Friedkin's Fresh Assault On Our Sensibilities

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday March 22, 2001

Reviewed by Sandra Hall

THE EXORCIST: DIRECTOR'S CUT

Directed by William Friedkin

Screenplay by William Peter

Blatty from his own novel

Rated R

Cinemas everywhere

The new version of The Exorcist, with digitally enhanced sound and 11 minutes of extra footage restored from the offcuts, doesn't seem so different from the original. It's the social climate that has changed.

In 1973, when the film came out, it was hard to look beyond the schlock factor especially here in Australia. By the time we got to see it, we'd already been treated to stories about American audiences running for the exits and collapsing in the aisles. We knew about the projectile vomiting, the green glop and Linda Blair's rotating head. We were prepared to be blase. But a lot has happened since then. For one thing, schlock has become a monster in its own right. Fed by John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Kevin Williamson and their imitators, it's almost swallowed the teen movie and cannibalised itself. Next to what came after it, The Exorcist looks like art.

You might say that its critical elevation has occurred in spite of its director, William Friedkin, who's never seemed burdened by any finer feelings towards the film. It was a deliberate assault on audience sensibilities, he said, which he wanted to make in an effort to come up with something bigger and better than the films of his friend and rival, Francis Ford Coppola. He was rewarded when The Exorcist came close to the box-office record set by The Godfather. Its two Oscars and a further eight nominations were a bonus.

By all accounts, including his own, Friedkin was a devil on the set. Ellen Burstyn emerged from the film's special effects finale with a back injury; a Catholic priest cast in a minor role had his face slapped so he'd put more oomph into his reading of the Last Rites. And Friedkin himself has contributed to his own demonisation myth with tales of torturing Mercedes McCam- bridge, a reformed alcoholic, during their recording sessions. He claims to have had her tied to a chair and force-fed raw eggs and whisky, so her gravelly tones would be even more perfect as the voice of Satan.

Yet raw eggs, green glop and all, he had taste when it came to casting.

Twenty-eight years on, it's the acting that has kept the film alive Max von Sydow's Scandin-avian gravitas; Burstyn's fierce maternalism; and the playwright Jason Miller's Father Karras, who's battling his own demons, as well as Blair's.

All convey a queasy sense of reality, as do the still harrowing medical scenes, which in this version have been extended, and begin with the doctors responding to Blair's swearing at them by calling her hyperactive and prescribing Ritalin. A very modern diagnosis.

The film has been read as anti-woman an unwholesome male chauvinist fantasy demonising adolescent female sexuality, much as Brian De Palma would do three years later with the menstruation scenes in Carrie. But now that we've reached an era in which international pedophile rings communicate via the Internet, the story of a child whose body is possessed by devils takes on even nastier connotations.

Its spookiest element is still the dialogue. Spewing from Blair's 12-year-old mouth via McCambridge's distressed larynx, the script's sexual obscen-ities are shocking enough to accomplish the virtually impossible and restore the potency of the four-letter word at least for the time you're in the cinema.