Old Yorker

  • Magic

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Attenborough (1978)

    Thanks to Michael Redgrave in Dead of Night (1945), any screen actor taking on the role of a psychotic ventriloquist, dominated by his alter ego dummy, has a hard act to follow.  Redgrave’s Maxwell Frere and his malign partner Hugo don’t cast such a long shadow over a novelist working a similar theme.  Besides, when William Goldman’s Magic was published in 1976, its author could do no wrong, at least in the eyes of Hollywood producers.  His screenplay for George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which won Goldman his first Oscar, helped give 20th Century Fox the top-grossing American movie of 1969.  In the same year that Magic was published, Goldman adapted his own novel Marathon Man and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men for the screen.  Both films (directed by John Schlesinger and Alan J Pakula respectively) did well at the box office, and All the President’s Men won four Oscars, including a second for Goldman.  Before Magic even arrived in bookshops, producer Joseph E Levine had bought the film rights and signed up its author for the screenplay.  Goldman’s surname was proving to be as good as it sounded – a guaranteed Midas touch.  Even A Bridge Too Far (1977) – which he wrote, Levine produced and Richard Attenborough directed – didn’t, despite some critical mauling, break the commercial spell.

    Nor did Attenborough’s film of Magic, though it didn’t set box offices alight either.  It’s possible that the casting of the lead role – the doomed Charles ‘Corky’ Withers – affected ticket sales:  Anthony Hopkins wasn’t a big name in Hollywood at the time.  But word of mouth may have played its part, too, because Magic is a stupid film and, although not long (107 minutes), a turgid one.  At the start, Corky is trying and failing to make a career as a professional magician, on the contemporary New York club circuit.  To be more specific, he does card tricks, and on stage is not just reluctant to engage with the audience but seems almost withdrawn.  We watch his act go down like a lead balloon with a bored, verging on hostile, audience; we hear Corky floundering, too, until he snaps and yells at the punters – at which point Richard Attenborough cuts out the sound, and focuses on aghast faces around the club.  Corky’s dying mentor, Merlin (E J André), tells him he needs a stage gimmick.  By the time we next see him, Corky has taken Merlin’s advice.  Now his card tricks are merely the introduction to his main act.  He’s a ventriloquist whose dummy, Fats, comes out with one lewd expletive after another.  In the words of Corky’s agent, elderly Ben Greene (Burgess Meredith), Fats is ‘the first X-rated dummy on the block’.

    The new act is such a hit in clubs that Ben is on the point of getting Corky his own TV show – once, that is, he’s done some chat shows, building up to Johnny Carson’s, and has taken the television network’s medical examination.  At this point, Corky flees New York City to take refuge in the Catskills:  he’s terrified that a medical will uncover his serious mental problems – will reveal that Fats is Corky’s id and beyond his control.  The set-up is highly unconvincing.  Corky is quite bereft of performing flair; you wonder what drew him to being a pro magician in the first place.  The answer seems to be that magic requires many hours of private offstage practice and gives an accomplished exponent audience control and, by (dubious) extension, self-control.  In which case, why does Corky choose a ‘gimmick’ whereby he cedes self-control?  The answer this time is that, unless he does, William Goldman doesn’t have a story.  You also wonder how Ben Greene can be the canny show-business operator he’s meant to be if he thinks ‘the first X-rated dummy on the block’ will be allowed to express himself on the Carson show, let alone star in his own series on mainstream mid-1970s American TV.

    Looking for somewhere to hide out, Corky just happens – or is it fate?! – to fetch up at a lakeside property owned by Peggy Ann Snow (Ann-Margret).  The same Peggy Ann Snow that Corky had a crush on when they were in high school together, and who now rents out cabins on her property.  Twenty-odd years ago, Corky was too shy to let Peggy know his feelings.  It’s different now:  once he’s booked into his cabin, he does a card trick for her, they bond spiritually and have great sex.  The only hitch is that Peggy’s in a loveless (childless) marriage to Duke, currently away on business.  He’s a rancorous estate agent manqué; when Duke (Ed Lauter) eventually appears, you understand why he failed as an estate agent because he looks more a cartoon redneck serial killer.  Duke is instantly suspicious of new cabin tenant Corky.  And jealous Fats takes instantly against Peggy, a new rival for Corky’s attention.

