Something Wicked this Way Comes (Retro)

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (1983) PG 95 Minutes Director: Jack Clayton Writer: Ray Bradbury Jason Robards, Jonathan Pryce, Diane Ladd CAST Jason Robards...Charles Halloway Jonathan Pryce...Mr. Dark Diane Ladd...Mrs. Nightshade Vidal Peterson...Will Halloway Shawn Carson...Jim Nightshade Royal Dano...Tom Fury Pam Grier...Dust Witch Mary Grace Canfield...Miss Foley Bruce M. Fischer...Mr. Cooger Richard Davalos...Mr. Crosetti Jake Dengel...Mr. Tetley James Stacy...Ed the Bartender Ellen Geer...Mrs. Halloway Jack Dodson...Dr. Douglas Brendan Klinger...Young Mr. Cooger Arthur Hill...Adult Will Halloway (Narrator)

The freaks come out at night.

— Whodini, "Freaks Come Out at Night" (1984)

A few months ago, while reviewing LITTLE BIG LEAGUE, I remember thinking it was a pretty good movie, though one that made the regrettable decision to kill off Jason Robards far too early. He plays the owner of the Minnesota Twins, then dies before we have much chance to get attached to him. With Halloween approaching, I happened upon SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, a movie in which Robards has the good sense to stick around. And is it any good? Well, you'll have to stick around for the rest of the review to find out. For now, I'll just say it isn't terrible.

Charles Halloway is convinced he's a failure as a father, and the first sixteen minutes establish it. Doc tells him at the bar to remember his heart, one drink and one cigar. At home, he tells his wife that Will makes him feel so darn old, that a man should be able to play baseball with his son. She answers, "Baseball is not necessary, not with a heart like yours." The real confession comes the next evening, when he finally tells Will about a picnic on the Indigo River. A current swept four-year-old Will into the middle of the water, and Charles stood on the bank, helpless, because his own father never thought it was right to teach boys to swim. The man who dove in without taking his boots off was Jim's father. Robards plays all of it weary and apologetic, and he never asks us to feel sorry for him. In the novel, Halloway is the library's janitor. The movie promotes him to librarian, making Dark's jab about "living only through other men's lives" more literal. Then the boys explain why they've been hiding, and Charles says he believes them. Jim objects that they aren't grownups. "That's why I believe you," Charles says. It reminded me of THE SIMPSONS episode "Lisa the Iconoclast," where Homer is the only person in Springfield who takes his daughter's side. Homer's way of backing her up involves digging up a corpse. Charles reads the boys an entry from his father's diary. He's a better dad than he thinks, and the movie has the proof ready. When Dark traps him in front of a mirror and tells him his son hates him, Will answers by shouting that he loves him. Charles shatters the glass.

The carnival works like THE MONKEY'S PAW, except nobody has to find it in a drawer. Every wish gets granted, and the bill comes with it. The movie makes sure we like Ed the bartender before it takes him. He has one arm and one leg, he swings the hammer anyway, and when the bell dings, Will and Jim hug him. It's a short, sweet moment, and then his prize arrives, a free pass to the mirror maze. Ed walks in, sees a reflection with both legs, and we hear him wishing he could run, throw, and tackle again. The next time we see his bar, it's empty. "First time in 20 years," Doc says. Miss Foley, who folks say was once the most beautiful woman in town, comes out of the same maze dazed, talking about how bright and beautiful it was. Dark later calls her a "blind girl." The diary entry Charles reads in the library supplies the rule. A lame servant girl asked the fortuneteller how she might run. "Her leg mended, and then she ran mad." "It seems they destroy people by granting their dearest wishes." Dark never has to invent anyone's unhappiness. He describes his diet in that same library, "funerals, bad marriages, lost loves, lonely beds," and Green Town had plenty of all four. The carnival offers to fix it as a favor, free of charge, and supplies the mirror.

