William Friedkin's "The Exorcist" – Hell of a Film

A little while ago I commented that, for all its flaws, at least Return of the Jedi managed to spawn an original and long lasting Halloween outfit: the Slave Leia.

Other films have attempted to introduce new swearwords or slang into our lives.  In Chan-wook Park's Oldboy, the character Oh Dae-Su returns to the world after a fifteen-year imprisonment to find that the kids have coined a new swearword: dickshit.  In Mark Waters' Mean Girls, the character Gretchen Wieners tries unsuccessfully to foist ‘fetch’ as a new piece of slang onto her friends.

William Friedkin’s The Exorcist is notable for using the word ‘cunting’ twice.  ‘Cunting’ was not added to the Oxford English Dictionary until March 2014 but it was alive and well in the mouth of the character Burke Dennings in The Exorcist in 1973.  While the OED defines the word as an intensifier, similar to ‘fucking’, there seems to be an extra sense in its use in The Exorcist of ‘like a cunt’ or ‘cunt of a…’

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The first time Dennings utters the word, he is drunk at a party and accuses a guest he believes is a Nazi as a ‘cunting Hun’.  The second time we hear it, is from the twelve-year-old possessed girl Regan, who is made to speak in Dennings’ voice by a demon to say ‘Do you know what she did?  Your cunting daughter?’  This is after he has been killed by the possessed Regan.  If the demon had said ‘Your cunt of a daughter’ it would have ruined the iambic flow and we all know the devil gets the best poetry.

It’s typical of William Peter Blatty’s intelligent and devilishly sparky script that this unusual word links the two speeches and gives the audience a nudge that it is Dennings’ voice coming from the little girl.  It provides all the proof that Regan’s mother needs that her daughter has indeed killed Dennings.

Fans of modern classical music often despair that nothing later than Stravinsky seems capable of making an impact on modern society.  In fact, there are two places where modern music is alive and well in popular culture: one is in the ‘before’ section of adverts plugging anti-migraine pills.  The other is in horror films trying to summon the spirit of Bernard Herrmann's screeching strings in Hitchcock's Psycho.  The Exorcist uses passages of top-flight modern composers Krzysztof Penderecki and Hans Werner Henze at the beginning and end of the film.  Sadly for music fans, the use of these passages (for both the ads and the films) seems to be when a director asks for ‘an ungodly racket,’ ‘the worst imaginable sound,’ or ‘an aural representation of a living hell.’

A lot of people have said a lot of things about The Exorcist, which is why I’ve gone a little left-field for this review.  Watching it again, I was struck by the mastery of every scene.  Compare the opening shots of the Iraqi archaeological dig with similar scenes in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, for example.  Friedkin aces the scene, with herds of sheep flowing along the bottom of the shot.

As though to justify the outlandish elements of the script, which asks us to believe in an actual demon, there are multiple evocations of hellish aspects of the real-life world, from the hints of the holocaust in Dennings’ rant, mental illness, loneliness and abandonment of the elderly, child abuse, the trauma of broken families, painful and hopeless medical procedures.

Vastly more ambitious than the average horror flick, The Exorcist also leaves its audiences with visual images as memorable as any in film.

Personal Score: 9/10

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This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde" – Trojan Horse

Bonnie and Clyde is an interesting film because it appears to be a semi-fictionalized account of American bandits Bonnie and Clyde and yet contains almost nothing that actually happened to the real-life crims.

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Now I’m not one of these idiots who gets upset when some detail is changed from a historical account.  Once you write a screenplay you are in a world of fiction and besides, who can justifiably claim to be able to walk in the shoes of people from the past?  One, we can never know all the facts and two, the facts are unavoidably distorted through the prism of our modern lives.

Still, if you manipulate the narrative shape of a real-life story, you’d better make sure you do a better job artistically than the actual events.  Real life has a habit of providing messier but more satisfying cause and effect in narrative arcs than fictionalized screenplays, which can seem contrived in comparison.

But there’s more going on with this film.  When you name a film after two historical characters and when you have the two leads dominating the film to the extent that they do in Bonnie and Clyde, you might be entitled to think that there was at least a semblance of real events being shown, even if they are heavily fictionalized.  But beyond the idea that a couple go on the run robbing banks, write some bad poetry, and end up shot to pieces in an ambush, there is nothing historical here whatsoever.

The folksy stories of them acting all Robin Hood in hold-ups, the characteristics of Blanche, Clyde’s impotence, the character of C.W. Moss… in short, everything… is made-up or taken from other historical characters.

Why does it matter?  Well, the film spends a lot of time making the audience root for Bonnie and Clyde.  Blanche’s unhistorical screaming and pathetic behaviour are there to make Bonnie look cool.  Clyde’s journey from impotent gutter hogger to bowling a perfect strike in the sack would be a touching piece of emotional development if it wasn’t between two psychotic killers. And there are plenty of scenes designed to show the banks that B&C rob as heartless corporations taking houses away from hardworking Americans.

