now, Voyager, Shire’s Adrian blooms from within.

Talia Shire was one of the last principals cast.
Susan Sarandon was screen tested but deemed “too attractive.”

Burt Young, as her loser brother Pauly, is used mainly for comic relief, until jealousy of his friend’s luck begins eating him alive.  He knows he may soon be abandoned by both Rocky and Adrian, and erupts from years of frustration, loneliness and hurt.

Burt Young's Pauly ruins the holiday.
I can still hear my mother muttering "poor Pauly" for days after the movie
every time she passed the Christmas tree

A former professional football player turned actor, Carl Weathers, plays the champion Apollo Creed, who Stallone obviously based on Muhammed Ali.  Weathers’ handsomeness, athleticism and crisp diction make him not only Rocky’s opponent, but his better in every way – he looks better, fights better and sounds better. Rocky knows he’s outclassed not just in the ring, but in life too.  Creed could have easily been a “villain” of sorts, but Stallone and Weathers make Apollo smart, savvy and completely in control of the “spin” surrounding the fight.

Apollo Creed looks for a small time fighter to face in an exhibition bout. He finds "The Italian Stallion."
Real life boxer Ken Norton turned the Apollo role down.

If there is any false note in the film, it’s the veteran Meredith as Rocky’s trainer, Mickey. Maybe it was because he was the biggest “name” in the film that the familiarity makes him seem less “authentic” compared to the revelatory turns by Stallone, Shire, Young and Weathers. When he first appeared in the film, my sister was waiting to hear him do the Penguin laugh from Batman. It’s the one performance in the film that, well, feels like a performance.

The producers wanted Lee Strasberg for the role of  Mickey but couldn't meet his asking price.

Avildsen cast the supporting roles with meat and potato character actors who looked like he grabbed them off the street in Philadelphia.  He generously gives Thayer David (the fight promoter), Tony Burton (Apollo’s manager) and Joe Spinell (Rocky’s small time gangster boss) moments that do much to create the gritty, small, ordinary world where Rocky knows his place.  It’s a harsh, grimy place, as are the people who populate it.

Spinell had an asthma attack shooting his first scene, and used his inhaler.
Avildsen used that take in the final cut.

Rocky was just the second film to use a Steadicam, which enabled the breathtaking shot of Rocky mounting the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as the climatic fight scene.  For the famous training sequence, much of the footage, including Rocky’s run through the street market and on the quay by the boat, were shot on the fly – Avildsen and crew couldn’t afford to pay for the film permits.  Instead, they drove around in a van filming Stallone in improvised locations. That type of montage is now such a staple in movies, it’s hard to remember how fresh it was in Rocky.  So many post-Rocky “underdog” films have copied it (including Avildsen’s own Karate Kid) that you can’t believe it was never a cliché.

The inventor of the Steadicam first tested it with his girlfriend running up the steps of the  Philadelphia
Museum of Art. Avildsen saw the footage and it inspired the movie's most famous image.

Many film critics grumbled when Avildsen won the Oscar over other more well-regarded directors.  They blamed the win on the out-of-touch Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (sound familiar?)  The fact is, though, that the hipper Directors Guild gave their prize to Avildsen too.

Avildsen collects his Oscar.
He beat Ingmar Bergman, Sidney Lumet, Alan J. Pakula and Lina Wertmuller

Whenever I talk movies with fellow movie buffs, I see them roll their eyes when I bring up Rocky. Their perspective of the original film is skewed by its association with the sequels that followed. If only the story of Rocky ended when the film ended, with Rocky and Adrian frozen in a triumphant embrace.  Instead, Stallone, the producers, and the studio cashed in and pimped the characters out.  The newly trim, bronzed and blow-dried Stallone made Rocky into a cartoon, and threw the supporting characters to the side.  The sequels were overacted, overproduced, overblown, yet strangely underpopulated.  Rocky now lived in a vacuum. He was the only character that mattered. And don’t even get me started on the red sweat band in Rocky II.  It’s more frightening than Joel Grey’s false eyelashes.

Just all kinds of wrong.

It’s a shame that the sequels exploited and cheapened what made the original so stunning, and such a visceral experience 40 years ago.

It was deep in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, Jimmy Carter administration malaise. We were worn down by inflation and oil embargos. In small towns like mine, an entire industry was collapsing.
Steel mills, coal mines and manufacturing plants were lumbering dinosaurs on their way to extinction.  Anti-heroes and emancipated women were the darlings at the box office.  Hard-working, decent guys like my dad were just looking for a break.  They weren’t seeing who they were – or who they wanted to be – on the screen.

