My Shudder Pick of the Month, the 1978 Anthony Hopkins Vehicle Magic, is an Evil Dummy Movie Positively Lousy with Class and Prestige
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch and then write about in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
My nine year old son Declan, being my son, is obsessed with animatronic, puppetry and ventriloquism. That means that I am also obsessed with animatronics, puppetry and ventriloquism.
So for my Shudder choice of the month I chose a seeming paradox: 1978’s Magic, a classy movie about an evil ventriloquist dummy.
Magic has prestige up the wazoo. It’s based on a novel by legendary screenwriter William Goldman, the Academy Award-winning scribe behind Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men and The Princess Bride.
If that weren’t impressive enough, Magic was directed by character actor and filmmaker Richard Attenborough four years before he won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director for 1982’s Gandhi.
The trilogy of Academy Award winners is rounded out by Anthony Hopkins, whose performance as a troubled, mentally ill ventriloquist named Corky is every bit as impressive as his Oscar-winning portrayal of Dr. Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs.
I am not being sarcastic, nor am I kidding. Hopkins is a hammy delight as our favorite erudite foodie cannibal serial killer but he delivers a much more nuanced, dimensional performance as, again, a ventriloquist named Corky under the sinister control of his dummy.
Anthony Hopkins was an alcoholic until the mid-1970s. I suspect that part of the reason he’s able to be so scarily convincing here is because he was able to tap into that experience to lend veriscimilitude to what could easily be an unintentional laugh riot.
As an addict, Hopkins knows, deep in his soul, what it feels like to be helpless before your compulsions, to be ruled by feelings and instincts that you do not understand and can only hurt you.
The producers reportedly wanted Gene Wilder for the lead role but Attenborough rejected the idea because he was making a serious movie about a crazed ventriloquist named Corky, dammit, and he didn’t want to provoke laughter of any kind.
I would love to have seen what Wilder would have done with the role. Hopkins brings to the role a sense of vulnerability and sadness that’s scary but also genuinely touching.
Magic opens with Corky as a struggling amateur diligently learning his craft from a dying magician.
Corky has learned his mentor’s lessons well but audiences are thoroughly underwhelmed. He cannot get them to care until he adds a new element to his act: ventiroloquist.
In real life combining magic with ventriloquism would result in the worst act in the history of entertainment. In the crazy, upside-down world of Magic, however, adding a ventriloquist dummy makes Corky a top attraction.
Burgess Meredith delivers a Saturn-winning performance as Ben Greene, a hotshot agent the Rocky scene-stealer based on real-life agent Swifty Lazar. Meredith plays Greene as a slick player who knows all the angles and was blessed with a preternatural gift of gab.
But he’s also sharp enough to understand that his client isn’t just eccentric in the time-honored show-business tradition; he’s genuinely unhinged.
Ben becomes the first poor soul to lose his life to the toxic twosome of Corky and Fats when he comes to visit him in the country and sees for himself just how utterly lost Corky is.
Meredith’s show-business player is savvy enough to immediately understand what is happening, in a way that Corky himself does not. He knows exactly when to stop schmoozing and cajoling and when to play it straight but it ultimately is not enough to save him.
Meredith was one of those late blooming character actors who experienced their greatest popularity as a senior citizen. His performance here epitomizes what made him remarkable.
One of the more curious aspects of Magic is that it is decidedly short on scenes of Corky and Fats performing for audiences. We get a glimpse of him onstage performing a moderately smutty routine with a filthy-mouthed dummy but that’s about the extent of it.
Corky’s profound ambivalence plays a central role in the narrative. TV people are hot to make a pilot special centered around Corky and Fats but insist that he have a physical beforehand.
This proves a deal-breaker for Corky because he understands that he is deeply unwell and possibly beyond hope, albeit for reasons that he can never admit to himself, let alone the world.
The defining feature of Dr. Hannibal Lecter is that he’s always in total control even when he’s locked up and caged like an animal. An antithetical dynamic is at play here.
Corky has no control over his mind, his thoughts and his words. Instead of controlling a ventriloquist’s dummy he ends up being controlled by the garish slab of wood that is both his ticket to the big time and the bane of his existence.
Fats proves an obstacle in Corky’s grown-up romance with Peggy Ann Snow, a childhood crush played by Ann-Margret. Corky and Peggy are two lonely, sad, quietly desperate people who find solace and comfort in one another but are hamstrung by factors beyond their control.
Peggy is married to a gruff loser played by Ed Lauter while Corky has an even more dysfunctional relationship with Fats.
Fats was designed to look like Hopkins. The randy cut-up is Corky’s alter-ego, after all, so it makes sense that they would look alike. Corky is the uncontrollable, rampaging id to Corky’s tortured ego.
Magic has a psychological depth you would not expect from a movie about a ventriloquist named Corky and his tragic relationship with his dummy. Attenborough set out to make a serious movie about an evil dummy. He succeeded.
Hopkins should have at least gotten an Oscar nomination for a role that required him to learn magic and ventriloquism. He had to settle for BAFTA and Golden Globes nods for Best Actor.
Norman Jewison was at one point in talks to direct Magic. He wanted Jack Nicholson for the lead role but the Academy Award-winner apparently didn’t want to wear a toupee for the role. He apparently had no problem learning magic or ventriloquism but really did not want to wear a rug.
Robert De Niro was apparently also considered for the lead role but I’m glad that it went to Hopkins. Everybody over-achieved widly here, but no one more than Hopkins.
Attenborough took a campy premise in the least campy direction possible. The result could have been a fiasco for the ages. Instead it’s a not so secret success commercially (it grossed over twenty million on a seven million dollar budget) as well as creatively.
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