The Medusa Touch (1978)

French Detective-Inspector Brunel (Lino Ventura) has been lent to the London police from his native France for quite some time now. His stint in the UK does slowly near its end. To make things difficult, fate does put a rather strange and dangerous case in his way: John Morlar (Richard Burton), a misanthropic writer of very angry novels has been nearly beaten to death in his own apartment, and is now in a coma. The doctor responsible for his treatment (Gordon Jackson) thinks it is only a question of time until he dies, and if not for some very curious spikes in brain activity, he’d probably not even warrant the battery of equipment that lets him breathe right now.

Brunel’s investigation paints a curious picture of the victim: bitter, cynical, perpetually angry, and obsessed with catastrophes and large accidents, the man had few friends (if any), his psychiatrist Dr. Zonfeld (Lee Remick) probably being the closest person in his life still alive. Yet she seems rather cagy about something concerning her patient. Still, Brunel’s slow and systematic efforts begin to suggest that Morlar suffered from a curious delusion, the conviction that he had some sort of psychic power that killed anyone who made him angry. Given how many of the people who did that actually died in strange accidents, there might even be something to the man’s idea.

Late in life, Morlar even seems to have developed some control over his powers, which, combined with his clear conviction of his own superiority over basically everyone surrounding him, and his seething hatred for the powers that be, would have made for a good motive for killing the man. Particularly since Morlar started to make plans for the future…

Jack Gold’s The Medusa Touch seems to be a bit of a marmite film, with people apparently hating the film with quite some passion, or treating it like one of the great undervalued British horror films in the Nigel Kneale vein. I belong to the latter group, surprising nobody.

But then, it’s not difficult to understand why someone might not enjoy a slow-moving investigative movie that mostly consists of Lino Ventura talking to people until we flash back into a past that shows us some of the horrors the world inflicted on Morlar, and then the horrors he inflicted on it in turn. The film’s portrayal of its comatose antagonist here is fascinating, because it seems like an honest attempt to understand the mindset of the man, find compassion for him, yet also clearly portray his later reactions to the general crappiness of the world as just as horrifying as the world itself. It’s very much a film about a guy turned monstrous by his surroundings, but he’s now a monster nonetheless. Even more interesting, as played by Burton, he’s never likeable, because he is much too convinced of his own importance and superiority over everything human. It’s not a pleasant or convenient route to take for the film - making him an innocent betrayed or a simple fanatic would make this much easier to digest - but it certainly adds an additional quality of disquiet. We all have felt like Morlar, after all, and with his power, might we have turned out like he did? It’s not even as if he weren’t right about at least fifty percent of the things he is so angry about.

Politically, you might read this as a film about the violence that can be evoked by politics birthed of anger, of how the horrors of the world can bend and twist people so much they become just as cruel as what surrounds them. This, needless to say, can go either way, politically, and without psychic powers, you can easily imagine Morlar ending up as a Nazi or an RAF terrorist.

Apart from subtextual complexities, I also simply find The Medusa Touch often highly effective as a piece of SF horror. There’s a quality of brooding and slowly increasing dread to the affair, created with the help of subtly disquieting and disorienting editing, and Michael J. Lewis’s fantastic score, a mood that is only increased by the fact that we are led through the tale by a man so clearly down to Earth as Ventura’s Brunel. He feels so real, witnessing him step into the world of the uncanny feels wrong in all the right ways for the film.

Burton, never one of my favourite actors, is pretty much perfect for the role: projecting an inflated ego was never difficult for the guy, but here, he adds an undertow of genuine hurt hidden under all the anger and bitterness and self-obsession. As it turns out, Burton also has one of the most convincing death stares I’ve ever seen in an actor.

All that and a climax that includes Not-Westminster Cathedral falling down like London Bridge makes for a pretty irresistible movie in my book.

Three Films Make A Post: They dare to climb a terrifying new peak in suspense... all the way up to hell!

