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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 on hearing this poem recited (preferably in a shrill, nasal voice with a New Yawk accent): Abracadabra, I sit on his knee. Presto chnago, 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 wasn’t among those frightened by the TV commercial, 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.
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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: s 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
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Ann-Margret as Peggy Ann Snow-Wayne
Burgess Meredith as Ben Greene
Ed Lauter as Ronnie "Duke" Wayne
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Fats
That 20th 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. Magic’s boon and bane has 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 alive (Devil Doll, The Twilight Zone episodes, “The Dummy” & “Caesar & Me”). 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.
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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, increasingly malevolent 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 opportunities. But the filmmakers are content to rely on Fats’ spectacularly chilling puppet design to do all the heavy lifting, horror-wise.
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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 overfamiliar 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 clouded me to what it was.
Only After returning to see Magic again was I able to appreciate how cinematically William Goldman adapted his novel. It’s not without its flaws, but it’s an engrossing -albeit familiar- story very well told and exceptionally wellacted. The Catskills setting has a chilly foreboding about it that's 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.
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"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 an 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 whomever was chosen, Attenborough seemingly 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.”
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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 a beauty. In the manner of all 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 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 boy's fantasy into a living-breathing woman, 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
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Funny Girl.)
If magic is problematic on television because you can't misdirect the camera; ventriloquism in the movies always opens the question of postdubbing. Much was made at the time of Hopkins learning ventriloquism and doing the voice of Fats. Some 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 make 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. And the fact that the act is so lousy is only exacerbated by constantly 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 the toupee-wearing TV executive Mr. Todson (David Ogden Stiers), Fats slips and accidentally on-purpose calls him "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 Goldmsith; they represent Magic at the top of its game.
Amateur Night Breakdown
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Meeting of the Minds
"Make Fats shut up for five minutes."
The Thing in the Lake
If 1978 audiences were left disappointed by Magic not living up to the horror suggested by the commercials (among the audience I saw it with, I remember the degree of consternation born of the film ending with Ann-Margret's nearunintelligible closing line: [Delivered in a voice imitative of Fats] - "You may not get this oppor-fuckin-tunity tomorrow!�); audiences since then have come to appreciate Magic as an entertainingly engrossing, mature thriller effectively employing the devices of the genre while being a moving parable about using illusions to mask our vulnerability and fear of rejection.
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THE AUTOGRAPH FILES
Actor Jerry Houser, who made his film debut in The Summer of '42 (1971), plays the cabdriver in Magic.
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 an excellent 2012 short film titled, The Ventriloquist.
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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's-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'm doubtful Johnson would have matched Hopkins' dramatic virtuosity, but I'm 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. I actually happen to be friends with a magician, one who actually knows Peggy Ann Snow! Emmy-nominated illusionist Larry Wilson was Ann-Margret's opening act for a time. Credentials don't get much better than that! Visit Spellbinders International Festival of Magic Copyright © Ken Anderson About Ken Anderson LA-based writer and lifelong film enthusiast. You can read more of his essays on films of the ’60s & ‘70s at Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For
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