Ten Reasons THE LEGACY (1978)

In interviews Sam Elliott called the weird 30s old dark house 70s devil movie hybrid "fifteen years behind it's time." Well, as so often happens, 30 years later and we're all the way around again to where it shines like the gleam in Sam Elliott's timeless cowboy eye. Either way, trailing Satanist glory as it descends the stair, THE LEGACY (1978) demands the best and gets it via a gorgeous remastering for Blu-ray from Scream Factory. Like Elliott's sturdy mustache, it's gorgeous, right painterly. The kind of film Sam would probably be proud to hang behind his gun rack in the den.

I'd never seen this film, never heard anything but bad reviews. Baby, I been misled. At any rate, glad I waited til now, while its perfect, for who knows when its fifteen years will be up once more?


Never more beautiful or assured, with that great long straight chestnut hair and autumnal wardrobe her she/s like the 70s own called-forth Cleopatra Babalon Marjorie Cameron Isis Scarlet Woman. And unlike so many of the 70s iconic beauties, she could act when the situation demanded it, not that it does here so much. But she looks great but she also looks mature (she was 38?) and intelligent, swept along in this weird tide with her man. There's no whining about wanting a baby or not having one or getting too much sex or not enough. She's equal partners with her man, for the most part, and when she inherits her legacy her whole face seems to change shape, expanding into an uncanny extra dimension of glacial stillness which shows why she was so effective in THE STEPFORD WIVES.


This is the era of some real strides in depicting assertive hot women who can believably order men around and sleep with them without emasculating them. If their mustache was on straight, and they'd smoked enough to get a nice deep live-in voice, they could even forge a new path. It's rare, but men characters were doing it all the time in the late 70s--there was Brolin, Kristofferson, Voight, and here's Elliott, singlehandedly bring his character back from the brink of feminism's total wash-out of the straight American white cowboy male. I mean, he winds up having a pretty rough time, a foreigner at a strange party he can never leave where his presence is superfluous and his stock is falling from there. His crankiness seems to indicate he's destined for death or irrelevance.

Well, I should have given more credit to old Sam --he's a warrior from the Iron Age of cowboys--the 70s--the Kris Kristofferson / James Brolin school, of guys so cool and badass they blazed a whole new trail of how to be macho while helping or at any rate not hindering the breakout women's lib vibe erupting all around like a myriad black hole tentacle whirling of tossed Mary Tyler Moore hats. These dudes might feel left out and sidelined as whole swaths of their power changed hands, but then, instead of staying sulky for more than a scene or two, they throw down and smash their way back to parity. Hopefully they'd then finally untuck their jeans from their ridin' boots.

The 3D clarity and glistening deep colors are perfect for the setting, a big weird English mansion called Ravenhurst, with a very bizarre pool room which I remembered clearly all this time from the TV spots (when I was 12) along with the white cat. There's a few moments when the couple's wearing white on white in the white room, when you think perhaps we're in heaven, or a halfway house, ala CARNIVAL OF SOULS. And sometimes the waxiness glistens too much, but overall the dusky great Allan Hume / Dick Bush photography is given full resonant expression, with a lot of magic hour deep blacks and the extreme angles, vertical and diagonal POVs inside the mansion are hypnotizing, lots of looking down from ornate stairs, the creepy nurse's face bleeding into the myriad portraits. I usually hate the way rural England looks in daytime shots--the stone white sky, the landscape all washed out and dreary and depressingly still (taking the tube to Heathrow from London--which turns into an above ground train once outside London--is like traveling across the land of the time-frozen dead) but in THE LEGACY it looks plenty ominous, sexy, and cool. I'm so happy to finally make my peace with British exterior shots, you don't even know how I suffered. And that Bentley is hypnotizing in the pristine HD cleanliness.

That said, don't judge by the pics here which I scrounged around the web, for you!

Orchestral and at times predictable but has great synths too, and it doesn't get too up into the helicoptering Korngold-Williams style. It percolates and oozes with sly menace in the Carpenter carpet style and sometimes browses around a giallo vibe with echoing female vocalizing and twangy guitar octaves. In other words, Lewis keeps it simple and cool rather than showing off your symphonic training every five seconds and boring everyone but the longhairs. And there's even a great tacky 70s theme song sung by someone named Kiki Dee.

This is from DEVIL RIDES OUT, but you get the picture

There's a minimum of the usually ubiquitous thriller scenes of the heroine in a nightgown padding around the darkened mansion investigating strange noises, and even fewer soft focus dream sequences, what we have instead is a kind of tumble down horror litany - the guests are dropping off and the host-- instead of just being a wheelchair bound codger with a will being read at midnight--is a mysterious dying monster behind a white curtain (like the old witch in SUSPIRIA) announcing only one of the assembled six will wield the ring of ultimate black magic power. Katharine Ross it seems is the designated one, and 'the power' isn't just the vast and unfathomable wealth of his sprawling estate, if you get my meaning. And it all makes perfect sense --these are the sorts of people we only saw with their maskies in EYES WIDE SHUT... and boom, they're popping off like firecrackers.



And then there's the weird elfin gnome-ishness of Daltrey, this strange being with the tiny body and huge head and wild mane of hair. And he's playing a rock icon much like himself, who's links to this weird ghostly mansion estate indicates black magic got him where he is today. Clutch. And leave it to a nouveau riche plebe to give us most of the exposition on how rich and powerful everyone there is. THe LEGACY is actually second film from the 70s I've seen where some dies from choking to death and no one gives him the Heimlich maneuver. My own grandmother knew to give me the Heimlich maneuver when I was just a child; she saved my life with it, before this movie was even made! So it was not unknown, at least in Sweden, though according to CNN

"In August 1974, editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association contacted the doctor who had developed a new method to save someone from choking -- then a major cause of death in the United States. His new technique was saving lives across the country, and they wanted to tell him they were publishing a story about it, and were going to name the procedure after him" (CNN)"

Either way, watching him choke to death at the buffet table is twice as agonizing as everyone just stands around freaking out. Is that really what they did back then?

There's some solidly imagined escape attempt sequences with the estate vividly depicted from the towers down to the stables. All the rustic one lane roads lead back to the mansion; they try to escape via horses, saddled on the sly which Sam does with a relaxed quick assurance of the real cowboy, and their mad ride to freedom manages to be 70s rustic lovely while scary; the near mauling by the hunting dogs, the crossbow vs. shotgun duel--all very town and country (where double barrel shotgun and crossbow must be continually reloaded as they would be in real life, a truth which seldom engages less imaginative screenwriters) going with the on location mansion setting very nicely and creating a much tighter unified whole than EYE OF THE DEVIL which loped along a similar track but--the Sharon Tate scenes aside.

 I can't spoil the ending but let's just say that no one fucks with the kid, whatever that means. I really liked all the directions it was going, I didn't know whether to cheer Sam's bloody death or root for him, the last thing I wanted was to see him instill some last minute bad faith better my girlfriend be dead than a Satanist edict she return unto his patriarchal coddling. But it's a great ending.  Maybe it's because THE LEGACY's based on a bestseller which apparently was heavily promoted to reach the the list in an elaborate bid to get some EXORCIST-ROSEMARY'S BABY association vibe. And makes sense that the couple met on the shoot, married and had a kid and went on to a groovy life, they got that daughter up in that pic that's the daughter up there. To use one of his LEGACY lines back at him, whatever he's doin'.... he's doin' it right.