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Yeah, Legion is a little gem of a film, even in its tampered-with state… it delivers new Blatty material – what more could a fan want… plus, as Ryan says, maybe, just maybe in some deep vault, the missing scenes are sleeping, awaiting the awakening kiss of Serendipity…
The following series of articles will be taken from “America” – published by the Jesuits of the United States and Canada.
February 2, 1974.
Vol. 130, No. 4 Whole No. 3337
Owned and published by the America Press, Inc., 106 West 56th Street, New York, NY 10019Article One: condensed editorial, page 65:
Exorcising ‘The Exorcist’
… The Church as always recognized the possibility of possession, that is, the invasion of a personality by an alien evil spirit that seizes control of the personality and displaces normal human consciousness. Although there are no instances of diabolical possession in the Old Testament, there are a number of dramatic confrontations portrayed in the New Testament… Similarly, there have always been Church rituals for exorcism, not only the extraordinary kind of ritual enacted in the film, but more familiar appeasl… Yet the Church has become increasingly wary of designating instances of possession.
This skepticism is based not only on increased scientific knowledge but also on genuine religious insight. A preoccupation with the magical and the occult runs counter to the character of Christian faith, which is a response to God’s Word incarnate in the human condition. True experiences of transcendence are not realized by a denial and a darkening of the human spirit but by stretching it toward the light. This is not to say that there are not forces in the world and in our lives that cannot be reduced to the confines of human categories. But it is to say that the authentic limits of understanding can be recognized only by those who trust an drespect human intelligence and freedom. One danger of the current preoccupation with demonic possession is the refuge it offers from facing the demons that are of our own making… the dark forces we must wrestle with if we are to be children of the light.
… Like the other miracles of the New Testament, the religious meaning of these exorcisms did not lie in their magical effects, but in their revelation of the healing power of God’s love. What is magical astonishes and inevitably deceives. What is sacramental reveals and illuminates.
If the Church, then, chosses to be reserved and cautious about reports of demonic possession, it is not the result of a corrosion of faith by secular science. Such caution does not reflect a lack of belief in the reality of Satan and the power of evil in our world, but rather a desire to correctly identify where the evil is at work. We live in a scarred universe, a world that “groans for redemption.” The different exorcisms of the Church’s life of prayer are signs of this struggle within the material universe as well as in the human spirit. They are prayers for liberation in this struggle, appeals, for example, that the [baptismal] power of water – both a threat and a promise – bring life rather than death, that the young Christian be freed from the illusions of evil and be faithful to the light of Christ. The struggle is real, but the first and last word is one of love. The tradition of the Church on the nature of the evil spirits leaves many questions unanswered. But one affirmation is consistently made. They were not originally evil: their condition is the work of their own freedom. They were created in love. They will be, in the end, overcome by love. It would be tragic if one film’s version of the terrors of the evil spirit would cause those most in need of it to forget that first and final word.
Glad you liked it. Like I say, “America” was “intellectual” and rather more critical and skeptical than some other sources… it’s interesting to see what the Catholic “eggheads” were saying at the time.
As to the third question, it demands, in its rhetorical form, the answer “yes.” Miss Kael tells me, in effect, that I must reject the picture or admit that my head is screwed on backward. I’m not altogether sure about my head, but I am sure that Miss Kael is in no position to judge. And I am concerned that she chooses this intellectual and moral forum for judging the movie. Why does she, as judge of this picture, care how I choose to screw on my head, granted I have a choice?
I don’t know, having seen the picture once, whether I accept it or not. It was a grinding and harrowing experience, but an engrossing one, too. I admired the skill of the director and camera crew, the effective acting and the hideous triumphs of the makeup artists. And I was not offended by the crude vulgarity of the manifestations. Literature, if nothing else had done it, would have prepared me to expect crude human meanness and obscenity in the efforts of an evil force to wound and frighten humans. Graham Greene, in one of his short stories, expressed the inability of an evil will to be more frightening to a free and perceptive eye than is a lighted pumpkin. The free and perceptive eye can be found, in “The Exorcist, only in the older priest, seen not only as saintly and infirm, which is all Miss Kael can perceive, but also willing to face evil unafraid, like Chesterton’s Father Brown. The old priest dies in the exorcism, but he is not frightened. Everyone else in the picture is.
Miss Kael sees them all as fitting into juiceless stock roles, but I judge that for once she misses some important points. She cannot see any revelation or expericne of ultimate personal motives, as we find in any character touched by Shakespeare’s imagination. Mr. Blatty is no Shakespeare, indeed, and a failure to convey any ultimate human experience would certainly flaw the movie fatally, as it seemed to me Mr. Blatty’s book was flawed. But even about that I’m not so sure now. It may be that the movie, more than that book, gets its harrowing impact from the reusal to analyze openly and make clear the motivations, not however denying or excluding those motives. Ellen Burstyn’s portrayal of an actress caught in a situation for which nothing in her natural charm or her professional training had prepared her, her constantly frustrated and stifled efforts to bring her normally adequate defenses into operation, her eventual ambivalent acceptance of and adjustment to the inexplicable, seemed to me a triumph of good acting, directing, camera-work and editing. Miss Kael says there is no indication that either Mr. Blatty or Mr. Freidkin has any feeling for the little girl’s helplessness and suffering, or her mother’s. I can only guess that something shielded [Miss Kael] from the agony of suffering that Ellen Burstyn, presumably working with Director Friedkin on Author Blatty’s material, conveyed to me.
