INSTALLMENT 26:
In Which A Good Time Was Had By All And An Irrelevant Name-Dropping Of Fritz Leiber Occurs For No Better Reason Than To Remind Him How Much We Love And Admire Him

Though her name be not Calliope, Euterpe, Thalia or any of the other six, a Muse of my East Coast acquaintance also happens to be on a first-name basis with John Updike, and she happened to mention a month or two ago that Updike had said the new Warner Bros, film adaptation of his 1984 fantasy The Witches of Eastwick only superficially resembled the novel, but it sure as hell captured the feeling of the book.

Now, this was not Updike's first picnic in the enchanted forest of our mythic genre. Back in 1963, he did a sorta kinda symbolic fantasy called The Centaur. It is my least favorite of all the fifteen or sixteen Updike books I've read. No, let me be more specific: surgeons have it easier; they are blessed and cursed with the ability to bury their mistakes; novelists have to live with the walking dead of their failed efforts. The Centaur made my hide itch. I ground away valuable layers of tooth enamel during the reading.

So it was with considerable pleasure that I found Updike's second sojourn down our way considerably more successful. (Like all of us who have access to the range and spiced variety of fantasy literature that includes writers The New York Review of Books has never even heard of, I often find myself subscribing to the Accepted Wisdom that visitors from The Mainstream more often than not make asses of themselves when they decide to try their hand at what we do. I am ashamed when I catch myself thinking that way; and for every Doris Lessing, Herman Wouk, Jacqueline Susann, Taylor Caldwell or Andrew Greeley who makes us rend our flesh and spit up our breakfast, there is an appositely wonderful Peter Straub, Naomi Mitchison, John Hersey, Peter Carey or Russell Hoban who teaches us old dogs some new tricks. So it is surely unfair to me, of us, to go to our graves bearing that ignoble misconception. So I was happy that Updike pulled it off, rather than wallowing in smug pleasure at his earlier misstep.)

While it is impossible to read any novel in which suburban witches appear in a contemporary setting without taking out the prayer rug and intoning the hallowed names of Fritz Leiber and Conjure Wife, Updike's literary conceit is a good read, an honest reexamination of the basic fantasy construct, and is filled with some of his liveliest writing.

What would be made of the book by the Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael Cristofer, the brilliant Mad Max director George Miller, and the "hot" but frequently tasteless producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters (we're talking here Flashdance, A Star Is Born, The Deep and The Color Purple, among others), was anybody's guess. But the odds weren't terribly terrific. Updike ain't that easy to translate onto celluloid, and the stats of previous attempts look like readouts on the value of the Mexican peso.

But I am here to tell you that The Witches of Eastwick is great fun. Get it out of your head that it's Updike's book, scene for scene, or line for line, or even character for character. But no matter how you saw Darryl Van Home (they've dropped one of the "r"s from his first name in the film), Alexandra, Jane and Sukie in the novel, you would have to possess the soul of a pigeon-kicker to object to the interpretations of those characters by Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer. Veronica Cartwright and Richard Jenkins are also not too dusty as Felicia and Clyde Alden.

Updike's Eastwick, Rhode Island (found and filmed in Cohasset, Massachusetts) is the safe, settled Late George Apleyesque cubbyhole of life in which Alex, Jane and Sukie mark off the days of their lives as victims of "the dreaded three D's": death, desertion and divorce. Alex's husband is dead, Jane's husband has divorced, and Sukie's old man has deserted, leaving her with six daughters.

The women possess "the source," the secret power of witchcraft that all men—naively or cynically—believe lies in the female. (Van Home delivers a brief but impassioned codification of this cliche near the beginning of the film and, near the end, does it again with the kid gloves off, inquiring whether God has made women as a mistake or as some sort of ghastly punishment for men. I take no side in this matter. I merely report what is on the screen.) This power manifests itself fully only with the arrival in Eastwick—perhaps by wish-fulfillment of the women's group fantasy—of "a prince traveling under a dark curse . . . very handsome . . . with a cock neither too large nor too small, but right in the middle": Daryl (one "r") Van Home.

Well, Jack Nicholson may be many things, but "handsome" ain't one of them. There is too much pasta in that face. Yet in a few minutes, like the exquisite three women, we are conned into accepting Nicholson and Van Home as just such a "dark prince." And he proceeds, without too much butter, to seduce all three of them. To tell you more would steal from you that which you deserve: the pleasure of getting coshed over the noggin by a satanically charming romp courtesy of all concerned.

