Any modern-day remake of Jack Gold’s The Medusa Touch would probably skew much younger in its casting
and energy-level, its plot fleshed out by race-against-time set-pieces. If Gold’s
version works significantly better than seems likely, it’s largely because of
its world-weariness and sense of crusty experience, allowing its melodramatic
contrivances to seem like expressions of shared frustration and common anticipation
of doom. Richard Burton is among the stiffest and intemperate of leading men, so
it works pretty well to cast him as a man driven by those very qualities,
allowed several vituperative rants about societal hypocrisy and the general
mediocrity of people individually and collectively: the premise is that he has
the capacity to destroy at will, from individuals who cross him, to planes that
he pulls from the sky for the hell of it (the retrospective echo of 9/11 is
impossible to shut out), or even beyond that, to tamper with the workings of
manned space probes. Lino Ventura (his presence on the British police force amusingly
attributed to an exchange program with the French) comes in to investigate after
Burton’s Morlar is attacked in his home and left for dead – the film dramatizes
the fruits of his investigation in flashback, interspersed with the growing anxiety
as Morlar clings to life against all odds, his malicious capacities and intents
possibly intact. The extensive use of other establishment actors in small
parts, the alertness to time and place, and the breadth of Morlar’s fury
(encompassing the family, the education system, the law, the church, etc.)
gives the film an unlikely symbolic force, allowing the character to embody
whatever undiagnosed or unaddressed ills are slowly poisoning us. At the risk
of auteur-seeking excess, it’s thus tempting to see the film as a companion piece to
Gold’s sensational The Reckoning,
which dramatizes a very different form of rage-filled triumph over the English establishment.
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