    It’s clearly not going to end well and the plotting is predictable – except that Goldman has Ben Greene act against type to get things going – but this hardly prepares you for how much bloody mayhem is to come.  Ben tracks Corky down to Peggy’s place and arrives midway through a furious argument between Corky and Fats (conducted not only fortissimo but with the cabin door left wide open).  Ben suddenly switches from wheeler-dealer to compassionate human being, urging Corky to seek immediate psychiatric help.  When he refuses, Ben exits to get the help on his client’s behalf but doesn’t progress far.  Fats orders Corky to stop Ben; Corky uses the dummy’s wooden head to bludgeon Ben to death – until, that is, Ben revives, so Corky has to drown him in the lake.  By next morning, Duke has returned and takes Corky out in a rowing boat.  While Corky oars, Duke fishes and tries to reel in a whopper … what can it be at the end of his line?  Corky is scared stiff, but any viewer will guess this is a false alarm, and that it won’t be Ben (the whopper is a hefty tree branch).  Duke soon does find Ben, though, lying beside the lake; for some reason, he thinks the corpse could still be alive and uselessly administers the kiss of life.  After that, he heads to Corky’s temporarily unoccupied cabin, where Duke discovers the wallet and ID taken from Ben’s body.  Duke is planning his next move when Corky returns and puts a knife in him.  To be honest, I’ve already forgotten what he does with Duke’s corpse.  Corky asks Peggy to run away with him.  She says she will but must let Duke know first.  Fats, in overdrive, first informs Peggy that Corky’s card trick is a seducer’s ruse, then tells Corky to kill Peggy.  It’s a relief when Corky disobeys orders and stabs himself fatally, enabling Magic to end.

    The moment Fats appears on the screen, it’s plain to see he’s in charge of Corky.  The dummy has a disproportionately large head; his face is designed as a grotesque caricature of Anthony Hopkins’ face – as if Corky wanted to make plain to the world the psychosis he spends most of the film desperately trying to conceal.  Richard Attenborough, even in the story’s climax, has the pair wearing matching shirts and sweaters, in case we still haven’t got the relationship between them.  Corky seems just as likely a name as Fats for a ventriloquist’s dummy and would suit this dummy better than it suits Charles Withers:  whoever gave him the nickname Corky was an ironist – bubbly and bouncy he’s not.   Yet Hopkins, despite everything, doesn’t fare badly in the Redgrave stakes and is the only good reason for staying with Magic.  Making Fats irresistibly imposing at least allows Hopkins to make Corky interestingly unprepossessing.  Although Hopkins isn’t tall (5’ 9”), he’s usually a strong physical presence.  Here, he’s a small, greyish figure, fitting neatly into cinematographer Victor J Kemper’s drab colour scheme.  Outdoors and indoors, the film often looks underlit, but at least this helps Hopkins’ Corky seem camouflaged.

    Even Hopkins’ naturally musical, resonant voice is muted and unremarkable in Magic.  That chimes with what may be a tendency of entertainers who make a living putting on different voices.  Interviewed on talk shows, impressionists can seem uneasy speaking in their own voice, keep reverting to the voices of those they’ve made a professional success of pretending to be.  And when they do use their own voice, you can sometimes understand the unease.  The Mike Yarwood Show was a fixture of primetime weekend TV in 1970s Britain.  Yarwood often closed the show with a song, in which he briefly stopped impersonating others.  He always prefaced the switch with, ‘And this is me …’.  He did well to make that clear; Yarwood’s own voice was weakly impersonal.  It may be a coincidence that Anthony Hopkins is himself a famously accomplished mimic of other actors; and ventriloquists may anyway be a different breed from impressionists in this respect.  Even so, you get the sense from Hopkins as Corky that the actor has an intuitive understanding of the impersonator’s vocal paranoia.  That isn’t nearly enough, though, to engage viewers emotionally in Corky’s terrible plight – especially when everything is made so obvious so soon, and the narrative gets to feel protracted.  (That may have been another advantage Michael Redgrave had – ‘The Ventriloquist’s Dummy’ segment of Dead of Night runs around twenty minutes.)  And though Ann-Margret is likeable as well as (too?) glamorous as Peggy, and Burgess Meredith good value as Ben, they can’t help too much.

