Bedeviled
By RICHARD SCHICKEL
THE OMEN
Directed by RICHARD DONNER
Screenplay by DAVID SELTZER
The Omen presents just one question of genuine interest: Can the antiChrist, moving among us in the form of a five-year-old boy, scare the world this summer as profitably as Bruce the Shark did, moving along similarly shallow shores of the mind, a year ago?
The answer is, probably. For The Omen is, like Jaws, a brisk, highly professional thriller, in which an implausible tale is rendered believable by the total conviction with which it is told. As did Jaws, it offers, from start to finish, a lovely ominous mood, punctuated by increasingly horrific actions that people react to a little too slowly, a little less imaginatively than they might. Finally, everybody's in the soup for fair and the audience is suspensefully simmering along with them.
The movie stretches a prophecy about the return of the Prince of Darkness, taken from Revelations, to fit certain events of our time -the creation of Israel and the Common Market, of all things -then argues persuasively that if Satan were to return in disguise he would logically want to be a member of a rich political family so that he could position himself for maximum mischief making.
The literally diabolical plot requires Gregory Peck, as a wealthy career diplomat, to acquiesce in the substitution of a foundling child for his own stillborn baby in order to protect his wife, Lee Remick, from psychological breakdown over her failure to deliver successfully. When appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, odd things begin to happen: the child's nanny hangs herself; a seemingly demented priest begins delivering strange and terrible warnings; a great, growling black mastiff appears out of nowhere to hover protectively around the lad (Harvey Stephens), who is a creature nothing human can love.
David Warner, as a press photographer who catches the strange drift of things, finally proves to Peck that he is not dealing with a set of curious coincidences. But by this time the ambassador's lady is trying to deal with them through psychiatry -quite useless -and is finally hospitalized as a result of a horrid accident engineered by junior. Peck and Warner start bucketing around Europe visiting monasteries, gloomy graveyards and archaeological digs, searching for proof of what they are already convinced is the awful truth and for techniques to deal with the menace.
This gives Writer Seltzer a chance to gracefully parade his knowledge of arcane church lore about its enemy, to impart Beelzebub's seven danger signals, as it were, and what to do about them. Director Donner has a smooth way of burying absurdity in atmospherics and does well with his set pieces, which include many gory, shocking and thoroughly entertaining deaths by special effect: a fine, spooky midnight raid on an Italian graveyard guarded by countless devil dogs and an ending sequence which combines fights, chases and a hard choice by Peck that is dramatically satisfying and cinematically expert.
Brainy Shark. It would be entirely unfair to report the outcome of these dark doings, but if it requires a slightly greater leap of faith in these secular times to believe in a reincarnated Devil than it does to believe in a brainily malevolent shark, all concerned make the jump quite a manageable one. Moreover, the use of a sweetly innocent- appearing child as the principal menace is a stroke of pop genius, reversing all generic conventions and audience expectations while avoiding through under statement the kind of queasy excesses of The Exorcist. Farfetched in subject matter, but not far out in its handling of it, The Omen speaks well of the Devil -and of the virtues of solid commercial craftsmanship.
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