The Sentinel (1976)
Universal DVD (region 1)
d. Michael Winner; pr. Michael Winner, Jeffrey Konvitz; scr. Michael Winner, Jeffrey Konvitz; novel. Jeffrey Konvitz; ph. Dick Kratina; m. Gil Melle; ed. Bernard Gribble, Terence Rawlings; cast. Cristina Raines, Chris Sarandon, Martin Balsam, John Carradine, Ava Gardner, Arthur Kennedy, Jose Ferrer, Burgess Meredith, Sylvia Miles, Eli Wallach, Beverly D'Angelo, Christopher Walken, Deborah Raffin, Jerry Orbach (92 mins)
The screen rights to Jeffrey Konvitz’ novel of The Sentinel were purchased whilst the book was still in manuscript format.
It was considered a salable horror film project and Don Siegel was slated to direct. However, there were script problems and when the novel debuted in hardcover it was a flop leading to the demise of the project. A couple of years later, however, director Michael Winner was offered the project to read through. Winner thought he could make a film out of it, adapting the book himself. The novel had come out in paperback where it had reached the New York bestseller lists and so the project was suddenly viable again. Winner duly delivered his screenplay in a quick four weeks and pre-production commenced. Although Winner cast relatively unknown actors for the leads, he ensured that the supporting cast of characters was filled by a cast of veteran Hollywood performers in an effort to prove to audiences that The Sentinel was not a small horror film project but a big budget studio effort, something akin to a successful horror film that Winner had actually earlier turned down the opportunity to direct – The Omen. Although closer in comparison to the likes of Rosemary’s Baby, with which it shares a New York brownstone setting, The Sentinel never became the box-office success that Winner expected and indeed his sensationalistic and morally dubious style here ensured that the film had few supporters.
In Northern Italy, a catholic leader (Jose Ferrer) delivers a sermon to select priests. There in attendance is American Arthur Kennedy. In New York City meantime, Cristina Raines is a young model who is seeking an apartment.
Her boyfriend, Chris Sarandon, wants her to move in with him and marry him but she is determined to be independent and live on her own. After some effort, she contacts a real estate agent (Ava Gardner) and so finds an affordable furnished brownstone apartment. She takes the apartment and settles in. Soon she meets one of the neighbors, an eccentric older man (Burgess Meredith), and begins to feel at home. However, she is gradually uncomfortable the more she meets of the neighbors (including the openly lesbian couple Sylvia Miles and Beverly D’Angelo) and begins to have sleep problems which affect her work. Sarandon is concerned and starts to investigate the situation on his own. Raines is overcome by a violent hallucination and runs out into the street claiming to have stabbed her own father, who died a short time prior. This comes to the attention of two New York detectives (Eli Wallach and Christopher Walken) who tie the matter in to the death under suspicious circumstances of someone Sarandon knew. Raines in the meantime is informed by Gardner that the neighbors she claims to have been entertained by are not there, and indeed the only other tenant is a blind priest in the apartment above.
The Sentinel is a film which thematically concerns free will vs. predestination. Raines is a woman who prizes herself on her independence, on being able to choose her own fate as opposed to relying on Sarandon.
For director Winner, the marriage that Sarandon wills is an entrapping end to Raines’ independence – an acquiescence of her will to that of another. But, although Raines resists this and holds on to her independence, championed by Winner, she is affected by fatalistic circumstances beyond her control. Specifically that her free will as an independent woman is measured against a supernatural sense of destiny, or rather as the plot reveals, pre-destiny. Religious authority exists in order to measure this pre-destiny, to keep it controllable in order to maintain the balance between good and evil, specifically here to ensure that the Gate to Hell is properly guarded. Thus, Winner rather cleverly parallels the protagonist’s psychological trouble and collapse with the mechanisms by which the sense of pre-destiny takes over from the independent will. This essay into a kind of psychological metamorphosis structures the film of The Sentinel over and above its convoluted and often barely coherent horror plot. Still, Winner is too concerned with the shock of the situation to truly mine the material for its subtly psycho-dramatic potential: indeed, the psychological undercurrents are symbiotic with the director’s trademark sensationalism.
As a director, Winner has repeatedly faced accusations of sensationalism and coarseness in his personal style.
