Movies - The Medusa Touch

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	Movies - The Medusa Touch

The Medusa Touch is a British film released in 1978. It starred Richard Burton (John Morlar), Lee Remick (Zonfeld), Lino Ventura (Brunel), Harry Andrews (Assistant Commissioner), Michael Hordern (psychic), Derek Jacobi (Morlar's publisher), Gordon Jackson (surgeon) and Jeremy Brett (Parrish). The screenplay was by John Briley, based on a novel by Peter Van Greenaway, and the film was directed by Jack Gold.

Plot summary

A French detective, Brunel (Ventura) on an exchange scheme in London is investigating the attempted murder of novelist John Morlar (Burton). With the help of Morlar's journals and Dr Zonfeld (Remick), a psychiatrist whom the author had started visiting, he reconstructs Morlar's past life, which (seen in flashback) is full of inexplicable catastrophes. Morlar is, in fact, a psychic with powerful telekinetic abilities. Disgusted at the world (in his 1988 book Nightmare Movies, Kim Newman described Morlar's dialogue as "incredibly misanthropic"), Morlar has caused two recent disasters, an airliner crash and the loss of a manned spacecraft. From his hospital bed he manages to bring down a cathedral on the "unworthy heads" of a VIP congregation giving thanks for the building's preservation; and he seems able to keep himself alive by sheer willpower. As the film ends, a second attempt on Morlar's life has failed, and he writes on a pad the name of his next target - the nuclear power station at Windscale.

Film and novel

The film follows the plot of Van Greenaway's novel fairly closely, but changes several details.

In the novel, the detective is not a Frenchman but an English character named Inspector Cherry, who appears in several other Van Greenaway books.
In the novel Zonfeld is male and is a Holocaust survivor whose experience of Sachsenhausen concentration camp contributes to his eventual suicide.
At the end of the book, Morlar's hand does not scrawl Windscale but Holy Loch, the site of an American nuclear submarine base.

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