This is where I part ways with the story. Dark's pitch to Charles is a countdown that starts at 30 and gives up at 52 with a "Your loss!" The movie takes place in the 1930s, when a man in his fifties might have felt older than he would today, but I still have trouble accepting fifty-four as an age worth mourning. If I woke up tomorrow twenty years old, I don't think my friends and family would stop caring about me. I'd still be the same person inside, with a couple of extra decades to get to the things I haven't. Dating would be trickier, since I'd have little in common with people my age, but old souls already deal with that. The people who really need this story's warning are Uncle Rico in NAPOLEON DYNAMITE and Al Bundy in MARRIED... WITH CHILDREN, men who would get their youth back and spend it reliving the fourth quarter coach never let one of them play and the four touchdowns the other scored once. No carousel fixes that. Dark's offer to Charles is smarter than that, though. He counts up through "You might still learn to swim" and "a year when you could run up the stairs without panting for breath," which are Charles's own regrets, not a generic wish for youth. Wanting more time to live and being unable to enjoy the life you're in are two different problems. Dark pretends he can solve the first because he knows Charles suffers from the second.

Jim Nightshade is the boy with the most to lose, and the movie shows us why before the carnival arrives. He tells anyone who will listen that his father is in Africa and coming home with a parrot and a shrunken head, and Will points out that Jim's father never writes. Things aren't much better at home. Mrs. Nightshade tells him to find something in the icebox because "Mother's just all tired out." Later he asks her whether he looks like his father. "Too like," she says, and adds that the day he leaves home, her Harry will be dead forever. A mother who can't look at her son without seeing her husband gives him one more reason to want out, and Jim wants out. He's the one who keeps threatening to remember things "when I'm older, darn it," and the one Will accuses of planning to ride the carousel the other way. Compare Will's mother, who marches him upstairs for sneaking out and calls Jim a bad influence. It isn't kind to Jim, but it's the sound of someone paying attention. Dark hears the difference. Calling to the boys in the library, he asks Jim how he'd like to be grown up, not looked down at, not told to run away and play. Then he says, "I'm the father you've been waiting for." Jim has spent the movie waiting on a letter from Africa. Dark shows up in person, which is more than his real father has managed.

The 1980s were good at movies that were creepy without being scary, the kind that ruin one night's sleep and then get watched again the following October. SILVER BULLET is another example, and SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES belongs in the same company. A lot of the charm is in the casting. Jonathan Pryce plays Mr. Dark like a courteous showman, introducing himself with "My name is Mr. Dark. I advise you to respect it," and later explaining that his people butter "plain bread with delicious pain." Pam Grier, who made her name in COFFY and FOXY BROWN, says little as the Dust Witch and is still the most frightening person in any scene she enters. Royal Dano gets some of Bradbury's most colorful dialogue as Tom Fury, the lightning-rod salesman, a man who wants to know what color lightning is and where the thunder goes when it dies. "Did I take the name? No, sir. The name took me." When I read the novel, I figured this would be tough to pull off today, even with modern CGI and expert practical effects. The movie doesn't pull it off entirely. Green Town was built on the Disney Studios backlot, and it looks like exactly that, a storybook street constructed for the occasion. The supernatural events have the handmade look of something put together with a lot of fog and whatever tricks the filmmakers could devise. That's part of why it works. A carnival that arrives in the middle of the night on a train nobody is sure they heard doesn't need to look real. It needs to look like a story somebody told you.

The movie's rough edges make more sense once you know how it got made. Bradbury first wrote a screenplay in 1958 for Gene Kelly, and it took until 1981 and Disney to get it shot. Bradbury and director Jack Clayton eventually fell out over an uncredited rewrite by John Mortimer. The draft I read is dated August 1981 and still has pages revised on September 30, two days after cameras started rolling. Then the test screenings went badly. Disney effectively took the film out of Clayton's hands, reportedly spent another $5 million overhauling it, and brought Bradbury back for a new opening narration and a new ending. Georges Delerue's score was dropped for being too sinister, and James Horner wrote a replacement on short notice. The film planned for Christmas 1982 finally opened on April 29, 1983, which is a strange time of year for a movie about October. The reshoots came long enough after the original shoot that the boys had visibly grown. In a couple of scenes, Will seems about a foot taller. It's almost the MADTV FULL HOUSE reunion sketch, where the Olsen twins, who split the role of Michelle, can no longer pass for the same girl because Nicole Sullivan plays a considerably heavier Mary-Kate. This is a movie about a carousel that rewinds people's ages, and it can't keep its own boys the same age from one scene to the next.