    There’s reason to think Richard Attenborough didn’t particularly want to direct Magic.  He agreed to do so as part of a deal with Joseph E Levine to secure financing for Gandhi (1982), although Levine subsequently changed his mind, and Attenborough had to pay him ‘$2 million and a percentage of the profits to get the rights back’.  That’s according to Wikipedia, which also quotes Attenborough as saying that ‘I think for me the attraction of Magic was Tony Hopkins. It was always Tony and I think really that I did the picture for him’.  A Turner Classic Movies note (by Matthew Ownby) says different, naming Gene Wilder ‘as Attenborough’s first choice to play Corky’.  Still, there’s no doubt that Hopkins was already and continued to be one of Richard Attenborough’s go-to actors.  Magic was far from the finest hour of either man, but enduring it is made easier by the thought of a later, successful collaboration between them.  Shadowlands (1993), the fifth and last Attenborough picture in which Anthony Hopkins appeared, may also be the best of all the twelve films that Richard Attenborough directed.

    16 August 2026

     

     

     

  • Privilege

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Watkins (1967)

    As a standalone picture, Privilege is a shambles.  In the context of Peter Watkins’ filmmaking career and political outlook, it can’t fail to be interesting, but is dismaying, too.  A voiceover explains at the start that Privilege is set in England ‘in the near future’, where a coalition government ‘has recently asked all entertainment agencies to usefully divert the violence of youth – keep them happy, off the streets and out of politics’.  Promoting the celebrity of the country’s favourite pop star, Steven Shorter, is central to this bread-and-circuses strategy.  The film’s first big set piece features Steve’s stage show.  He’s handcuffed and in a prison cell.  The cell is then unlocked; two uniformed policemen drag Steve out and beat him up.  He sings to the auditorium (and to camera) of his pain [1].  At the show’s climax, Steve, assisted by rioting fans who invade the stage, fights back against his assailants, before order is restored and he’s re-incarcerated.

    Watkins devotes the next part of the narrative to showing how Steve, even when uncaged, is trapped, and miserable.  Everything he does and says is controlled by his managers within the music industry.  Press and TV cameras are on him relentlessly.  Yet he’s completely isolated in his private life – as Vanessa Ritchie, a young artist commissioned to paint Steve’s portrait, soon perceives.  Privilege then switches to a more ambitious and sinister phase of Steve’s exploitation by the government, now in cahoots with not only his management but also representatives of the moribund Church of England.  (It’s also revealed at this point by the narrative voiceover that the coalition partners are Labour and the Conservatives, that monolithic government makes sense because the policies of the two parties have become indistinguishable.  This got a knowing laugh from the NFT2 audience, though the gibe is as untrue today as it was in 1967.)  Steven Shorter’s image will no longer be that of rebel whose (vague) non-conformism must be punished.  Instead, he’ll publicly repent and perform songs with religious lyrics.  He will thereby encourage many of his generation to follow suit, massively increase churchgoing across the land, and inspire both conformity and flag-waving national unity.  (The flag is the Union Jack rather than the Cross of St George, although the other home nations never get a mention in the film.)

    The crusade is launched in ‘the national stadium’ at a huge rally where 49,000 people are converted to Steve’s new outlook; they line up, vowing to conform.  Steve, unhappier than ever, confides in and sleeps with Vanessa, but she tells him they can’t have a future together and he doesn’t argue.  He saves that for a music industry ceremony where he’s presented with a prestigious award.  He tells the gathering what he thinks of them, his other exploiters and their attempts to turn him into a false messiah.  As a result of this outburst, Steve’s public immediately turns against him, and his investors instantly withdraw their support.  His punishment is to be silenced.  The voiceover postscript informs us that some archival footage of Steven Shorter remains, but ‘with the soundtrack removed’.  The voiceover, spoken by Peter Watkins himself, adds that, ‘It is going to be a happy time in England this year, in the future’.

    The film involved an odd assortment of talents.  In the lead role, Paul Jones, who had just left Manfred Mann to embark on a solo singing career but had never acted professionally.  As Vanessa, the 1960s supermodel Jean Shrimpton, another acting newcomer.  The original screenplay was by Johnny Speight, who’d recently become well known as the creator of the TV sitcom Till Death Us Do Part; Watkins developed Speight’s screenplay with the New York writer Norman Bogner.  The script is, to put it kindly, light on important detail.  At the start, Steve’s audience in the theatre looks to be entirely female:  you immediately wonder what’s happening to divert the presumably larger problem of male youth violence, and Watkins gives no indication that anyone other than Steve is being actively used as an instrument of political policy.  At the end, you’ve no idea what effect the award ceremony debacle has had on the government’s appetite for brainwashing, or if they’ve someone lined up to replace Steve as a popular idol.  In the interim, it’s unclear whether the repent-to-conform drive is designed to build on the fruits of the violence-diversion campaign or simply to replace it.

