Film 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 20^th 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be more specific, he does card tricks, and on stage is not just reluctant to engage with the audience but seems almost withdrawn.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