From Will shouting "I love you" at the mirror to the final "Tie!," my subtitle file clocks about six minutes, and a lot happens in them. Jim climbs onto the carousel beside Dark, lightning hits, Dark withers into a husk, the carnival tears itself apart, and a man with a bad heart saves a boy by acting like an idiot. That last part is the best of it, and it's faithful. Charles snaps Will out of his tears, tells him the night people love them, and dances around announcing that he's the great whooping crane, which is nearly line for line what the novel does. Fighting evil with laughter and love is a nice idea, and the movie sells it. What it skips is the novel's other half. In the book, Dark isn't killed by lightning. He has ridden the carousel backward into a lost nine-year-old boy, and Charles recognizes him, holds him close, and starves him with kindness, on the theory that evil has only the power we give it. Afterward, Will asks whether they'll ever come back. "No. And yes," Charles says. "Maybe they're already here." The boys look around and see nobody but themselves. Then all three, including Charles, briefly consider taking another ride on the carousel. The movie replaces that conversation with a narrator telling us that "being old was all right now" for his father, and a footrace that ends in a tie. It's sweet, but the novel leaves all three characters vulnerable to temptation, and the movie lets us go home reassured. The carnival is gone, and everything it fed on is still in town. The movie doesn't need a longer climax so much as a couple more minutes to consider what happens after it.

So, is it any good? I said at the start that it isn't terrible, and I'm willing to go a little further than that. It's uneven, the ending is rushed, and you can see the effects of Disney's attempts to make it more accessible. But Robards is the real thing, the atmosphere holds up, and the ideas under the carnival are better than the film has time to develop. Dark makes his living on dissatisfaction. He finds what someone is missing and sells it back as a favor, always in the politest terms: "Excuse me, gentlemen, I am a stranger in this town." He merely wishes, he says, to give the boys "the valuable rewards that they so richly deserve." Charles has no such manners. He sings badly, dances worse, and gives up his dignity to save a boy who isn't even his. What Dark sells has a price, and what Charles gives away doesn't. Bradbury called the finished film "not a great film, no, but a decently nice one," and I like that he reached for the word nice. Dark has the better manners. Charles has the better heart, bad as it is.

Final Verdict: 77 out of 100

Sidenote: What's Halloween without a little Salem Saberhagen?

Local Hero (Retro)

LOCAL HERO (1983) PG 111 minutes Director: Bill Forsyth Writer: Bill Forsyth Peter Riegert, Burt Lancaster, Denis Lawson CAST Peter Riegert...Mac MacIntyre Burt Lancaster...Felix Happer Denis Lawson...Gordon Urquhart Fulton Mackay...Ben Knox Peter Capaldi...Oldsen

When I feel
that the world is too much for me
I think of the Big Sky
and nothing matters much to me.

— “Big Sky,” Ray Davies / The Kinks (1968)

I found LOCAL HERO the way Mac MacIntyre found Ferness — by accident, through a chain of events I couldn't have planned. I was listening to a Northern Exposure podcast when a producer named Cheryl Block mentioned in passing that Josh Brand had watched this film while developing the show and couldn't stop talking about it. On a whim I pulled it up. I had no prior attachment to it, no childhood memory, no critical framework telling me how to feel. I didn't even know who was in it. What I knew was that a 1983 Scottish film about an oil company trying to buy a village had somehow inspired one of my favorite television shows, and that seemed like enough of a reason. Two hours later I wasn't entirely sure what had happened to me.

I kept trying to find something to compare it to. The better Albert Brooks films came to mind — where a man whose structured, success-driven life quietly dissolves around him without anyone raising their voice. Northern Exposure is the obvious reference point, for reasons that turn out to be less accidental than they appear. You can feel the inheritance everywhere: in the eccentric community that never condescends to its own quirks, in the conversations that drift into philosophy without announcing it, in the humor that arrives sideways and leaves before you've fully registered it. The closest I came was an unlikely one — watching JURASSIC PARK for the first time. Not because the films have anything in common, but because of that specific feeling of discovering a place you don't want to leave. All of these comparisons are slightly wrong. LOCAL HERO slips out from under all of them. It is, stubbornly and completely, its own thing.

