One rare treat is rediscovering something that intrigued you as a young person, but which you’d completely forgot. Living in a small town and seldom going to movie theaters, I had to have learned about Magic from television commercials. I remember parts of the trailer, even down to particular phrases, but it was a movie I’d never seen. I forgot about it. That’s not to say that in the intervening decades I might not’ve relived that trailer in my head—I’m sure I did—but since I began binging on horror films a few years ago, it never occurred to me. I remember it scared me as a kid because the trailer consisted of a monolog by the ventriloquist’s dummy. Herein hangs the tale. The movie did reasonably well at the box office but nobody seems to discuss it much. When it showed up on a streaming service, the thumbnail of Fats’ face transported me back to the seventies and I knew I had to see it.
I have a soft spot for seventies horror. I was surprised to learn that Anthony Hopkins and Burgess Meredith were in it. And Ann-Margaret. A movie about a stage magician going mad, I found that it kept me tense. I didn’t know how the story went. In case you’re curious, it goes like this: Corky, a stage magician with a ventriloquist act, is about to hit the big times. He then flees to his childhood Catskills and finds his high school crush managing a remote, rundown resort. She’s in a loveless marriage and Corky has trouble with women. Two things become clear: his dummy says what he (Corky) really feels and Corky is seriously disturbed. Fear of being found out leads him to murder and although Peg, his crush, really liked and likes him, he can’t separate himself from the dummy.
There’s an ambiguity here. There are a couple scenes when Fats moves on his own. Otherwise there’s nothing supernatural going on here. That raises the question of whether the camera is lying or whether spooky action at a distance is taking place. Overall I thought the movie was well done. I wouldn’t have tolerated the language Fats uses when I was younger, but I did think Hopkins’ acting was quite good. Playing a person struggling with a mental disorder requires some convincing acting to be bought. And there was a feel to many seventies horror movies. This one brought me back with the power of suggestion, and perhaps a little magic.