    In the sixties (and long after), pop was widely considered a liberating force for British youth – a means of self-expression, an area of relative autonomy.  This may have been simplistic (the degree of freedom probably depended a bit on social class and economic means, for example), but it wasn’t groundless.  Watkins is so determined to subvert this view that he refuses to give pop and pop singers their due.  He so hates pop’s commercial possibilities that he won’t show what’s being done to, and through, Steven Shorter as the corruption of something positive.  As a result, it’s very hard to see why Steve appealed to people in the first place.  You hope against hope that Paul Jones, his face a mask of suffering, might be allowed to give hints of what made him popular and attractive.  ‘Go on, Paul,’ you keep wanting to say, ‘Sing “Do Wah Diddy Diddy”.  Sing “Pretty Flamingo”.  Sing “High Time”.’  (That was Jones’ first solo single and reached number 4 in autumn 1966.)  There’s not a chance, because Watkins controls everything that his leading man does.

    This is more than just the impression you get from watching Privilege.  In a 1993 piece for Sight and Sound, Paul Jones recalled making the film.  Before Watkins approached him, he had no acting ambitions.  He’d appeared in one school play (and not for long in that:  it was Macbeth and he was Duncan).  Jones remembers that:

    ‘… I thought of movies as the work of the director rather than the cast.  So I was ready to do as I was told, within reason, by a man who was highly regarded in a profession where I was an absolute beginner.  In a newspaper interview I was asked how I went about a task for which I was so untrained; I replied that Peter Watkins showed me what he wanted for each scene before we shot it, and I merely mimicked him.  This upset Peter, I think because of the implication (unintended) that he was dictatorial; and in any case, he said, he was already mimicking me when he went through the scenes, so my performance was my imitation of his imitation of me …’

    For a story set in the more-or-less contemporary pop world, Privilege doesn’t have much of a soundtrack.  At the national stadium rally and subsequently, there are upbeat arrangements of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ and ‘Jerusalem’; these are presumably meant to be satirical, though (as I recall) the C of E’s awkward efforts to get on the younger generation’s wavelength were already a joke by the late 1960s.  (You’d have thought, incidentally, that a conformism drive might have looked for hymns with less activist, more lulling words and tunes than ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ and ‘Jerusalem’.)  There’s some instrumental music, as well as the dire ‘Free Me’, reprised at the rally with different, government-sanctioned lyrics.  Mike Leander, a successful record producer and arranger, as well as composer or co-composer of plenty of hits in the 1960s and beyond[2], is officially responsible for this soundtrack, but you wonder if he too was only following instructions.  Leander’s other original composition for the film isn’t just much better than the rest of the music.  It’s also the number which is most revealing of Watkins’ attitude to pop.

    Mike Leander’s ‘I’ve Been a Bad Bad Boy’ was released as a single in early 1967, shortly before Privilege arrived in British cinemas, and gave Paul Jones another top ten hit.  It’s a nice tune with neat lyrics; Jones (as you can see on YouTube) sang it with a good deal of pretend-rueful charm.  In the film, however, he doesn’t perform it at all on screen; ‘I’ve Been a Bad Bad Boy’ is used instead to typify disposable pop pap.  The first time it’s heard, it’s merely background and virtually irrelevant to the images it accompanies.  The next time, the song is used more pointedly, playing on a transistor radio in Vanessa’s studio.  Steve turns the dial to another radio station and the song’s playing there, too; then to another station, where …  Yet ‘I’m a Bad Bad Boy’, whose words are all about (romantic) contrition, doesn’t feature in relation to Steve’s conversion to faux-religious penitence.  In other words, Watkins ignores a clear opportunity to show how pop might be used as a cunning, seductive weapon to manipulate public opinion.

    The start of Privilege – mock newsreel plus authoritative voiceover – primes the film’s audience for a quasi-documentary framework, which naturally brings the narrative structure of Watkins’ The War Game (1966) to mind.  Not for long, though.  Actual footage of 1960s teenage-girl pop fans screaming and weeping is so familiar (and was when Privilege was made) that the audience for Steve’s stage show – with a collection of film extras acting hysterical – verges on embarrassing.  It’s hard to believe the director responsible for these shots is the same man who put alarmingly convincing pseudo-documentary personnel on camera in The War Game.  Privilege soon degenerates into bitter but crude lampoon.  Mixed up in its heavy-handed condemnation of ‘national states, working via religion, the mass media, sports, popular culture, etc, [to] divert a potential political challenge by young people’ (to quote Peter Watkins) is a more familiar parable about short-lived celebrity.  The music business types pulling Steven Shorter’s strings – a slimy PR man (Mark London), a Jewish record company executive (Max Bacon), a suave financial backer (William Job) – are cartoons much inferior to their counterparts in, say, Val Guest’s Expresso Bongo (1959).