The night before the fight, Rocky sees that a banner has the color of his trunks wrong.
(An actual mistake made by the props department.)

"Does it matter?" says the fight promoter, in a line that Stallone wrote on the spot.

Back to my parents and my sisters and I in a small theater on a freezing western Pennsylvania night. My dad and mom likely entered the theater that night with lots on their minds – car payments, mortgages, saving to send three girls to college, the nasty chronic cough my dad had from smoking too many cigarettes.  They were probably prepared to have another movie disappoint them, and embarrass their daughters.

With Rocky clutching Adrian in freeze-frame (it was the 70s) and the strains of Bill Conti’s iconic score playing over the final credits, someone in the audience began clapping. Soon everyone was on their feet applauding, which then turned into cheering.  I heard the man behind me tell his date “I feel like I could lift this theater on my shoulders right now!”  I did too. More importantly so did my dad. He was literally out of breath and invigorated when the movie ended.
Walking to the car, my family was excitedly replaying scenes and dialogue.  They were already planning on telling others at work, at church and at school to be sure to see Rocky.  I wasn’t.  In some strange way, I didn’t want Rocky to be a hit. I wanted it to remain something special that had happened just to us. No one will ever know or love these people like we did, I thought. Somehow, keeping the movie a secret meant being able to hold onto the joy forever. One of my sisters suggested that we come back the next night and see it again.  For a moment my dad considered it. I’m glad we didn’t.  While I’ve enjoyed seeing the movie again over the years, nothing will ever top that first time.

As we were driving home, my mom, sisters and I were arguing about whether or not Rocky had actually won the fight.  “What difference does it make?” my dad said from the front seat. “He was a winner either way.  All I know is when he ran up those stairs, I was right there with him.  What a movie!”
Yo, dad, you were right.  Rocky was a winner.  And a knockout.

Roberta Steve is a writer and blogger. A native of Pittsburgh, her Steel Town Girl blog details coming of age in the 1970s.   She is also writing her first play and advocates for mental health awareness. A film buff, sports fan, fashionista, and sometime actress, you can find her on Facebook at Steel Town Girl, or follow her on Twitter @Bertie913.

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

THE SENTINEL 1977

The search to find a horror film as gratifying to me as Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby has largely proved a futile one, but through my efforts, I've discovered several reasonable and unreasonable contenders for the crown which I've nevertheless enjoyed a great deal.

Of all the films released in the post-Rosemary’s Baby Modern Gothic vein, the real standouts for me have been: The Mephisto Waltz (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Exorcist (1973), The Stepford Wives (1975), The Omen (1976), Burnt Offerings (1976), and Polanski’s The Tenant (1976). All are films for which I held high hopes before release, all are excellent-to-exceptional movies in their own right; yet none come close to capturing Rosemary’s Baby’s distinctive way of drawing the viewer into an empathetic identification with its protagonist through the skilled manipulation of the medium of film and an understanding of the central, elemental vulnerabilities of fear.

When a book critic in 1974 described Jeffrey Konvitz’s new novel The Sentinel as a cross between Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, I was instantly intrigued. When sometime later I read in the movie magazine Rona Barrett’s Hollywood that Universal Studios had acquired the motion picture rights and that Kate Jackson of The Rookies (Charlie’s Angels was just taking off) was being considered for the lead, I was interested. Later still, when I heard that Jackson had passed on the role and Nashville’s relatively unknown Cristina Raines was to head an all-star cast opposite Dog Day Afternoon Oscar/Golden Globes nominee Chris Sarandon (whose rising star was not yet tarnished by the still-to-be-released Lipstick), I was completely sold. 

Cristina Raines as Alison Parker

Chris Sarandon as Michael Lerman

Deborah Raffin as Jennifer

Eli Wallach as Detective Gatz

Burgess Meredith as Charles Chazen

What am I saying? I was stoked! I got the book from the library and positively raced through it, the cliché “I couldn't put it down!” a most apt description of how engrossing I found it. A novel so influenced by Rosemary’s Baby that it bordered on plagiarism, yet taking its overlay of then-trendy Catholic-based horror to effectively creepy and unexpected twists.

Meanwhile, the Hollywood trade papers ran items on an almost daily basis announcing which new star (Eli Wallach, Ava Gardner, Martin Balsam…) had just been signed to the film. A good book, a good cast, a high-profile director (Michael Winner of Death Wish, who, had I been familiar with his work at the time, would have given me pause)…I had the feeling that The Sentinel could be the post-Rosemary’s Baby Satanic thriller I’d been waiting for.