It almost wasn't this movie at all. Warner Brothers and Goldcrest, uncomfortable with the little-known Peter Riegert in the lead, pushed hard for Henry Winkler. The Fonz. There is a version of this review where I spend several paragraphs trying to unsee Arthur Fonzarelli feeding ten pence coins into a Scottish phone box, watching the aurora borealis, maybe even racing that motorcycle guy outside the hotel. Forsyth had written the role with Riegert in mind and had no interest in anyone else. What I can tell you is that Riegert's particular quality — understated, slightly opaque, a man whose face doesn't arrive with prior associations already attached — is load bearing. Forsyth held firm. When Riegert apparently told him he'd understand if the politics of Hollywood forced a different choice, Forsyth's response was simple: if you're not in it there's no movie.

The setup is deceptively simple. Mac MacIntyre, a junior executive at Knox Oil and Gas in Houston, is sent to Scotland to buy a small fishing village and its bay for a new refinery. He's chosen for the assignment because of his Scottish surname, a detail that turns out to be something of a fiction — his family changed their Hungarian surname to MacIntyre when they arrived in America because they thought it sounded more American. He is sent to negotiate with his own people and has no people. When he arrives in the fictional village of Ferness he finds a community that is warm, eccentric, and almost comically eager to sell. The expected conflict — scrappy locals defending their way of life against corporate destruction — never materializes because nobody is playing their assigned role. The villagers want the money. Mac finds himself falling in love with the place he's supposed to be buying. The oil company's eccentric billionaire owner is more interested in finding a comet than running an oil company. The film keeps setting up a confrontation and then quietly declines to have it.

Ferness is a village where everyone has at least three jobs and nobody thinks this is unusual. Gordon Urquhart runs the hotel, tends bar, drives a taxi, fixes lobster creels on the beach, and happens to hold power of attorney for the entire community in negotiations with a multinational oil company. The reverend is African — he came as a student minister decades ago and never left, which strikes nobody as remarkable. A Soviet fisherman named Victor shows up for the ceilidh and immediately starts discussing currency markets and short-term deposits with Gordon, because of course he does. Early on, Mac and Danny stand on the pristine beach they've been sent to buy and marvel at everything petroleum makes possible — nylon, polythene, dry cleaning fluid, waterproofs. The jets overhead really spoil a very nice area, Mac observes, apparently without irony. The whole village piles into the church to scheme about how to extract maximum money from the oil company, which is either the most Scottish or most human thing in the film, possibly both. And somewhere in the background, a man on a motorcycle nearly runs people down every time they walk out of the hotel, unexplained, unremarked upon, permanent.

LOCAL HERO was made in 1983, before the internet, before smartphones, before the average person spent their waking hours staring at a screen in a city that had forgotten what the night sky looked like. And yet it feels urgently contemporary in a way that has nothing to do with nostalgia. The film is quietly obsessed with scale — specifically with what happens to a person when something reminds them of their actual size in the universe. Happer, one of the most powerful men in the world, pays a therapist to abuse him and dreams of having a comet named after him. Mac arrives from Houston, where, as Forsyth noted, you can't readily look up and see the stars. Ferness has no such problem. The sky over Scotland keeps interrupting the business of buying and selling — a meteor shower stops Mac cold, the aurora borealis stops an entire community mid-thought, and when Happer finally arrives by helicopter the lights are so extraordinary that his entrance feels less like a business trip than a landing from another world. Ben Knox already understands all of this. He lives on a beach, owns no possessions worth mentioning, knows the night sky like his own backyard, and cannot be bought for any amount of money. The film's argument, delivered without a single speech, is that Ben has the scale of things exactly right — and that understanding your place in the universe doesn't make you small. It makes you free.

