Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/17/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, October 17, 2024

The Spell (Lee Phillips, 1977)

Susan Myers in The Spell

Cast: Lee Grant, Susan Myers, Lelia Goldoni, Helen Hunt, Jack Colvin, James Olson, James Greene, Wright King, Barbara Bostock, Doney Oatman, Richard Carlyle, Kathleen Hughes, Robert Gibbons, Arthur Peterson. Screenplay: Brian Taggart. Cinematography: Matthew F. Leonetti. Art direction: Robert MacKichan. Film editing: David Newhouse. Music: Gerald Fried.

The Spell was planned as a theatrical feature, but when Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976) became a big hit, the producers decided that another film about a telekinetic teenager would be dismissed as a copycat, so it was reworked into a TV movie. In the process, as its writer and director responded to tighter censorship, time constraints, and the need to accommodate commercial breaks, it lost a lot of suspense as well as some essential characterization and backgrounding. The Matchetts, Marion (Lee Grant) and Glenn (James Olson), are an affluent couple with two daughters, 15-year-old Rita (Susan Myers) and 13-year-old Kristina (Helen Hunt). Rita is overweight, and her father criticizes her at the dinner table for eating too much. She's a misfit at school, taunted by the mean girls, and when she's asked to do a rope-climbing exercise, she's unable to do it. The girl she was paired with in the exercise succeeds and starts showing off, but when Rita glares menacingly at her, the girl falls from the rope and breaks her neck. It's not an accident: Others who cross Rita, including her father and her sister, find themselves in danger, too. Marion is closer to Rita and more defensive of her than the others in the family, but when a friend of hers dies in a freakishly inexplicable manner, she too becomes concerned. The story builds to a surprise twist, but the ending fizzles into anticlimax. The cast, especially Grant and Hunt, does the best they can with a clumsily mishandled narrative.