    Watkins also relies on the same here-today-gone-tomorrow formula to bring the story to a conclusion, never mind that he cloaks it in politically ominous disguise.  Given the Triumph of the Will-style rally that’s gone before, Steve’s supposedly stunning act of self-assertion at a mere record industry lunch is a bit of an anti-climax.  What happens at the lunch also contradicts the film’s premise that the powers-that-be keep him on a tight leash:  it makes no sense that, as he carries on biting the hand that feeds him, no one intervenes to shut Steve up – explaining that he’s not himself, has been working too hard, or something – but that, of course, wouldn’t suit Watkins’ purpose.  Clutching his award, Steve is lost for words to begin with.  Once he finds his voice, everyone else in the room is struck dumb until he has said his piece, which it takes ages for him to do.

    A few good actors, including James Cossins and Doreen Mantle, pop up in bit parts.  Jeremy Child makes Steve’s choleric manager somewhat more individual than the role deserves.  Jean Shrimpton is limited, to say the least, but the quiet scenes between Vanessa and Steve come as a relief – a change from the film’s prevailing hectic overstatement.  Whereas Shrimpton never acted again, Paul Jones went on to enjoy sustained success performing in better-known musicals.  In 1976 he was Juan Peron on the original concept album of Evita.  During the 1980s, he took over from Ian Charleson as Sky Masterson in Richard Eyre’s famous production of Guys and Dolls at the National Theatre, where Jones also played Macheath for Eyre in The Beggar’s Opera; and was Fred/Petruchio opposite Nichola McAuliffe’s Lilli/Kate in an RSC production of Kiss Me Kate that transferred to the West End.  Also in the 1980s, Paul Jones converted (from atheism) to Christianity, after accepting an invitation from Cliff Richard to attend a Luis Palau rally at White City.  Heaven only knows what Peter Watkins made of that turn of events.

    What Watkins made of the negative reception of Privilege, though, is a matter of public record:  BFI’s handout for this screening comprised the director’s recollections of the film, as well as Paul Jones’, for Sight and Sound in May 1993.  Watkins’ comments in this piece reinforce the impression given by the extract from a 2002 filmed interview with him that was shown as part of the introduction to the BFI screening of The War Game less than a week before this Privilege screening.  In Watkins’ view, Privilege:

    ‘… was prescient of the way that popular culture and the media in the US commercialised the anti-war and counter-culture movement in that country … also ominously predicted what was to happen in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s – especially during the period of the Falkland Islands War … was heavily attacked for being ‘hysterical’ when it first appeared in Britain … The fact that everything which was shown or implied in the film came about in Britain in subsequent years – especially during the nationalistic period of Margaret Thatcher – has done nothing to change the status of Privilege as another marginalised film.’

    Watkins goes on to allege, inter alia, that ‘one scene from Privilege appears to have been directly copied and used in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange’ (it’s implied without acknowledgement of the source).  On the evidence of what Watkins told S&S, there’s nothing about Privilege that he considers defective, nothing that, on reflection, he feels he might have done differently.  Peter Watkins’ political convictions act as their own justification and evidently blind him to the merits or otherwise of the films through which he expresses those convictions.  Any adverse criticism is proof that the establishment doesn’t want people to hear the truth.  The truth in this case, alas, is that Privilege is a lousy film.

    8 August 2026

    [1] ‘My body all aching/My hands are tied/I need my freedom/Not your sympathy/Look, you needn’t love me/Just set me free/Come on, come on/Set me free/Set me free …’

    [2] Just a few examples.  Mike Leander co-wrote Paul Jones’ ‘High Time’.  In the year that Privilege appeared, Leander became ‘the only orchestral arranger other than [George] Martin to work on the recording of a Beatles basic track’ (Wikipedia):  at Paul McCartney’s request, Leander arranged ‘She’s Leaving Home’ on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band because George Martin ‘was unavailable at the time’.  Leander also executive-produced the 1970 concept album of Jesus Christ Superstar.  It’s worth noting in that connection that the character of Steven Shorter, at least in Paul Jones’ benumbed playing of him, rather anticipates the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice idea of Jesus as ‘just a man’, overwhelmed by the pressures of fame and messianic expectation.

     

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