The Believers (1987)

Following the tragic death of his wife, police psychiatrist Cal Jamison (Martin Sheen) moves to New York with his little son Chris (Harley Cross), for a classical new start. Things don’t begin too badly, despite the lingering grief. Cal even begins to get close to a woman again, his landlady Jessica (Helen Shaver). Not that Chris approves, obviously.

However, when Cal is called in to use his professional expertise on Tom Lopez (Jimmy Smits), a cop who seems to have lost it completely while doing some sort of undercover work nobody really seems to know about, he’s sucked into an occult conspiracy. Lopez believes that a sort-of santeria cult has infiltrated the highest echelons of New York society, using very dark magic for power and influence; his “madness” is no such thing, but actually a curse bestowed on him by the cult to keep him quiet.

At first, Cal believes his patient’s ideas to be delusions, but various hints and coincidences suggest to him there’s more than just a little truth to the man’s tales. Obviously, stumbling onto this sort of conspiracy will put Cal and everyone he loves in danger. And that’s before he learns his family (well, at least the one he married into) is much closer connected to the cult than he ever would have believed.

That last part really is the weakest aspect of John Schlesinger’s occult conspiracy horror movie The Believers, because at the point in the story the family business becomes important, Cal is already as connected to what’s going on around him as the narrative could ever need. Adding backstory connections this late in the movie is really just ladling on twists instead of adding actual narrative tension.

Given how much else the movie does right, I don’t believe the somewhat overcooked feel of its third act is as much of a problem as it could be. After all, once we reach that point of ultimate paranoia, the film has already left the realm of probability far behind and has turned into a perfect mix of urban paranoia, dramatic emotional breakdowns and rather nasty witchcraft.

Sheen copes with all of these elements well, grounding the roles of increasingly obsessed investigator, still grieving father and husband, mental health professional, and ranting maniac in the same kind of intensity so effectively, there’s rarely the feeling of incompatible elements trying too hard to exist in the same character.

Some of the horror and suspense scenes are astonishingly nasty for a rather mainstream production like this, even for a film made in the sometimes less rigid 80s. Schlesinger packages this nastiness into very traditionally grounded forms of suspense and horror, in form and style giving an occult drift to the 70s conspiracy thriller (a genre the director of Marathon Man certainly knows quite a bit about) while keeping that genre’s distrust of authority and the rich and powerful. In fact, The Believers takes this distrust even one step further by making belief/faith itself a thing to be distrusted – or at least belief as embodied in people perfectly willing to sacrifice their own children for these beliefs.

The film’s racial politics, unlike its class ones, will probably be rather problematic for some today. The Believers’ treatment and interpretation of brujeria is certainly not great. The filmmakers clearly realize this, so the film spends some time to acquaint us with morally upright followers of the religion; it never makes any kind of argument there, however, and certainly doesn’t help its case by at least leaving the reading open that its evil rich people were all seduced by the powers of the only black character of note in the film. Which is its own can of worms.

I have no particularly strong feelings about this one way or the other, and found myself rather too involved in the film’s increasingly over the top – that’s a good thing – narrative of paranoia and horrible shit happening to perfectly okay people to be invested in putting the least favourable reading on everything I saw.

Hell, I was riveted enough, I even enjoyed the horror movie bullshit ending for once. Perhaps because it’s not actually bullshit this time around, and instead fits the tone and themes of what comes before so perfectly. Again, at that point The Believers has left the realm of the plausible and the probable so far, yet so elegantly, behind, I would have probably bought whatever Schlesinger was trying to sell.

Marathon Man (1976)

Babe Levy (Dustin Hoffmann) is a New York student working on a thesis connected to the death of his father, who killed himself after being subjected to one of the McCarthy “hearings”, something Babe clearly can’t get away from, and so doesn’t try. Apart from his training up to run marathons, if you go for that kind of psychology; the film certainly does. Babe believes his brother Doc (Roy Scheider) is some high-level businessman working from Washington, but in truth, he is involved in the shadiest parts of espionage work, where it’s okay to keep mass murderers safe as long as they are convenient sources of information.