Where Eagles Dare (1968): For quite a few people, this war adventure directed by Brian G. Hutton and written by Alistair MacLean is a bit of a classic of men’s adventure cinema. I’ve never seen that in the film, and a recent re-watch unfortunately did not improve my impression. Mostly, the film feels bloated beyond all comprehension, taking up two and a half hours of one’s time for a series of plot twists and improbable plans that makes the most of our contemporary blockbusters look downright sane. Brian G. Hutton’s direction is bland, wasting many a theoretically cool set piece through tedious pacing, the script just goes on and on about everything, and the cast, well…This is as bland a performance as you’ll encounter by Clint Eastwood, and Richard Burton does his usual Richard Burton slumming thing that just doesn’t do it for me, just longer, in this case.

Falcon’s Gold aka Robbers of the Sacred Mountain (1982): I have a lot of room in my heart for Indiana Jones knock-offs (particularly of the Italian persuasion) but this cable TV movie – ergo, breasts – which is the understandably only directing credit for one Bob Schulz, really doesn’t even seem to try to grasp for an adventuring crown forever out of its reach. Instead of cheap thrills and silly ideas, we get Simon MacCorkindale making rubber faces that must go for human expressions on his planet, atrocious editing that ruins the few moments of theoretical excitement the film has on offer, and a script that doesn’t actually manage to hit even the simplest adventure movie tropes decently but does find space to include a pretty problematic “romance” between MacCorkindale and a character we first meet wearing her school uniform. Though, to be fair to the nudity does come not from her.

Romancing the Stone (1984): It is of course a bit unfair to compare a cheap TV movie to a decently budgeted studio production like Robert Zemeckis’s adventure romance with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, but still, this one shows how to trot classical adventure movie paths well. And thanks to its organic mix of slightly updated romance tropes and a lot of very well done adventure stuff, it doesn’t feel like much of an attempt to catch that Indiana Jones money at all, but rather like what it is: a film inspired by many of the same sources as Lucas and Spielberg that goes its own, frequently funny, always crowd-pleasing and very fun way from there. Diane Thomas’s script mostly manages the difficult task of having her heroine grow and finding that big roguish love without the latter destroying the former fantastically well; that Turner and Douglas where both in a phase where they could do little wrong certainly helps here too.


The film is also perfectly paced, looks and just feels fantastic thanks to Zemeckis and photography by the great Dean Cundey. Sure, one might complain this is film as candy, but when it’s as good as any candy you’ll get your hands on, who’s going to?

In short: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)

Over the years, we have been quite lucky with the overall quality of John Le Carré adaptations, on TV as well as on the big screen. Martin Ritt’s film is the first of them all, and might very well be the best, though that’s a matter of personal taste as much as of the film’s quality.

To me, it certainly is the bleakest of them all, and therefore the one closest to the soul of the Cold War. Like all of the Smiley novels and films, The Spy is – and I think I’m repeating myself here – a film about all sorts of betrayal, betrayals of country, belief, loved ones and oneself, of betrayals crushing characters who are more often than not traitor and betrayed at the same time. The Spy in particular is a film about people – especially of course Richard Burton’s Alec Leamas who has the eyes of a man who has seen and done profoundly horrible things - who reached the point where telling themselves they do all the shabby, horrible things they do out of necessity and for some greater good just isn’t enough anymore but who are ruined for anything beyond these things by all that they’ve done and seen. Of course, and not surprisingly, any remnant of normal human feeling they still carry is exactly the thing that gets them killed, or, worse still, getting the people killed who still carry ideals which aren’t built on betrayal. At its core, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a film of people maimed, and rather more often crushed, not so much by the forces of history (that would be too friendly a thing to be crushed by) but by powers that have long divorced themselves from any moral except of the moral of expediency; actual moustache-twirling evil would also seem a much preferable thing to be crushed by.

It’s the world of international espionage as a kind of cosmic horror of the soul, realized by Ritt in a calm, unspectacular manner that makes the resulting film all the more horrible and weighty. The abyss, it turns out, is not a place of dark magic, but of the greyness of the everyday.

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