But the small cast and quiet, rural setting benefit the slow build of creeping menace. The film is worth seeing for those moments alone. An increasingly sweaty and agitated Corky keeps asking how much time has passed as the agent coolly observes his new act self-destructing into a full-blown mental health crisis in front of his eyes. Two of the most memorable scenes concern Fats’ control of Corky, one in which he orders him around like a puppet, and again when the agent asks Corky to make Fats shut up for five minutes. Although the territory is familiar, the combination of Attenborough’s direction, Hopkins’ powerful central performance and Goldman’s tight script ensures that the tension remains high throughout. As with Psycho, most of Magic’s action shifts to a deserted location, as Corky tries to escape from his problems and reconnect with his childhood sweetheart (Ann-Margret). The pleasant young man with a split personality had been examined to great success in Hitchcock’s Psycho, and the ventriloquist losing his personality to his dummy, prior to Magic, was most memorably achieved in Dead of Night where Michael Redgrave played the ill-fated entertainer.
Thematically, Magic is a pleasing amalgamation of established psychological horror tropes. Only there’s a problem: is Corky in charge of the dummy, or the other way around? All Corky has to do is take a medical test. All of a sudden he’s the talk of the town, and a top agent (Burgess Meredith) wants to take him on. In a last-ditch attempt, he creates an alter-ego – his obnoxious dummy Fats – who becomes his heckling sidekick. Corky Withers is a failing magician, lacking the confidence to connect with his audience. William Goldman adapted his own novel for the screenplay. He could play vulnerability and psychotic with equal conviction, and both traits are needed in abundance. It’s easy to see why Anthony Hopkins came to be cast as Corky Withers, an up-and-coming ventriloquist. Magic, which was released in 1978, was his second collaboration with director Richard Attenborough in only a few years, following quickly from 1976’s wartime epic A Bridge Too Far. He retained good looks, an interesting face and piercing blue eyes that helped solidify his leading man status ahead of his second coming as a character actor with Hannibal Lecter. The late 1970s was an interesting period in the career of Anthony Hopkins, one of the most successful British actors of his generation.
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