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February 01, 2022

The Antichrist

L'anticristo / The Tempter
Alberto De Martino - 1974
KL Studio Classics BD Region A

As a general rule, I usually do not watch horror films involving exorcism. The one big exception is The Exorcist. Not being Catholic, or Christian for that matter, the theological aspects can be interesting on an intellectual level. Otherwise, I do not feel compelled to watch a young woman going through various physical contortions until the priest with arcane knowledge and rituals shows up.

The Antichrist might be described as the story of the power iconography. The film starts off, documentary style, with pilgrims praying to a shrine of the Virgin Mary. The shrine is protected by a cage. Just outside are a small group of people with various mental or physical maladies, hoping for the miracle cure, by prayer or touching the statue. Crosses, whether in the form of a personal crucifix, statuary, or the kind smudged on the forehead, all appear here. Even church bells take on added significance.

More of interest to me is the iconography of the cast. A number of 1970s Italian genre films would have a cast mixed with European actors who sometimes had more artistically ambitious work in their careers, along with older Hollywood stars who kept their careers going by going abroad. The film stars Carla Gravina as a woman who suffers from paralysis in her legs due to a childhood trauma, and then through hypnosis discovers she was a witch in a previous life. And honestly, my only motivation for seeing The Antichrist was for Ms. Gravina. It was seeing two films within a short time of each other, Claude Lelouch's And Now My Love and Duccio Tessari's Tony Arzenta, released in the U.S. as No Way Out, where Gravina caught my attention. In the first film, she plays the girlfriend of Marthe Keller, in the second, the girlfriend of Alain Delon. Red hair and a face full of freckles, of course I had a crush on her. Gravina's stardom may have been limited primarily to Italian films, but she has a handful of acting prizes, including Cannes, along the way.

Supporting Gravina are Mel Ferrer as her father, and Arthur Kennedy as her uncle who also happens to be a ranking priest in the Vatican hierarchy. Both actors at this time were frequently seen in Italian genre films, usually as authority figures. Younger viewers might be unaware of a time twenty years ago when Ferrer was a romantic lead while Kennedy was a much respected actor on his way to five Oscar nominations. It was about twenty years earlier that Alida Valli made Senso with Luchino Visconti. What also probably attracted filmmakers to casting Ms. Valli was her history of starring in films by Alfred Hitchcock and Sir Carol Reed, even if she no longer resembled the woman once compared to Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. As the priest doing the exorcism, Orson Welles associate George Coulouris takes on that task.

For the horror film fan, there is ritual sex with a demon, flying furniture, exploding lamps, the voice of the devil, spitting of green liquid, and the usual bag special effects moments. In the supplement ported over from Blue Underground, shot in 2002, De Martino cheerfully admits there would be no Antichrist without The Exorcist. Fortunately, there is enough difference to keep the film from looking like a lazy imitation. Something I did not expect was a level of elegance in the sets and cinematography. Also included in the brief supplement is an interview with Ennio Morricone, who shared composing credits with Bruno Nicolai. Morricone reveals himself as the author of the atonal violin score heard at various dramatic points.

The commentary track is casually conversational, between two Australian film critics, Lee Gambin and Sally Christie, who have both specialized in genre films. Their discussion ranges from Catholic ritual to some of the other work of the primary cast and crew. Another supplement in the opening credit for the film when it was released as The Tempter. I do want to advise anyone unfamiliar with The Antichrist as I was that while the blu-ray offers both Italian and English language soundtrack options, the first nine and a half minutes are in Italian with no subtitles. That particular sequence is the documentary style opening prior to Gravina and Ferrer isolated from the frenzy of the crowd.

Posted by Peter Nellhaus at February 1, 2022 06:01 AM