Monday, March 17, 2014


Movie Review

The Magus (1968)

December 11, 1968

Screen: 'The Magus,' With Michael Caine, Opens:Novel's Author Turned It Into Filmscript

Published: December 11, 1968

"THE MAGUS," which opened yesterday at the Festival Theater, is a fine adaptation of a strong, difficult novel by John Fowles, who also wrote the screenplay. In its style and ambition, "The Magus" is just the opposite of Mr. Fowles's other important novel??? "The Collector," which was stark, realistic, hermetically sealed—one obsessed??? demented character exercising his power over another in a small, enclosed space. "The Magus" opens out, with many characters drifting in and out of time and place, possibly in one man's imagination, "to arrive where we started," in T. S. Eliot's line, "and know the place for the first time."

Michael Caine plays the young Englishman, Urfe, who, on a small Greek Island, meets Anthony Quinn, as the Magus, Conchis. (For people who don't read aloud in their minds, hearing the names first in the movie, before seeing them spelled, has the peculiar effect of turning the novel inside out.) Caine's special quality as an actor, the handsome, viable but essentially passive and bewildered hero, is just right for the kind of real unreal bargain he strikes with Conchis—never knowing whether he is part of a game, an experiment, a simple event, a madness or a fantasy, as the movie, like the novel, keeps inquiring of itself what its plot is going to be.

The director, Guy Green, is remarkable in knowing what to show, what to drop, what to put in relief. The camera picks up Empson's book, "The Seven Types of Ambiguity," works by Auden, frescoes that are meant to be (and cannot, because of their location, possibly be) by Fra Angelico — but it does not dwell on them. You can see the movie as just a dense, rather sexy story if you like. Candice Bergen, who is not a remarkable actress, is perfectly cast as a partly unreal character, some of whose essence is her artificiality. For a change, the work a character does to earn his living is shown with care, so that Caine's brief scenes as a teacher in a boys' school include a few classrooms and recesses as they actually are.

Occasionally the unreality, the voices drifting flatly from anywhere on the screen, gets in the way a bit; but there is some beautiful cutting, some use of flashback that actually enriches the novel. And a scene in which Quinn faces the Hanna??? Arendt problem of whether a man has the right even to enter into a contract that entails sacrificing some lives to spare others (even when the murder of three might save 80) ends with a Greek cry of "Eleftheria!," "Liberty!," which is as moving as anything on screen this year. It is surprising how the movie (which was shot, incidentally, in Majorca without the Greek crisis in mind) is not embarrassing, but actually dovetails with yachtings and oppressions in contemporary Greece.

Mr. Fowles lets the Magus describe the plot as "meta-theater—for the actors" and, at another point, refers to the Nazis as "bringing order into the chaos of Europe." The implication is that natural life is chaos, and that order, even plotting, is an exercise of force. This is a highly doubtful point, but the movie, by following the disorder of the novel so faithfully, is, for a change, done just right to suit and complement the book. "The Magus," of course, was a highly visual, movie-aware novel of ideas (it even included the screening of a pornographic film.) On the screen, as in the novel, the ending, the arrival where we started, resolves nothing, but it is, mainly, a fascinating trip. The movie also stars Anna Karina, as Caine's original real girl.

The Cast

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