Product: Magic [VHS] (1978)
Rating: 3.0
When the stuffing's removed....
It may be worth asking whether "Magic" is the dismal failure critics have claimed, especially since some of the criticisms fall wide of the mark. We can dismiss, for instance, a critic who maintained that the theme of the film ----- a ventriloquist whose consciousness transfers to a wooden dummy ----- was such a horror cliché that it made the film a waste of time.That particular criticism is invalid, since few people launch similar complaints about the endless succession of films about vampires, werewolves, and Faustian scientists, or the many films on alien invasions. The above-mentioned critic might retort that these themes are "archetypal," and therefore merit as many variations as audiences might demand. But even that justification is pointless, since the essential theme of "Magic" is psychic duality, a theme falling well within the confines of traditional fantasy. In other words, the motif of the ventriloquist-and-his-alter ego, which has shown up in films as varied as "The Great Gabbo" (1929), "Svengali" (1931), "Dead of Night" (1945) and "Devil Doll" (1964) is simply another manifestation of the doppelganger theme, which is as much a fixture of the horror genre as any of the other themes mentioned.So that leaves is with the question of treatment, or let's say: "production values."On the acting front, Anthony Hopkins easily steals the show as the bedeviled ventriloquist, while Ann-Margret does a creditable job as his long-lost paramour, displaying a fair amount of "brains as well as boobs." But Burgess Meredith, playing Hopkins's manager, chews some scenery trying to look like a shrewd entrepreneur, to the point where his "jokes" fall totally flat (e.g., offering Hopkins a cigar, saying "Take two, they're big," as if he's just served up a gem).This brings us to the shaky script by William Goldman, whose talents seem to have eluded him for the bulk of this film. It's almost impossible to believe that Goldman was the same man who penned the scripts for "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The Stepford Wives," both of which were models of cinematic wit. "Magic," by contrast, falls apart almost completely: when we're not enduring the one-liners of Meredith, we're groaning at the ostentatious swearing of his protégé's wooden sidekick. As Meredith says at one point near the beginning of the film, trying to sell his act to a TV executive: "I've got a ventriloquist teamed with the first X-rated dummy on the block. Eat your heart out."Well, we're not exactly eating. Perhaps it's worthwhile, however, in this context, to relate an anecdote from personal experience, to help illustrate why "Magic" fails on a rhetorical level.About ten years ago I unknowingly purchased an expurgated edition of "Magic" on VHS. Believing I had the original version, I popped it into my VCR, only to discover that all the X-rated words of the dummy had been edited out and replaced by words like "darn" and "heck." At first this seemed a good idea, since a lot of the cussing in the original version seemed superfluous. But as the picture moved along I cringed. Every time the dummy opened its mouth and uttered its sanitized lines, it became obvious how sterile the dialogue was in other respects. In other words, it became clear that the X-rated lingo was thrown in for the same reason as the nudging, winking performance of Burgess Meredith, trying to "impress" the viewer for all the wrong reasons.This, I think, is the main reason "Magic" fails in the long run. Not that it's a bad film in some respects. The performance of Hopkins is brilliant, and the mere appearance of the dummy in many scenes, due to its ability to conjure up some incredibly creepy facial expressions, makes for some scary moments. The music score, for its part, is very effective, especially the "demonic" harmonica riffs that seem borrowed, to some extent, from an old Twilight Zone episode called "Printer's Devil." Atmospherically, in other words, the film is suitably dark and eerie in its more somber sequences.But it's the pandering tone of "Magic" that ultimately undermines it, almost as if the director, Richard Attenborough, had no real interest in the film and so decided to resort to gimmickry to get its points across. On one level we're intrigued by the theme of a shy, repressed stage-magician whose "dark side" gets expressed through his ventriloquized alter ego, and who, during the course of the film, almost gets his girl. But when all the dust settles and the blood dries, we're left with the feeling we've been conned, so that what might have been a forceful dissection of abnormal psychology becomes ---- well, just a very wooden dummy with its guts pulled out.