Witches Of Eastwick By John Updikec

Summary

George Miller's film begins with the general conceive of John Updike's satiric innovative about women discouraged by middle age and unworthy men and lovers, which wickedly suggests that any intelligent and perceptive woman may have the power and promise of evolving a witch. Michael Cristofer's screenplay adjusts the aim, however, so that the film becomes mainly a Jack Nicholson vehicle. In the novel, the three witches are the centered characters. They conjure up the devil (Daryl Van Horne, performed by Nicholson), who seduces them and then wed a junior woman who does not emerge in the film. The witches send the devil back to torment and are left simultaneously at his land parcel to rear the young kids he has fathered by them. The film works broadly for comedy, unlike the novel, which is far more subtle and satiric.Introduction

John Updike is a prestigious author, and Hollywood is always prepared to exploit prestige, even if not routinely prone to esteem it. As often occurs, the design of Updike's innovative, THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK (1984), was drastically changed to turn the story into a star vehicle for Jack Nicholson, who plays the Devil incarnate, Daryl Van Horne; Van Horne is not, however, the centered feature of Updike's novel. In Updike's initial work, the Devil is a dupe and no agree for the three quick-witted women who override the narrative. As Pauline Kael commented in THE NEW YORKER, about Michael Cristofer's ``rickety script,'' the film is little more than ``a farce that resembles its source.''

Witches of East Wick

Understandably, then, Updike's readers were compelled to be bothered and puzzled (though perhaps bewitched) by the movie type administered by Australian George Miller in 1986, released in June of 1987, and only loosely founded upon the novel. The movie is little more than a cartoon decrease of the original article about three divorcees who discover that they have supernatural forces, which they use, occasionally nastily, to terrorize persons they disapprove in the Rhode isle community where they live. Conventional notions of witchcraft are amusingly revised to the twentieth years.

The witches are directed by the artist-earthmother Alexandra, who at thirty-eight, is the eldest of the three. She makes inquisitive female figurines called ``bubbies,'' sculpted with distinctive anatomical enlargements. Jane, who plays the cello, is the most malicious of the three. Sukie, the youngest, is a writer, hacking away as a journalist for a localized paper, the Eastwick WORD. All three have creative temperaments, and in the innovative, they understand from the starting that they have supernatural powers. The movie decreases their bitchiness as well as their witchiness. It furthermore weakens their spirit.

Updike wickedly proposes that the power of witchcraft lives in all intelligent, unaligned, creative women and that such power can be liberated by female frustration and contempt for men. The local men, who they use for their carnal pleasures, are somewhat stupid and defenseless against their charms. After the witches have worked awful hexes on their local adversaries, other women in town ...