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The image is a chapel candle flickering in a red glass, Sidney Lumet shoots it to resemble police siren lights. The initial feint on Anderson's If.... has boys with sinister pranks at the Catholic boarding school, thus the unattended dodgeball match that gouges out a student's eyeball. "There's a nice, steady progression to the violence, a nice, discernible, gory pattern." Faculty battle lines, the popular English teacher (Robert Preston) versus "the sadistic pedagogue" teaching Latin (James Mason), a poisonous brew of accusations and conspiracies. The graduate turned gym instructor (Beau Bridges) plays accidental mediator, the clerical smartass (David Rounds) provides running commentary. "I don't know if you've noticed. There is the decided smell of brimstone in the air." A Gothic prism on the Lumet male group, a possession horror movie by a secular realist who keeps the diabolical intimations of the Robert Marasco play fastidiously grounded. (There is a desecrated altar one year ahead of The Exorcist, though the deeper connection is to The Offence.) Blood for dormitory dwellers, "every one of them a killer at heart," poetry and biology, "fodder for filthy little minds." Murky savageries at the alma mater, angelic choruses and sinister liturgies to go with the fluctuations of incubated fascism. "Did you ever think of going over the wall?" At the center is the despised taskmaster, "Lash" to pupils, stuck with a dying mother and obscene calls and smutty magazines—a tangle of bitterness and terror given superbly clammy shadings by Mason. "Poor Publilius Syrus" on trust, "you can't deny a confession." The candle goes out at the close to complete the metamorphosis from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Village of the Damned, let us prey. With Ron Weyand, Charles White, Kate Harrington, Jamie Alexander, Paul O'Keefe, and Bryant Fraser.
--- Fernando F. Croce |