NEW Magus (1969) (DVD)

---I first saw this movie at the theater my second year of college (1968-69) in Texas. At that time, it being the late 1960's, it seemed perfectly normal to me that it was complex and confusing. It was psychedelic. How can anyone who enjoyed the Beatles "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," "Magical Mystery Tour," and the "White Album," not to mention The Doors' "Strange Days," or Iron Butterfly's "Inagodadavida" (sp?), complain about a movie that is confusing?

---Nicholas Urfe (Michael Caine) accepts a job as an English teacher at a private boys school on the idyllic Greek island of Phraxos. As he settles into his room, he finds a cryptic note left in a drawer by his predecessor who had committed suicide. The note reads "beware the waiting room." On the weekends Urfe explores the far side of the island and discovers the villa of the mysterious Maurice Conchis (Anthony Quinn) who invites him for weekend visits where Conchis entertains Urfe with his life story. In these stories of his past, Conchis presents to Urfe major dilemmas where the choices are life-changing. Subsequently, in a series of "Twilight Zonesque" time shifts, Urfe finds himself trapped into reliving these same stories and being forced to make the same life-changing choices. The effect is, well, "mind-blowing," both for the character Urfe, and for the viewer. Is Urfe hallucinating or dreaming, or is this a well-planned masque, directed by the "master-manipulator" Conchis, where Urfe is unwillingly cast as the central character?

---I guess my take on it is that the mind-blowing nature of the film fit very well with the zeitgeist of the late 1960's. The film itself may be lacking, but the greater story, only partly told in an abbreviated version in this movie, is much, much better than could ever be captured on film. Instinctively, I knew this and sought out the book in the Fall of 1969. I found it at Doubleday Bookstore in New York City while visiting for the Texas A&M vs. Westpoint football game. The book helped me survive the long, cold, rainy winter of 1969-70, as I was manipulated into making life-changing decisions -- school vs. Vietnam, girls vs. grades, polyester vs. cotton, Santana vs. Led Zeppelin, etc. etc. etc. As Nicholas Urfe rode the roller coaster of his life, so did we.

---I'm glad to see that the movie is in video.

One of the reviewers mentioned David Lynch. I recall waiting with anticipation for the film adaptation of _Dune_, hoping that the movie in my mind would be realized, and discovering through the film flaws in the book that my adolescent mind had not noticed when I fell in love with it. Something like that is true of _The Magus_ as well. It *is* fairly faithful to the book, and many of the more embarrassing scenes of dialogue are taken directly from it. So my first reaction to seeing this film is a troubled sense that I was wrong to love this book.

What's missing? Three things: time, the narrator, and a realist texture. For a sense of what I mean by the third, see Minghella's _Talented Mr. Ripley_ to see how this film should look, should feel (indeed, how, if it were remade today, it could even be cast--all that's missing is Ben Kingsley as Conchis). But what makes the book work is that the fascinating and bizarre events are made plausible by their embedding in a realistic frame: Nicholas' life away from Conchis' universe is utterly real by being largely veiled autobiography. He is the typical callow young man as would-be writer, struggling fitfully to overcome his narcissism and join the human race, while desperately clinging to that same narcissism in the knowledge that only this will allow him to become the artist he would betray himself by not becoming. The Conchis Masque is but the externalization of Nicholas' "therapy" as he sorts through this paradox, grows up and becomes a Real Writer. For every Real Writer is perilously close to a merely Failed Human Being.

In the book, Nicholas experiences Bourani (the site of Conchis' manipulations) the way people experience affairs: as what seems for a time an endlessly fascinating distraction from the intolerable experience of being who they are. On this level, the book is essentially the story of an affair, and Nicholas' guilt is an essential part of him finding his way to resolution. But the film so compresses the events that we get only Conchis, only the affair, and almost none of the narcissism, tedium, failure and self-doubt of Nicholas, or the process by which he comes to terms with them through his guilt over how his self-importance and thirst for experience harm the women in his life. And yet it is this which makes the book seem real (especially to the many young Nicholases who read it) and thus confers reality on the otherwise incredible, and incredibly silly things that transpire on the island.

I remain convinced that this film could've been done, but there must be much much more of the ordinariness of Nicholas, so that the fantastic stands out that much more. _French Lieutenant's Woman_ gives us some inkling of how a very free but literate adaptation can be penned, and _Talented Mr. Ripley_ gives us some notion of how it could be shot. But it must be *much* longer, and that length should be devoted to showing what the novel shows: how we grow through love.

Reflecting on the movie while on the mid-watch on a naval ship in the South China Sea in 1969 was an experience that has never left me. The constant turning inside out of what Nicholas Urfe believed was going on, through the leap from stories told by Conchis at the dinner table becoming either reality or staged reinactments that tested Urfe's belief and sense of morality fed my hunger for thought provoking dialog. I had to buy the book and read it. I went on to "The French Leutenant's Woman", and "The Aristos", soaking up Fowle's philosophy.

Later, attending an interview with John Fowles in San Francisco with my Daughter, he said, "I didn't think 'The Magus' was very good". I wanted to stand up and say, "But I named my Son Nicholas!" I think he got tired of answering the questions about what it meant, when it really wasn't intended to give answers. Like someone else said in a review here, one of his favorite themes was "An answer is a form of death".

Candice Bergen said one time that as her third movie appearance she thought is might be her worst. She might be right. I loved the movie for where it lead me at the time, not as something that would entertain me again and again. Skip the movie, or see it for the novelty, but read the book if you want the experience that Fowles meant you to have.

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