Re: 1974 Oregonian: Fr. O’Malley

The Sunday Oregonian, November 24, 1974
By Ted Mahar of the Oregonian staff.

… Like all Jesuits, Fr. O’Malley has fought his way up a particularly rigorous academic stream. He has taught religion and English for a decade at a Jesuit high school in Rochester, N.Y., where he also directs student plays.

Nevertheless, he is full of what some might call puckish wit or Irish blarney. He is a natural born performer addicted to ironic or facetious comments, some of which, in print and without his inflection, would misrepresent him disastrously.

Or, as he somewhat ruefully admitted before a speech at Portland’s Jesuit High School last week, he can’t resist occasionally being cutesy flip.

His topic was, “what is a nice priest like you doing in a movie like that?”

One of the best qualities of “The Exorcist”, he felt – and a virtually unique quality in modern times – is that it portrayed evil as being ugly.

“We have a very high tolerance of evil today,” he said. “We’ve put a patina on it, protecting ourselves from it, trying to deny it. In movies, it’s actually glorified. When James Bond murders someone, it’s portrayed as manly and romantic.

“We pretty it up by cutting away selected portions. In the name of delicacy and good taste, we actually give it an acceptable image by leaving out the worst parts.

“Well, that’s one area in which ‘The Exorcist’ is not guilty. It’s ugly in the movie. People say they threw up watching it. Yet they didn’t throw up watching the Vietnam war on television.

“If people saw babies fused to their mothers by napalm, do you think the war would have lasted 10 years? Mothers let their children watch war news and John Wayne movies. Do they throw up at images of starving babies in Africa?”

Some viewers were upset by the profanity and scatological dialogue in the movie.

“Mostly because they were uttered by a little girl,” Fr. O’Malley said. “We hear those words all the time, and they don’t throw us. They’re commonplace, as any high school student can tell you. In the mouth of a little girl… [it becomes] one of the biggest grossers of all time, in at least two senses of the word.”

Fr. O’Malley also admitted being in the movie was “a great ego trip.” It gave him a sense of spurious credibility. “I’m saying the same things I’ve always said as a priest. They’re no more true now than they were five years ago, but now people listen, sometimes with apparent awe. Would you be taking notes on anything I said if I came through Portland five years ago?”

Fr. O’Malley would have wanted to be in this or any other movie. “I lost my youth in movies,” he said, adding that he wrote his first play at age 5, has written plays or skits and acted in school, seminary and community theater ever since. At actor Robert Forster’s invitation, he played the gentleman caller in “The Glass Menagerie” five nights a week for five weeks in Rochester.

One of the pinnacles of his career was playing Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons” – when his high school student lead got sick a few days before opening night. “I was finally the star of my high school play at age 36,” he said.

He has two regrets about “The Exorcist”. One, director William Friedkin shot, but did not include in the final version, dialogue from the novel in which the old priest Max Von Sydow plays explains the purpose of possession as an attampt to make us hate ourselves, see ourselves as vile and unredeemable.

“Friedkin said he didn’t want to make a commercial for the Roman Catholic Church. Is ‘Crime and Punishment’ a commercial for the Roman Catholic Church?” he said.

“The other one is that some people see the ending as a victory for evil when Fr. Karras sacrifices himself for the others by committing suicide. The most important reason Fr. Dyer is in the story is to give Karras last rites, to show we’re on the side of the angels,” he said.

“There was a rumor of a new ending,” Fr. O’Malley said. “That was just Blatty’s little joke. He said he was going to make the ending clear by having legions of angels fly down and bear Fr. Karras personally to heaven.”

Fr. O’Malley then offered his own suggested ending, roundly rejected by all. It was the movie’s ending, with him as Fr. Dyer pondering the house in which all had transpired.

Then there is a cut to a close-up of Fr. Dyer, who peers into the camera over his shoulder and leers in a particularly sinister fashion. Fr. O’Malley may be a nice priest, but if they ever do a movie version of Benet’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” they would have the devil’s own time finding a more wicked smile.