Said mass murderer is Nazi Szell (Laurence Olivier), and he’s grown rather paranoid in his old age. Believing Doc to be part of a conspiracy to steal his retirement nest egg of diamonds, the old man eventually kills him. Because Doc, despite all his faults certainly a loving brother in his way, stumbles into Babe’s apartment to bleed to death there, Szell assumes the younger Levy knows something about his most probably imagined conspiracy, so he begins to threaten and torture Babe.

Babe eventually escapes and turns rather more lucky at vengeance than Szell could have feared.

It is one of the fine ironies in John Schlesinger’s often brutal and really rather wonderful paranoid thriller Marathon Man that Szell is very much the architect of his final doom, driven by madness and an immense guilt this monstrous little man could only ever channel into anger and violence to create enemies and his own final catastrophe by his own blind brutality and cruelty. Laurence Olivier plays up the basic horribleness and horridness of the man wonderfully, grasps enough of the pathos of the character to make him interesting and complex, yet also keeps well away from making this murdering Nazi bastard “sympathetic”; as Olivier plays him, he’s small, cruel and painfully human in his quotidian monstrosity – there’s a controlled restraint in the actor’s approach that’s absolutely right for what is happening here.

Hoffman’s Babe is just as driven by the shadows of the past and guilt as Szell is, but where Szell is actually as guilty as a person can be, Babe’s guilt is based on a past history he had no hand in shaping and bears no responsibility for. In truth, Babe starts out as the innocent his name suggests (the script by William Goldman based on his own novel and apparently doctored by Robert Towne isn’t subtle about these things), and is dragged into growing out of assumed guilt into accruing some of his own through machinations he has little control over. I have seen Babe’s development read as the process of him growing up, but I’m not quite cynical enough to understand “learning that your loved ones are lying to you about the most crucial elements of their lives, and being involved in several violent killings” as growing up. I can’t imagine Babe after this as nothing but broken, dysfunctional and utterly alone, having shed the guilt for what his country did to his father only to have to replace it with one all of his own, however much the film tries to sell its ending as a happy one. To be fair, there’s also a second thematic strand about endurance (another reason for the marathon running) under horrible circumstances running through the film, but its darker thematic vein isn’t just richer, it is also much better embedded into the deeper strata of the film itself, at least to my eyes.

There’s a deep sense of urban paranoia running through much of the film; there isn’t only the heavy burden of hidden or at least unresolved history to carry, the characters also have to cope with a world where betrayal is a given as if it were a natural law. In the Paris and New York of this film, it’s a given that your partner and your lovers will betray you, that your brother’s friend is a rat, and so on. Though, in a curious sense of fairness, the worst of us, like Szell, can’t rest easy either.

On a cinematic level, this is a rather fantastic film. Schlesinger, whose body of work I generally find inconsistent but genuinely interesting, creates dark, grubby versions of New York and Paris that fit the grim and desperate tone of the film perfectly. Even by day, this particular version of the world is dominated by shadows and only the coldest of artificial light; everything is grubby, grimy, and used-up. Even the Paris Opera looks as if it had seen better days.

The suspense scenes follow classicist Hitchcockian forms, but Schlesinger often adds little notes of historical verisimilitude here Hitchcock would have avoided, probably very consciously keeping to the film’s main theme of the psychologically (possibly psychically) disfiguring burden of history and guilt. These scenes are often incredibly tight and tense, be it Szell torturing Babe dentally, Babe’s ensuing escape attempts and eventual escape, or the long, final sequence in which a panicked Nazi war criminal makes its way through a Jewish part of New York (at a time when you’d still meet quite a few survivors of the concentration camps there). The film’s actual finale isn’t much of one, in comparison, with a strong whiff of studio executives getting cold feet when confronted with the consequent grimness of Goldman’s initial ending. The rest of Marathon Man is so strong, the mildly botched ending isn’t much of a problem however.