Word: magus
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...first three novels, John Fowles displayed a talent for taking risks. The Collector (1963), The Magus (1966) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) came in impressive sequence, one surpassing another in virtuosity, like the work of a magician developing his craft, slow motion, before his audience. The Collector was a comparatively simple pass?butterflies in psychotic transformation turned into pinioned women, perhaps a gothic variation on Lepidopterist Nabokov. In The Magus, Fowles worked gaudier effects: allegory, romance, black magic. The French Lieutenant's Woman played the entire Victorian milieu against the 20th century; Fowles could so persuasively dream...
Kenneth Clark called Leonardo "the great Sphinx of art history," but he was also its great Rorschach blot. The past century has seen almost as many Leonardos as there have been léonardistes. Magus, "Renaissance man," supergay, world's first nonlinear thinker -the parade of stereotypes marches on. At one moment he struck the Victorians as a prototype of the engineer-hero, a 15th century Brunel or Edison who lacked only the omnipotent semen of capital to make his projects real. At the next, the English 19th century aesthete Walter Pater wrote of his mechanical inventions as mere...
...films today. Robertson gives his role just the right mixture of dumb impudence and shrewd calculation. And then there is Caine, an extraordinarily good performer with an apparent weakness for taking any role that comes along. Despite his mighty skills both as a dramatic actor and comedian (AIfie, The Magus, Gambit), his talent is in danger of being blunted by too many appearances in too many hapless exercises like Too Late the Hero. Movies like this, after all, can be just as wearing on an actor as on an audience...
...film refuses to take sides with its characters, it adopts a firm stand toward its actors: it is against them. Producer-Director Richard Rush sets his cast at shriek level. Even the elegant Candice Bergen, who at last seems ready to break through plaster casting (The Magus, The Adventurers), is given too much to yell and not enough to say. Elliott Gould is a natural clown; his hands are an act in themselves, and his hair seems to be coiling for a strike. Yet only once does Getting Straight allow him an original scene. At the oral exam...
...Fowles, entertainment need not be art, but art should always be in some sense entertaining. The Collector was both a taut psychological cliffhanger and a shattering study of good and evil. The Magus was both a love and adventure tale and an erudite venture into occult philosophy. Richer and more accomplished than either. The French Lieutenant's Woman seems destined to be a bestseller. It is the kind of work that helps give success a good name...