Beat the Devil

By JAY COCKS

THE EXORCIST

Directed by WILLIAM FRIEDKIN Screenplay by WILLIAM PETER BLATTY

This movie has impressive credentials, according to the Hollywood value system. It is based with excessive reverence on William Peter Blatty's best-selling novel of the same title. It is directed by the man who won an Oscar last March for his direction of The French Connection. And it went, by some estimates, 100% over budget, costing between $11 and $14 million.

Nevertheless, the movie is vile and brutalizing. Indeed, in many ways it is worse than the book, although it spares us the Gethsemanic agonies of Blatty's metaphors ("the Kurd stood waiting like an ancient debt"). A famous movie star (Ellen Burstyn) and her daughter are on location in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., when the daughter is possessed by a raging demon--the Devil himself. To depict the permutations of this evil spirit, Director Friedkin and Writer Blatty go in for cheap shocks and crude novelty. There are gruesome details of an encephalogram being taken on the girl in search of some physical origin for her symptoms; there are also scenes showing her genitals being maimed with a crucifix, copious vomiting, a cacophony of obscenities and miscellaneous bestiality.

It is not these scenes in themselves that are offensive, but the uses to which they are put. The Exorcist entirely lacks the challenge and humanity of a film on a vaguely similar subject, Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (TIME, Dec. 10).

If The Exorcist had been invested with any real intelligence or passion, if it had wanted to do something other than promote a few shivers, the explicitness would never have mattered. As used here, the explicitness amounts to not much more than a shill, a come-on.

The movie is not--as it might more profitably have been--about the testing and steeling of the faith of two priests who try to exorcise the spirit from the girl's body. The priests are characterized with cliches: the younger one (Jason Miller) suffers guilt over the death of his mother, who appears to him in dreams carrying two shopping bags and moaning his name; the elder (Max von Sydow) is a weathered, mystic intellectual--perhaps modeled after Teilhard de Chardin--who may or may not be able to muster the strength to go a final round with the Prince of Darkness.

Friedkin and Blatty seem to care nothing for their characters as people, only as victims--props to be abused, hurled about the room, beaten and, in one case, brutally murdered.

The special effects--flying furniture, a levitation--are good. What else could be expected with such a budget? Von Sydow has a presence of unshadowed strength. Jason Miller (author of the Broadway play That Championship Season) makes a very impressive first film appearance with a performance full of swift undercurrents of psychic pain. Lin da Blair performs bravely as the tormented girl; the rasping voice of her demon is hauntingly dubbed (without screen credit) by Mercedes McCambridge. Ellen Burstyn, a good actress who is especially adept at portraying a beleaguered strength, is stuck here with an assignment that might once have suited Fay Wray: look hysterical and scream. The role, alas, is the very essence of The Exorcist.

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