True, the wider impact of B&C’s actions is shown.  We see the heavily bruised face of a guard that Clyde has hit with his pistol.  We see another policeman shot in the face as the robbers try to get away.  There is a rather wonderful performance from Mabel Cavitt as Bonnie's mother, ignoring Clyde's attempts to charm her.  And Bonnie’s poetry is given plenty of airtime to dig its own grave.  These points are there but the overwhelming impression generated by the film is that the banks somehow deserve to be robbed, and that poverty has been a justifiable driver behind Clyde’s actions in particular.

When you combine this with the charismatic performances put in by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty as Bonnie and Clyde, which again have the effect of making the audience root for the couple, the whole thing seems to add up to a slickly produced piece of propaganda for whatever social messages Beatty as the producer wanted to get across: a Trojan horse with the shell of a true story concealing a political payload.

Personal Score: 7/10

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This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Mike Nichols' "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" – To The Shite-House

Another film towards the bottom of the IMDB 250 list, another stage adaption.  In this case it is Mike Nichols’ version of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  He breaks up the stage action with some outdoor and location shots, though, as well as some ingenious lighting and close camera shots of characters as they walk around the set.

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The world has perhaps too many campus novels and plays and I can’t say I share some writers’ apparently endless fascination with the bed-hopping and worldly-wise dialogue of jaded academics.  But this is a pretty sophisticated piece of drama that’s been given a decent treatment in Mike Nichols’ film.  Yes, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton ham it up massively at times and some of the earlier drunken sequences are not completely convincing, but then they also both have many moments of acting genius to compensate.  Burton in particular delivers some beautifully quiet and understated lines and convincingly shows how his character is control of most situations he finds himself in.

Sandy Denis plays athletic Nick’s wife Sandy, who spends a lot of the film looking for a loo to be sick in after getting drunk.  Less of “To The Lighthouse” and more “To The Shite-House.”

Elizabeth Taylor put on weight for this role and looks strikingly like and older Helena Bonham Carter at times, and Bonham Carter was later cast to play Taylor in the TV movie “Burton and Taylor”.

So, what does the title mean?  On the one hand it’s a joke between academics at a party that took place before the film starts, a playful turn on “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf’ with scary, austere Virginia substituted.  But at the end, when the fantasy of an imaginary child is laid bare, we are left with the lines:

George: Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Martha: I am, George, I am.

Looking online, most people explain these lines and by extension the title, by saying that Virginia Woolf represents reality and that the characters finally face up to reality at the end of the play by killing off their imaginary child.  I happen to be reading Woolf’s novel Orlando at the moment – described on the back cover as “the tale of an extraordinary individual who lives through centuries of English history, first as a man, then as a woman.”  Hardly a realist novel.  I couldn’t help wondering if those final lines of the film really meant “Who’s afraid of becoming Virginia Woolf” – the characters frantically spinning fantasies and fictions in an attempt to avoid confronting a mental illness that has the force to overpower them.

George: Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Martha: I am, George, I am.

Personal Score: 7/10

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This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Elia Kazan's "A Streetcar Named Desire" – The Gender Game

I recently saw a stage production of Tennessee Williams’ memory play The Glass Menagerie and it was interesting to see this film version of his next great play, A Streetcar Named Desire, fairly soon afterwards.

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There are some obvious thematic links between Menagerie and Desire, such as the dilemma of a sibling as to whether to stay or leave a dysfunctional family, and the desire of a mentally unstable woman to marry in order to save herself from a world that she is not capable of living in on her own.

Gender roles are very prominent in Desire.  Stanley (Marlon Brando) is the ultimate macho man, fighting, rude, card-playing, wife-beating, shrewd and money-focused in his role as the ultimate breadwinner.  Blanche (Vivien Leigh) plays a role herself as the ultimate Southern belle, and Stella (Kim Hunter) the little wife who keeps coming back for more (although the film does diverge from the play in having her leave her violent husband at the end).

The skill of the play and the film is the slow release of information about Blanche’s character and background, which drives the plot from beginning to end, and Vivien Leigh pulls this off superbly.  All three of the leads leave a strong memory of a character created in this film, which is no doubt why it has remained a classic since its release in 1951.  Brando in particular is a huge presence on the screen.

It’s hard not to think of Judith Butler’s 1988 essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution" when watching this film.  If the performance of gender leads to the creation of gender in real life, the character of Blanche self-consciously performs the actions of that most stylised of female models, the Southern belle.  And Stanley – who is referred to as coming from the Stone Age in the script – is the stereotypical hard man, his macho armour no doubt hiding a sensitive soul underneath and we do see signs of that sensitive side breaking through at various points in the play.

The film does not refer to the homosexuality of Blanche’s husband.  We’re told he killed himself but the reasons are more generalized than in the play.  The British artist Grayson Perry’s currenttelevision series about male gender roles, "All Man” shows a similar preoccupation with Williams in his simultaneous fascination, awe and fear of the macho working class male.  Both Perry and Williams have well documented macho fathers who disapproved of their effeminate ways.  (In Perry’s case, a macho father and a macho step-father.)

Personal Score: 8/10

Follow @MichaelHardach



This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.