The Magus. 1968. UK. Directed by Guy Green. Screenplay by John Fowles, based on his novel. With Michael Caine, Anthony Quinn, Candice Bergen. 35mm courtesy Swedish Film Institute. In English; Swedish subtitles. 117 min.
Writing for the Los Angeles Free Press, Paul Schrader notes, “We see Guy Green’s The Magus to realize just how good Buñuel’s Belle de jour was, just as we read John Fowles’ The Magus to realize how good Hesse’s Steppenwolf was.” Michael Caine has also been humorously dismissive of Fowles’s adaptation of his own weighty novel (he had more success with The Collector and The French Lieutenant’s Woman) but we include it in this retrospective as one of those enjoyably pretentious European art films in which an all-star cast, in this case Anthony Quinn, Anna Karina, Candice Bergen, Corin Redgrave and Caine himself, match wits while working on their tans on a sun-baked Greek island (Majorca, actually). There Quinn, a self-proclaimed mystic, or magus, holds court, luring the aloof yet befuddled teacher Caine into a spellbinding labyrinth of irreality and fantasy role-playing (this is where bosomy Bergen comes in). The mind games—or “Godgame,” as Fowles would have it—involve name-dropping references to W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Fra Angelico, the myths of Orpheus and Odysseus, and William Empson’s The Seven Types of Ambiguity.
Please note this print will be presented with Swedish subtitles.