That concern is certainly evident in The Sentinel which offers Winner, by virtue of a genre so oriented towards shock tactics, the perfect opportunity to examine his own concern for sensationalism with due self-reflexivity. Thus, the more Raines is exposed to the neighbors the more psychological turmoil she experiences precisely because it involves the exposure to an underlying sexual perversity that she finds evil and is unable to deal with – hence the revelation that her father’s debauchery when discovered by her led to an earlier suicide attempt. This clash between the pure and the perverse is fought out for Winner in terms of sensationalism. Thus he stresses every opportunity to draw out the sexual and the ugly within the material, making it truly unsettling for its sense of decadence, within the limits of mainstream Hollywood of the time of course. This concern for the unsettling reaches its climax in the morally questionable use of real human freaks in the final scenes, allying these freaks to the denizens of Hell. Morally dubious, it confirms Winner’s sensationalistic intent in exploring sexual perversion and human ugliness to effectively make him a master freak-show carnival barker of a director. No Winner film quite captures the director’s own sense of both joy and repugnance in sensationalism as The Sentinel.
DVD DETAILS:
Vision
The anamorphic widescreen transfer is a vast improvement over the previous snapper-case pan and scan DVD release of this movie. It is always clear and concise, preserving the look of a glossy 1970s film. The opening credits make good use of a montage sequence of a young couple enjoying themselves in the city and there is a sense of organized glamour to those scenes dealing with Raines’ modeling profession. Winner’s compositions are often jarring and there is a fine sense of increased constriction within the frame the more unwell Raines becomes. Nudity is graphically deployed and there is a coarse delight in the seedy sexual undercurrents throughout the film, particularly in the characterization of the neighbors, who are played with deliberately sinister eccentricity (with Burgess Meredith in a sexually ambivalent role). It is often shadowy and Winner uses pans and zooms to good effect as he keeps the visuals stylized. He favors long medium shots and there are some good uses of symmetry and objects looming at the corners of the frame. Wide angle lenses add a quality of distortion to the compositions in depth and when needed the film is shocking, dizzy and disorienting – one of Winner’s more stylized genre works. Raines is slyly eroticized in terms of her fear and danger as the film proceeds and the final set-piece involving the actual freaks is one of the most disturbing of such uses in cinema.
Sound
The sound transfer is available in Dolby Digital 2.0 and is clean and concise with some sense of depth on occasion. The score is solid and eventful, nicely cued to Winner’s sense of increased garishness and sensationalistic provocation. Ambient details are minor in their use, with the emphasis on traditional foley work. Voices are always clear and concise and the overall aural design of the movie neatly complements the visual glossiness of the enterprise. Footsteps work well, voices can be strained and shocking and there is the sense of macabre debauchery to the neighbors, particularly the sinister Meredith. The offbeat approach to the characterization and vocal mannerisms of the neighbors has a touch of deliberate and sly caricature in its notion of eccentricity – Meredith in particular seems to have a lot of fun with the role, although derivative of material in Rosemary’s Baby. The black and white dream sequence features an effective use of disoriented voices and the score is always eventful and effective. Some minor details, such as a stuck record, work well although the transfer does not allow for much depth or play with ambient effects, the score doing much of the work in this horror film. Good use is made of the horror cliché of things that go bump in the night in the scenes where Raines has difficulty sleeping due to noises from above. Although the film is effective in aural design, like the visual style, it is not subtle.
Special Features
The only special feature is an original theatrical trailer in fullscreen. It is very worn and full of artifacts. Included in the DVD case was a double sided page of promotional artwork for other DVD horror releases by this distributor, including a full page ad for a Chucky DVD Box Set of movies.
an extract from Robert Cettl's book Film Tales: Movie Trivia in the Age of DVD (on sale now in print and soon in e-book)
The 1932 Tod Browning film of Freaks was thought of as one of the most disturbing films ever made, a horror movie featuring a cast of genuine human freaks, circus performers turned actors for the film. Considered too disturbing to be exhibited, the film was banned in many countries for decades although finally released as a genuine classic of the genre, one of the most influential horror films of all time. But what remained remarkable was the sheer compassion and honesty with which these human freaks were treated. The treatment of freaks on film remained a taboo subject, however, until these human curiosities were featured in another movie, The Sentinel. The film was again controversial for its use of human freaks but not in the same way that the original Freaks was. For The Sentinel director Michael Winner made himself an effective carnival barker and sideshow huckster of a director when, in what was also a special effects cost-savings measure, he hired freaks and deformed actors to play the denizens of Hell in a final sequence. This equation of freakism with damnation was thought extremely offensive and made Winner the epitome of bad taste. With due irony, the highly disreputable bad-taste director late became a popular restaurant critic.
