The Exorcist (1971) by William Peter Blatty: The best-seller that spawned a movie mega-hit (adjusting for inflation, its domestic box office would today be in the $400-$500 million range. That's domestic B.O. only!). It holds up well today, though a lot will be familiar if you've seen the movie -- William Peter Blatty adapted his own novel for the screen. Blatty was a screenwriter, so this makes a lot of sense.
Indeed, his most famous screen-writing assignment prior to The Exorcist was on the second Inspector Clouseau movie. Some of the movie-comedy stuff appears in The Exorcist novel, quippy exchanges and some lengthy comic riffs that didn't make the movie. Blatty liked a couple of them enough that he would use them 19 years later in The Exorcist III, which he wrote and directed. Apparently he didn't want the world to miss his 'Lemon Drop' and 'There's a carp in the bathtub' comedy stylings.
Do I need to recite the plot? The daughter of a Hollywood star falls ill while she and her mother are in Washington, D.C. filming a movie. Really ill. Possession-level ill!
Most of the novel builds up to the climactic exorcism, which takes place with great brevity in the last 30 pages or so of the novel. Father Damien Karras, so hauntingly portrayed by Jason Miller in the movie, works to determine whether the possession is a possession or not. So, too, doctors.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Kinderman investigates the death of a Hollywood director who fell to his death on those crazy stairs beside the Hollywood star's rental. Fell. During a time when he was alone in the house with the daughter. Hmm. And his head was twisted all the way around.
Blatty keeps things humming along to the violent climax. The theological discussions are a bit half-baked, but this is a popular horror novel, so we'll give it that. As in the movie, Karras towers over everything as a tortured, sympathetic hero. Lieutenant Kinderman is a much larger presence here than in the film (played there by Lee J. Cobb and in The Exorcist III by an incandescent George C. Scott), which is too bad because he's really, really, really annoying. So annoying. He's half comic relief, half dogged detective, and all annoying.
But The Exorcist holds up, and popular novels generally don't. Hell, critically praised novels generally don't. Well worth a read, if only to discover the name of the demon afflicting Regan. Recommended.
Get Carter: written and directed by Mike Hodges, based on the novel Jack's Return Home by Ted Lewis; starring Michael Caine (Jack Carter), Britt Ekland (Anna) and Ian Hendry (Eric) (1971): Brutal, great film about a ruthless, amoral English gangster (Caine) who returns to his decaying wasteland home city of Newcastle to investigate and avenge his estranged brother's death.
Caine plays Jack Carter as an almost pure sociopath -- even his 'love' is really just a reason for violence, though he becomes vaguely sympathetic when contrasted to the mobsters he ends up fighting (mobsters just like the ones he works for, of course). It's a mostly soulless, shark-eyed performance, and one of Caine's very finest. This isn't the performance of an actor (or the film of a director) looking to charm the audience with rogue-ish gangsters and their wacky ways.
I'd call this movie kitchen-sink noir -- it's got the grimy, disintegrating backdrop and characters of the British kitchen-sink dramas of the 1960's and the murky, rotten moral landscape of all good noir. In some ways, the plot resembles the 1940's noir classic, Robert Mitchum vehicle Out of the Past. But the film world of Get Carter can show what a 1940's film noir can only imply.
There's no evident soul-searching on Carter's part as he uncovers the personal effects of the violent, impersonal world he's worked within for so long -- just ever-increasing violence that never provides the vicarious zing that a lot of violent revenge dramas do. There are simply men and women doing terrible things to terrible people and innocent people alike.
The sudden bursts of violence still have the power to chill 40 years after the picture's release -- Hollywood may have remade the movie in the oughts with Sylvester Stallone (!) in the Michael Caine role, but the movie's grim, anti-cathartic world isn't something a major studio would ever try to portray today. It would be too dark and too honest about violence. It would cut into the box office. Highly recommended.