Like Rosemary’s Baby, The Sentinel is a story of a lapsed Catholic who comes to pay dearly for her loss of faith. The godless infidel in this case being beautiful New York model Alison Parker, a fragile, two-time suicide attempt with father issues and a sleazy, albeit caring, lawyer boyfriend with a shady past (Sarandon). Afraid of duplicating her mother’s unhappy life of emotional and financial dependence, Alison seeks to live on her own for a time before committing to marriage, her search leading to a picturesque riverfront Brooklyn Heights brownstone that is to die for...literally.

Contemporary audiences are apt to find The Sentinel’s most startling, gasp-inducing scene to be the one in which real estate agent Ava Gardner informs Raines that the outlandishly spacious, fully furnished apartment is available to her for only $400 a month! A detail so outlandish in relation to today's housing crunch that even after the story begins dropping hints that the building is built over the very entrance to Hell itself, I doubt if any modern viewer would find that bit of info to be a deal-breaker for such a bargain. More than likely it would only serve as a reason to take on more renters insurance. 

Predictably, it's the renting of the too-good-to-be-true apartment that seems to trigger all manner of maladies and calamities for Alison. The strange neighbors, the noises coming from the empty apartment above, the piercing migraines, the blackouts, the hallucinations. And just what is it with the blind priest on the top floor who sits all day at the window, seemingly watching all the events unfold? What does it all mean? 

Finding out the answers to these questions makes for devilishly good, often unpleasantly gross-out, entertainment. The Sentinel is nowhere near as accomplished as Rosemary’s Baby (indeed at times it’s downright amateurish) but it’s a nicely constructed, slightly old-fashioned thriller of considerable suspense and scares that veers agreeably back and forth between chilling and campy, depending on which scene and whose performance you’re watching.

Sylvia Miles and Beverly D'Angelo play Gerde and Sandra, a quirky lesbian couple residing in the mysterious brownstone. Thanks to Ms. Miles' questionable Swedish accent and D'Angelo's, shall I say, commitment to her craft, their scene has become something of a cult classic.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

It’s clear from the start that the makers of The Sentinel are shooting for an unholy union of Rosemary’s Baby's brand of sophisticated urban horror crossed with the graphic gross-outs of The Exorcist and The Omen. There’s the emotionally fragile heroine plagued with guilt over abandoning her faith; the ominous-looking apartment-house filled with elderly eccentrics; a disturbing, cryptic nightmare; the suggestion of a plot against our heroine that her shady boyfriend may or may not be involved in; and the heroine’s deteriorating mental and physical health. It’s all there…cloaked in a solemn portentousness worthy of a religious parable on sin and redemption. 

Alison  seeks the counsel of Monsignor Franchino (Arthur Kennedy)
In The Sentinel, the battle between good and evil is metaphorically evoked (and a good many plot points telegraphed) by the colors black and white. 

The Sentinel never quite comes together as a great horror film (the script is too weak and performances all over the map), but as your better-than-average, big-budget B-movie, it’s very much like one of those amusement park haunted house rides. You get scared, you jump, sometimes you have to cover your eyes, other times you laugh - but through it all there's a great great time to be had, provided you don't take any of it too seriously.

Photographer Jeff Goldblum offers assistance to a headache-plagued Cristina Raines while concerned friend and fellow model Deborah Raffin looks on.

Here's a tip for budding screenwriters: if you really want the audience to like and feel sorry for a character, don't make her a fashion model. We don't take models seriously. For starters, nobody considers what they do to be real work, secondly, deep down we're all slightly envious or resentful of their genetics-based charmed lives and therefore tend to harbor secret hopes that terrible fates befall them. However, I must add that scenes of beautiful, heavily made-up women suffering in high-fashion attire awfully entertaining, even if the pleasure derived from it leans a bit towards camp and unintentional laughs.

Top Model: Slightly slouching model Cristina Raines (who did indeed model in real-life)
like looks like she could benefit from a Tyra Banks outburst about her posture.  

PERFORMANCES

In the I Love Lucy episode titled “Ricky’s Screen Test,” it’s learned that the producers of Don Juan plan to cast a newcomer in the lead and build him into a star by surrounding him with big-name performers. Pretty much sounds like what they had in mind with the casting of the lovely but largely unknown Cristina Raines in her first major screen role. 