Perhaps “The Exorcist” will never be classed with the “Last Tango” as a great movie, but I suspect that if it is not, its rejection will not be on the basis of the mechanical and vulgar horrors that so offend Miss Kael. Those strike me as effective in somewhat the way the Huysman-horrors are effective in Oscar Wilde’s “Dorian” and “Salome”. They reveal or at least suggest some basically stupid and malevolent force operative in human affairs. And they can do more than scare, if one has eyes to see. But I’m not really in a position to say that “The Exorcist” achieves even this minimal value. Certainly I do not aim to do what Miss Kael tells us one of the Jesuit actor-advisers did for the reviewers of the movie, and “enrich” anyone with assurance of high moral achievement in the film. I can say, however, that I found a certain human depth in “The Exorcist”. How much the depth that I found owes to what I brought to the movie, including, it may be, a desire to have my Church look good, I cannot at the moment clearly judge. But I am sure, at any rate, that there is more to this movie than Pauline Kael was able to find.
[Robert Boyle, S.J., is a member of the English Department at Marquette University in Milwaukie.]
THE END
You’re welcome, Blizzi. It’s obvious that “America” represents the liberal end of Catholicism. Conservative sources seemed to diss the film because of its scatological content, or to literalistically embrace its “documentary” treatment of the demon as a real being.
Liberal Catholic writers tended, like “America”, to support the film in the sense that they felt obligated to support free speech and literary license, but were nonetheless uncomfortable with any hint of supernaturalism. Hence their references to “dark forces” instead of actual demons, and their emphasis on coming to grips with internal/subjective evil while keeping as much as possible to an agnostic position on external diabolical evil…
Anyway, next weekend I might post one or two more… I’m running out of contemporary articles, plus I tried to post the most relevant and interesting ones first…
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.
NY Times PART TWO
In Houston, workmen renovating a house preivously used as a “pagan church” demanded prayers by a priest to expel evil spirits from the premises. The workmen had seen “The Exorcist.”
On the West Coast, pastoral problems have been intensified by the disclosure of the Rev. Karl Patzelt, a Jesuit priest at Our Lady of Fatima Russian Catholic Center in San Francisco, that he recently performed a series of 14 rites to free a young couple and their son from the presence of a demon in their home in nearby Daly City.
The ritual of exorcism is rooted in numerous incidents, described in the New Testament, in which Jesus or his followers cast out demons and unclean spirits from distressed individuals…
The ritual of exorcism, which persists in vestigial forms in the modern rite of baptism, was developed as a means of regularizing the Church’s approach to such situations and is essentially a prayer invoking the power of God. Until 1972, when several minor orders of ministry were eliminated, new priests were routinely ordained as exorcists.
Priests who were actually called upon to perform exorcism are carefully screened for maturity and depth of faith by their superiors. Authorization is only given on a case to case basis by bishops after it is demonsrated that medical efforts have been unsuccessful. Most informed officials estimate that no more than a handful of exorcisms have been performed in this country in this century.
THE END
Oregonian 1979 – Mahar – Part 2
Also, Blatty’s inspiration, he insists, is from real life. “The Exorcist” is based on a 1949 case in Rainier, Md., and as a student at Georgetown University, Blatty knew the exorcist who had seemingly solved the problem.
And possession and exorcism, whatever [they are], can be a truly horrifying spectacle. Exorcisms do not invariably succeed, and exorcists do not invariably survive the attempt. In his allegedly true book, “Hostage to the Devil…,” Malachi Martin sums up the attitude of many Catholic priests. He cites a pastor who “new little about possession and wanted to know less.”
Hollywood, of course, took it all quite seriously. Not since the James Bond movies inspired a river of secret agent movies a decade previously had a movie generated so many copies – and so much revenue.
“The Exorcist” itself took in $82 million in domestic rentals; its copies “The Omen” and “Damien – Omen II” (from Fox, which this time did get on the bandwagon) totalled $40 million domestically.
Other films inspired to varying degrees by “The Exorcist” include “Abby,” “Beyond the Door,” and a sequel, “The Power,” “The Manitou”, “The Medusa Touch,” “Carrie,” “The Fury,” “Jennifer” and the film version of “The Late, Great Planet Earth.”
Upcoming films include “The Amityville Horror,” “The Prophecy” and several others. Some have been the flops they deserved to be, but altogether, “The Exorcist” has probably stimulated $300 million in movies and books worldwide.
Well, that’s commerce, of course. Movie people in any country will copy anything to make a buck. But they can’t sell to an unwilling audience. “Rosemary’s Baby” had not generated the same kind of bandwagon just five years earlier. There was a sinister magic to “The Exorcist.”
Part of it, naturally, was novelty. Audiences were ambushed. “The Exorcist” will always have at least a small niche in film history for introducing the right monster at the right time. It was as much a film landmark as “Dracula,” “Frankenstein” or “King Kong.”
But why was it the right time? No one could answer that for sure, even in retrospect. But “The Exorcist” may also have a small niche in social history. “Rosemary’s Baby” seemed to suggest – using a Time magazine cover – that God was dead, not God, but the god of man’s religion. “The Exorcist” seemed to confirm it.
“The Exorcist” may come to be seen in time as the bellwether of the spiritual frustration, indifference and disillisionment that has resulted in millions of people joining cults.
Some religions may seem moribund, and some may be dead, but the religious impulse may be stronger than ever. Some people have a strong need to worship, and power attracts worship. “The Exorcist” demonstrated in dollars that power does not have to be constructive to demand respect.
THE END
The crime was not committed by burglars. There is only one.
Burke Dennings, re-animated former child molester controlled by the spirit of dead thief Lucky Mickey “Lew” Lewis, is the culprit. Detectives noted that the pages of several of Friedkin’s books had been ripped in thin strips along the sides, and an inordinate amount of alcoholic beverages had been “sampled” – both fitting Dennings’s M.O.
Friedkin’s groundskeeper, who only identified himself as “Karl”, vowed that if the thief returned he would quickly bind and gag him, even though the felon would certainly want no straps.
