Boorman and the Devil
Director – David Kittredge – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 112m
*****
How director John Boorman’s sequel (or not) to The Exorcist became one of the biggest Hollywood flops of all time – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 25th
This quite understandably takes a while to get around to its subject, talking both about where Hollywood found itself in the 1960s and looking at Boorman’s directorial career before settling on the production that nearly destroyed his career. Once it gets there though, a considerable amount of time is allotted to a production which starts to sound like one of the most amazing spectacles ever filmed. Yet this comes alongside a feeling that, on the most fundamental level, something is going to go or perhaps has already gone horribly wrong before the director has even signed on.
By the early 1960s, Hollywood was making big budget epics like Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963) or The Fall of the Roman Empire (Anthony Mann, 1964). When such movies started to fail at the box office, it turned to younger directors in the hope that they might understand what audiences wanted. The result was movies like Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) or The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967).… Read the rest
