The Heretic - Confused Attempt to Vary a Well-tried Formula

Scan page 8

The greatest disaster movie of them all-King Kong.

The centre-piece of Exorcist Il' ('The Heretic') is a long, screaming ride into a disease ridden city in the African desert, on the back of an enormous beast. The scene is repeated, with stimulating variations, several times, reaching finally a terrific pitch of excitement.

Unlike the toy monsters of old-time horror tilms, this Is the real thing, wondertully magnified, shot from above and behind, so that. the audience feels itself riding with him.

Pretty scary.

The Heretic is aimed, it the rate at which the audience deserted during the showing I attended, the term seems a little misplaced.

Still, the theatre started out full; the type of movie attracts audiences, even if the particular film fails to keep them.

Horror

The type can be generally described as horror/disaster films. Into this category come not only the earthquake and air-crash films, but monster films like Jaws and Grizzly, as well as the 'namelessmenace' type, whether the menace is spiritual (as in the Exorcist) or physical as in the new Rabid. It is tempting to relate them to the economic crisis; the bourgeoisie under seige, in the throes of a terrible chaos, watching image after image of its undoing.

There is a related interpretation of the demon-child motif in films such as Exorcist and The Omen as a part of the backlash produced by the women's liberation movement (This is what you'll get, if you don't stop snivelling about day nurseries!').

Deep crisis

But while it is certainly true that these films would not have been produced and could not have been popularly received, except in a society in a state of deep crisis, it is important to stress that works of art-of any quality-do not simply imitate the social situation in which they are produced, or simply resist it.

Cinema in particular has a history of its own; as is well known, the rise of television as an advertising and cultural medium in the fifties and early sixties precipitated an enormous decline in Hollywood revenues.

"Bankable"

The limited recovery of audiences in the late sixties and early seventies has been hedged 1 in by more general economic difficulties.

One result of this has been the 'formula' rather than the "star' film.

Even those stars that remain 'bankable' are dominated overwhelmingly by formulae: how many times Lave Robert Redford and Paul Newman made the same film?

Tie formula is used to sonto: expenditure: after it Em See me sar. Is costs The sardiatons are simple tea-Nares Blaca ior three * = muca. Shelley so much In film. physic which teIS this form.

Special effects dominated, the actors blended into the background.

The script shunted them tidily along from one eruption of green vomit to the next, never raising tiresome problems like motivation, or the relationships between characters.

Disaster The slick smart, successful disaster film reduces characterisation to a conventionalised minimum-in the threatened plane, on the sinking boat, there is always an appealing small child, always an alcoholic, always a plucky invalid or terminal cancer case.

In The Exorcist and The Omen the 'spiritual dimension, while it relies of course on the marketability • which occultism has acquired since the late sixties, is really simply scooping up the 'spirit world' and its effects and dribbling them over the rest of the confection.

Haywire

the successful disaster it is the immediate al world of the characwhich goes haywire. becomes unstable and iLad The Heretic despite special effects which are far superior to any thing in the varlier of and despite a series glossy, scary, brilliantly designed sets, loses its way just at this point.

Picking up the story of The Exorcist at a point four years later in time, it decides to take a stab at becoming a kind of psychological thriller.

And while maybe Hitchcock could break the rules in this way, John Boorman can't.

Good thrillers have the same lack of interest in personal relationships that disaster films display, but they do interest themselves in the origin and nature of the particular violence on which they're centred.

Shell-shocked

Disaster films can't investigate themselves in this way; they can only display, and display.

Richard Burton as the priest goes through the film burnt-out, shell-shocked, stumbling along and muttering unconvincingly about "the soul' and'evil'.

The film keeps interrupting the wonderful scenes full of locusts and other devilish creatures to psychiatrist (Louise Fletcher) as the personification of religion and science.

Science presumably wins out in this debate, since the priest goes down fighting with the demon while the psychiatrist waits, trembling outside the wreckage caused by the struggle for the soul of the exorcised child, now a bouncing teenager, Regan.

Grinning

In fact the film speaks not for science but for self help.

Regan saves herself, as she has brought the possession on herself, by her own spiritual powers; which are such that she can heal the sick merely by grinning at them.

This, of course, is the last straw: Part I was careful to display no interest at all in source of Regan's troubles. But tearing around as it does in search of a theme The Heretic finally opts for the hostility-of-the-modernworld-to-the-spirit.

It goes down heavily with it.

For while Ms Blair (who having played Regan I was presumably the only choice for the role) has a certain hamsterish charm, ethereal she isn't.

Nightgown

teenager traipsing through Penn Station in her nightgown does not evoke notions of the frailty of the spirit in this weary world.

Locusts

The Heretic keeps wandering off with Burton and Blair into realms of phoney spirituality, there to lose itself.

And to lose the audience too; which is too bad, in a way, since the final whirlwind of locusts which destroys a substantial section of the elegant Washington suburb of Georgetown, was well worth staying for.

NEXT WEEK 'Socialist Press will next week contain a review of the pamphlet published today by the Hotel and Catering Workers National Action Committee, "The Hotel StrikesLessons for Unionisation" . The pamphlet recounts the struggles for unionisation at the Trust Houses Forte hotels in Oxford.

Sheffield and Birmingham and the Linton

Scan page 9

OCCUPATION PRESS, Wed resdry 16 No the fight demands HOUNSLOW -HOSPITAL bills.

Such a demand flies in the face of the main focus of government policy, and raises the need for a break in the reactionary Lib-Lab coalition, which stands as a barrier to socialist policies.

----- pull-quotes -----

seems safe to say, at a "popu- lar market; though consider-