Ben Knox is the soul of the film and the hardest character in it to explain. He lives alone in a shack on a beach he has owned for four hundred years, a gift from the Lord of the Isles to an ancestor who helped out with a spot of trouble — killed his brother, something like that. He has eight unplotted objects in the night sky nobody else has bothered to catalog. Coconuts and oranges wash up by the North Atlantic Drift; he accepts them as perfectly normal. Ben cannot be bought. Not for a hundred thousand pounds, not for half a million, not for any beach in Hawaii or Australia. When Mac spreads postcards of tropical beaches in front of him, Ben looks at them politely and notes that they seem like very nice beaches, but he only needs the one. He already has this one. The company is even named after him, in a roundabout way — Knox Oil and Gas, Ben Knox, a coincidence Forsyth plants without explanation or emphasis, the way he plants everything. When Happer finally arrives and the two of them disappear into the shack together, the film stays outside with everyone else. Forsyth said he simply didn't know what they would say to each other. The audience fills it in themselves. Whatever it was, Happer comes out having decided to build an observatory instead of a refinery. Ben stays on his beach. The film considers this a happy ending. It's right.

There is a version of LOCAL HERO that is a slightly better film than the one that exists. It lives in the first act. Mac's Houston life — the migraines, the Porsche, the electrically locked briefcase, the ex-girlfriend who took his camera case, the office where everyone cheerfully discusses buying a country over lunch — needed more room to breathe. The counterweight to Scotland had to be heavy enough that when Scotland dissolves it, the audience feels the full weight of what's happening. As it stands the Houston section moves quickly in a way that slightly softens Mac's transformation. You feel him changing, but you don't fully feel what he was changing from. This is not a guess. David Puttnam identified it himself before the film even opened, calling the first act cuts the film's flaw — the price paid for getting the runtime to a manageable length. When Mac calls Houston two days into his trip and says it feels like he's been in Ferness forever, the line should hit like a small earthquake. It does hit. It just hits a little softer than it might have. Those are the eight points I'm withholding. Not for what's there. For what got cut.

Warner Brothers wanted a different ending. Mac returns to the village, gets embraced by his mates, marries a local girl. The full upbeat Hollywood resolution. Forsyth refused. His original ending was Mac back in his Houston apartment listening to the sounds of the city — no sentiment, no hope, just the noise closing back in. Puttnam negotiated a compromise. Forsyth remembered he had a shot of the village with the phone box in the mid-ground. They added the sound of it ringing. Warner Brothers found it acceptable. That became the ending. The instinct to side with the artist against the studio is almost always correct and the history of Hollywood is full of good reasons for it. This is the rare exception. The compromise produced something neither party was aiming for — genuinely open, genuinely moving, and completely consistent with a film that refused to tell you what to think from the first frame to the last. Mac is back in Houston. The phone is ringing. Whether anyone answers it is entirely up to you. Puttnam said it best — if they had done everything Warner Brothers wanted nobody would be talking about this film today. They compromised on the ending and held firm on everything else. That turns out to be exactly the right set of compromises to make. Most studios get it precisely backwards.

Everything about LOCAL HERO should tip into sentimentality. A man finds a beautiful place and doesn't want to leave. An old eccentric saves a beach from corporate destruction. A lonely billionaire finds connection with a stranger over a shared love of the stars. A community's way of life is preserved. Mark Knopfler playing gentle guitar over Scottish landscapes. Any one of those elements in a lesser film would have you reaching for a bucket. Forsyth avoids it through a combination of techniques that work so naturally you don't notice them operating. The humor cuts through at exactly the right moments. Nobody explains their feelings. The film refuses to linger on its most emotional moments — it lets them happen and moves on before you can be manipulated by them. The rabbit is funny and then it's dinner. The aurora borealis is beautiful and then Mac needs more ten pence pieces. Happer and Ben bond in a shack and the camera stays outside. What remains is something difficult to describe. Not happiness exactly. Not melancholy. Something closer to the feeling the Kinks were reaching for in Big Sky — when the world gets to be too much, think of the big sky, and nothing matters quite so much anymore. I watched this film with no preparation, no nostalgia, no prior attachment, and it still did that to me. That's the only honest thing I can tell you about it.

Final Verdict: 92 out of 100

Sidenote: Just like 3 NINJAS, LOCAL HERO is also freely available on YouTube.