Raines possesses an overall impassive countenance, a somewhat flat speaking voice, and a very un-model-like way of walking and standing, yet in spite of all this, I found myself being totally won over by her in this movie. Aside from liking the whole preachy Catholic thing used as a basis for horror, Raines is the main reason I've seen The Sentinel so many times. I know that sounds strange given what I've just said, but in roles that require an actor to be the one upon whom an audience must invest its sympathies and identification, personal appeal and likability can often trump technique. Cristina Raines registers rather stronger in the scenes of her character's decline than she does in the film's earlier scenes, as such, she makes for an appealingly vulnerable protagonist in the war between good and evil. 

Top-billed Chris Sarandon followed his attention-getting supporting role in Dog Day Afternoon with two career-killing unsympathetic lead roles in two poorly-received motion pictures. He was a sweaty serial rapist in Lipstick, and in The Sentinel, he plays a corrupt lawyer with an unflattering '70s porn-stache that makes him look way too much like Paul Snider (of Dorothy Stratten/ Chippendales infamy). Sarandon has proven himself to be a wonderful character actor, but I'm afraid he makes for a stiff, blank, leading man.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Even more than I love seeing all those bell-bottomed jeans and '70s fashions; more than I love the New York locations; more than I love Gil Melle's ghoulishly symphonic score—I really get a kick out of the roster of talent assembled for this movie.

Clockwise from top left: Arthur Kennedy, Ava Gardner, Martin Balsam,
Christopher Walken, Jose Ferrer, and John Carradine.

Clockwise from top left: Jeff Goldblum, Jerry Orbach (the original Billy Flynn in Chicago), Charles Kimbrough (Murphy Brown), Reid Shelton (the original Daddy Warbucks in Annie), Hank Garrett (Car 54, Where Are You?), and William Hickey (Prizzi's Honor).

That's Richard Dreyfuss in this brief street scene and Tom Berenger  makes an appearance in the film's epilogue

THE STUFF OF DREAMS NIGHTMARES

Every horror film worth its salt in the 1970s had a big setpiece moment. The Exorcist had projectile pea soup, and The Omen had that spectacular beheading. The big moment in The Sentinel—not exactly a surprise, as it was prominently featured in the paperback cover art and on the movie poster for the film—is the rising of the demons and denizens of hell. The gates of hell spill open and all of Satan's minions come forth to terrorize and unleash (more) evil into the world. It is a peak horror moment and everyone involved with making The Sentinel knew it was going to have to top The Omen and The Exorcist if it had any hope of doing similar business.  

What many people apparently knew but failed to let me in on at the time (there was some pre-release controversy that somehow got by me) was that director Michael Winner had decided to take a disturbing page from the harrowing conclusion of the 1932 cult horror film classic Freaks, and used people with genuine physical disabilities to portray the demons. 

To say this sequence is unsettling is a major understatement. It's creepy, it's gory, it's so weirdly grotesque it borders on the distasteful. To this day I still can't bring myself to watch it except through extremely close-knit fingers over my eyes. But one critic at the time made the very good point that audiences are just as likely to view these individuals with empathy instead of fear, undercutting the effectiveness of Winner's questionable creative decision. 

In 1979 I had an opportunity to speak briefly to Cristina Raines and asked her about this scene (I was working at a Honda dealership at the time and she came to pick up her car. My asking about The Sentinel must have struck her as totally random, but how could I let an opportunity like that go?). She relayed to me that the entire film was very difficult to shoot, but this sequence, in particular, was especially tough because Winner, intent on extracting genuine reactions from her, was prone to springing surprises on her. 

It appears that many of Raines' screams and shocked reactions are the real deal, owing to the fact that much of what we're seeing is something she is seeing for the first time, as well. Raines also said that the individuals hired for the finale sequence (I think she said it took a week) appeared to be enjoying their time as movie stars. While not privy to whether or not any of them felt exploited or were disdainful of Winner's desire to present them as fearful grotesques, she did tell me that they all formed a kind of fraternal clique and seemed to enjoy the attention and special treatment that came with making the film.  

With the horror genre currently in the hands of many filmmakers I'm not particularly fond of (Rob Zombie, Sam Raimi, Eli Roth...the inauspicious list goes on....all of whom make Michael Winner look like Alfred Hitchcock), and favorites like Roman Polanski, David Cronenberg, and Brian De Palma all in their 70s and beyond; I've more or less put an end to my search to find a horror film as flawless as Rosemary's Baby. And maybe that's how it should be. Perfect is great, and you're lucky when you find it...but The Sentinel is a terrific reminder of how imperfection can sometimes be a lot of scary fun, too. 

"Blind? Well, then what does he look at?"

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2013