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It opens like Black Narcissus and closes like Quatermass and the Pit, in between John Boorman doesn't so much follow The Exorcist as continue his Wizard of Oz analysis from Zardoz. (The elongated figure of the healer consumed by flames is later reflected in Kitty Winn's self-immolation, the Wicked Witch of the West is the abstruse point of reference.) The oneiric flow is swift and allusive, the possessed villager gives way to the heroine (Linda Blair) tap-dancing to "The Lullaby of Broadway," that great vision of pleasure and death. The institute for recovering children is a glass hive, the pragmatic doctor (Louise Fletcher) introduces the hypnotic "synchronizer" meant to fuse consciousnesses, extract dreams, and generally give a sense of cinema's purest capacities. "The world doesn't want any more saints," the investigating priest (Richard Burton) faces ancient evil and loses himself in modern science. (The teenage protégé surrounded by doves on the penthouse ledge is remembered by Argento in Phenomena, as a diabolical temptress she's a memory of Burton's tempted-padre roles in The Night of the Iguana and The Sandpiper.) Trances, connections, reflections, superimpositions. "Share my wings." Glittering spirals as a riposte to the original's earthbound viciousness, unfinished business between the missionary (Max von Sydow) and the demon triggers a wondrous hallucination—a bedeviled traveling shot that devours acres of African scenery until it's halted by James Earl Jones' leonine roar. (The Shining and Evil Dead help themselves to it.) From "mud city with golden walls" to insectoid swarms engulfing the Capitol Dome, Boorman's barmy-sublime portrait of quivering metaphysics, "a locust mind, if you will." Scorsese, who knows how to watch a movie, saw the brilliance of it; critics at the time, who don't, didn't. Cinematography by William A. Fraker. With Paul Henreid, Ned Beatty, Rose Portillo, and Belinda Beatty.
--- Fernando F. Croce |