And even if Fritz Leiber did most of this to perfection in 1943, preceded only by Rene Clair, Fredric March, Veronica Lake, Cecil Kellaway and Robert Benchley (from a screenplay by Robert Pirosh and Marc Connelly) in 1942's I Married A Witch, you would have to be the kind of person who enjoys pissing on the snowy egret to carp about this delicious film.

As Stan Lee would put it, 'nuff said!

But:

Unceasing in my efforts to broaden your filmgoing experience (and by way of thanking all of you for saving Woody Allen's life by retroactively awarding him a Hugo for Sleeper in 1974, which fannish largesse was imparted to him on the operating table, thereby giving him the will to live), I have preserved my notes from the Warner Bros, screening, and I offer them here in brief, to give you things to watch for.

•The Writers Guild fought long and hard for proper credit onscreen for the scenarist(s). But notice, when you go to see The Witches of Eastwick, how cunningly the Directors Guild has circumvented the rules. All but two of the opening credits are committed, concluding with the writer, before there is an intrusion of a complete scene. Then, after that space, we return to more bucolic camerawork (by the inspired Vilmos Zsigmond, who could make rice pudding as breathtaking as Walden Pond) and in the artistic respite that follows, the downtime, as it were, they flash the producers' and director's credits. It isn't exactly a degrading-to-writers cheat, but in terms of cinematic vocabulary, of what the eye sees and registers, it is a now-commonplace dodge that establishes who is below the salt and who ain't. Watch for it. Notice it.

•The editing by Richard Francis-Bruce is marvelous. Very suspenseful. Particularly in the ways in which it is integrated with what may be the best film score by John Williams in a decade. The aural package melded to the visual freight is as good as anything you'll currently find on the big screen. It looks like a movie, not just another of those slambang tv eye-rippers tossed into the microwave and toughened up for theater release.

•Note the intelligence of everyone in the film. People may act weirdly, but consistently. There are no dopes in this story. Which is a tribute to Cristofer and the canny players, because Updike gave us a fantasy trope, and the scenarist and actors have rendered it mimetically, sequentially, logically.

•Catch the flies. Every time Nicholson comes onscreen, we get a not-obtrusive Lord of the flies echo. More would have been to pull a Spielberg ("Hey, looka me! See how well I know my subtext! See how cute I am!") and less would have been lost in the rush of the story.

•Consider if it isn't time to send a letter to your regional movie maven, to suggest we may indeed have had enough vomiting scenes in films. The Exorcist did it as well as any of us cared to have it done, and if quality of puke were not sufficient, Terry Gilliam gave us Mr. Creosote in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life for sheer quantity. Beyond those seminal upchuck icons, all else is, well, simply parking the tiger. Calico carpet comment. What I mean, mate, you seen one spring-loaded tsunami of york, you've seen it all, in't it?

•The tennis scene. See and delight. Then catch the resonance from the ultimate sequence in Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966). Upper crust athletic activity as mystical ritual.

•If costume designer Aggie Guerard Rodgers doesn't get an Oscar for Jack Nicholson's wardrobe (provided by Cerruti 1881 Paris), then we ought to call in Lt. Col. Oliver North to start collecting funds for the overthrow of Hollywood's Academy.

•Rob Bottin's special makeup effects. Are you, as am I, getting weary of that same Bottin monster look? Would you kindly pay some attention to it in this film and ask your kids or the nearest SFX freak if it doesn't look boringly as if Bottin uses the same damned slavering, hunching critter every time, with a bit more or a bit less hair. Tell his mother. Bottin's, not the critter's.

In conclusion: I'm not sure John Updike would like one of his serious novels thought of as simply great fun, but that's the way this film has turned out. And unless I'm off my feed, I think you'll look at this drollery and recognize it as a germinal piece of American cinema. One of those films people will use as reference for years to come. A very American movie, beautifully directed by an Australian, co-produced by a talented ex-hairdresser (we'll never let you get above your station, Jon), persuasively acted by three of the most seductive women in film today, and written with brio by a man who should be kept working at his craft by whips, if necessary.

Even Fritz Leiber will enjoy this one.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / October 1987