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DIRECTED BY: Guy Green
FEATURING: Michael Caine, Anthony Quinn, Candice Bergen, Anna Karina
PLOT: Commitment-phobic English teacher Nicholas Urfe escapes his girlfriend by traveling to Greece to take a job vacated by his predecessor’s suicide and meets a wealthy eccentric whose activities seem to center around Nico himself.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: When babe-in-the-woods Anne tells her wayward boyfriend, “Oh, Nico, this is life, not an existentialist novel,” it’s not a self-own. She’s having a go at all of us for trying to apply the tenets of reality to a tale that’s really half-philosophical treatise, half-rejection of conventional storytelling. It’s gleefully existentialist, leveraging a traditional leading man and spectacular Mediterranean vistas in service of a full-throated mockery of expectations. The Magus is aggressively weird—even hostile—to anyone who would try to make sense of it.
COMMENTS: “You have entered the Meta-Theater!” declares Anthony Quinn. How utterly baffling that must have been to mainstream audiences in 1968, long before the idea of a metaverse was common parlance and entertainment made a regular habit of sledgehammering the fourth wall into oblivion. Here they are, expecting to see a film about Michael Caine playing fast and loose with the affections of beautiful young women, and this intervening plotline keeps showing up in which Quinn alternately casts Caine in the role of confidant, spy, and test subject. If viewers were confused, that was apparently echoed by the actors themselves: Bergen complained that she never knew what she was supposed to play, while Caine reportedly has named The Magus as one of the worst movies he has ever made (a fantastic claim, especially to any of us who have seen Jaws: The Revenge). If the people making the movie don’t know what’s going on, that’s not going to make it easy on the rest of us.
Toying with structure seems to have been author John Fowles’ whole thing, utilizing tools like split narratives and multiple endings to heighten the uncertainty of existence. Given that Fowles insisted on adapting his own novel (having been unhappy with the previous adaptation of his work, The Collector), we can assume that everything is playing out exactly as he intends. So when protagonist Nico takes a walk through the Greek countryside that just happens to end up at the palatial estate of Conchis (Quinn, styled after Picasso, right down to the bald head and striped shirt), that’s all part of Fowles’ plan. There’s something amusing about the way Conchis changes his story, including his name and profession, every time we meet him. What boring people we must be to try and tie him down to a single identity.
Caine initially seems ideally cast as Nico. After all, it would take someone with his reputation for playing distinctly chilly characters like the brutal spy Harry Palmer or the caddish Alfie to be so cruelly dismissive of the beautiful and adoring flight attendant Anne (a fetching Karina). From that perspective, he seems ideal to portray a man so disdainful of commitment that when his girlfriend asks him to take a later flight to spend more time with her, he promptly books an earlier one. But as he becomes more enmeshed with Conchis’ machinations, which seem to revolve around the hapless beauty Lily (an airless, seemingly dubbed Bergen) but are really more of an indictment of Nico himself, Caine’s aloofness becomes a poor fit. Even when he’s tied up and confronted by the entire populace of the town (and a goofy computer), Caine feels far too confident, too safe to be genuinely threatened by the existential crisis that’s landed upon him.
Ironically, it’s the most straightforward, unadorned scene that retroactively justifies all the metaphysical tricks we’ve seen at play. Conchis’ flashback to his days as the puppet administrator during the Nazi occupation, when he was asked to make a Trolley Problem decision about the fate of the townspeople in the wake of a Resistance action, is a perfectly pitched as a tense, straightforward piece of drama, and its exposure of the cruelty of man. We know enough about both Nico and Conchis to understand how they’ve reached this point, and it makes sense that Quinn would reject the absurd limitations of logic. He’s got the more compelling case, so the ensuing lunacy he perpetrates seems only right.
Unfortunately for Fowles, he cannot quash the natural impulse of film to present even the most ridiculous situations in the stark light of reality. As Nico is left to reflect on his experience, we’re asked to judge what we’ve seen. Was it all just a dream? Has Nico been punished for his infractions? Is this an elaborate revenge on Anne’s part? Philosophy thrives in the uncertainty, but film demands an answer. That’s the paradox of The Magus: after two hours rejecting the tedium and pointlessness of reason, it just can’t quite give it up.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“The Magus is one of the weirdest films of the late 60’s… those anticipating the standard fare will no doubt be left scratching their head in disquieted belief – their expectations tossed down a well.” – Gary W. Tooze, DVD Beaver
(This movie was nominated for review by Steve Mobia. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
