‘The Medusa Touch’ or — Morlar Concentration ?
“I am the man with the power to create catastrophe.”
In ‘The Medusa Touch’ (1978) Richard Burton plays John Morlar, a bitter, dyspeptic writer who wishes that anyone who irritated or annoyed him he could instantly kill using only the power of his mind… so obviously I couldn’t relate to this guy in the slightest.
But that fact that Morlar is a writer is the key to why ‘The Medusa Touch’ works so well because, in many ways, this movie shouldn’t work — it has hardly any action, almost no deaths (apart from during the two set-pieces), contains a couple of naff jump-scares included only because the filmmakers knew something had to happen at some point as well as the fact that it’s blindingly obvious who Morlar’s attacker is from the very beginning with even the film itself doing a not very subtle job of attempted misdirection.
Fortunately none of that stuff matters at all because this is about a writer who believes he has the power to destroy the world using only his mind. It’s a set-up that allows for, if not demands, overly florid and exceptionally verbose narration meaning the scriptwriter can just go to town and have a field day of linguistic indulgence as well as having the perfect excuse to channel every single dark and nasty thought he’d ever had in his entire life. This must have been such a fun film to write! You can almost feel the glee the writer must be having leaping from the page. Combine that with Burton’s rich, ‘War of The Worlds’ doom-laden voice-over and the mixture is perfect.
So we are treated to some spectacular diatribes, tirades and rants of excessive acidity as Burton rails against every injustice in British society before destroying it with his telekinesis, a bit like if Carrie was a middle-aged civil servant with the erudition of Anthony Burgess. Indeed, one of the times Morlar snaps with anger is when his wife makes the remark about the “vegetable”, a remark that hits him maybe not because of the grief it alludes to but because she came back with a better line than his and it’s that that his ego can’t bear.
Another sign this movie works is the climax. Without giving too much away the film contains a Royal Ceremony and a possible appearance by the Queen, something that is usually death to a movie (I’m struggling to think of a film containing a Royal appearance that isn’t toe-curlingly god-awful) but here it actually works. This is, after all, a story about bringing the temple down around the establishment’s heads and it’s also the point where ‘The Medusa Touch’ reveals just how much of a biting satire it truly is; the ending almost plays out as an extension of Lindsey Anderson’s ‘if….’. Not only that but the falling stones, the cascading masonry have a genuine sense of weight; you really get the feeling of people being totally flattened and it’s a terrifying release of all the previously built up tension.
The film is also helped by some great performances and nice directing. Burton is fantastic as the maniacal Morlar, Lee Remick is appealing as his psychiatrist but it is a rather charming and warm turn by Lino Ventura as Inspector Brunel who gives the movie a secure footing in human decency. Director Jack Gold brings a few nice directorial flourishes too — notice when Brunel’s assistant literally feeds him some information.
I enjoyed revisiting ‘The Medusa Touch’ way more than I was expecting and I love it when a movie surprises me like that. As a telekinetic horror movie it might seem slow paced yet taken for what it is, an eloquently dark satire, it’s a total success. Oddly, I watched it only a couple of nights after William Peter Blatty’s ‘The Exorcist III’ (1990), a film with which it shares quite a lot in common — an apocalyptic tale about a confined man with the power to unleash catastrophe scripted by a writer with a sharp ear for dialogue and a piercing sense of humour. They’d make for a great double-bill.
