Aunt Peg wrote: Sat May 04, 2019 11:32 amI finally saw The Legacy for the first time a few years ago on DVD having missed its initial cinema run in the late 1970s. Its not a 'good' film, very ordinary really but its very watchable all the same. I sort of think its main claim to fame nowadays is that is it the film that Katharine Ross & Sam Elliott met on and have been a couple ever since - and one of Hollywoods most enduring couples at that.
Anyone who is a fan of B-grade horror from the 1970's, this is a must buy.
I would agree with Aunt Peg on this one in the "very watchable" comment. I like the film a lot, but had to pull out and rewatch my pan and scanned recorded from TV VHS copy of the film to remind myself of it rather than it jumping vividly to mind. Its a film that feels a lot about conversation scenes set in mansion rooms which are always lushly appointed and always have a roaring fire going! The film is beautifully shot and Katharine Ross and Sam Elliott make for a great pair of relatable main characters with our hip and modern Los Angeles/San Fransiscan couple (Ross is even introduced wearing a flower in her hair!
By the way, I love the Kiki Dee ballad over the opening credits!) being guided with a bit of gentle nudging towards an English country mansion which then fills with an assorted cast of characters all fighting it out for a mysterious inheritance. Then the guests inevitably start being killed off one after the other with Maggie, now being forcibly made a part of the battle for the legacy, also being in danger. Though not as much as Pete is, being the 'uninvited guest' in the situation! As noted in previous posts, one of the guests includes Roger Daltrey with an amazingly 70s poodle hair cut and a great line in sleeveless black shirts as a rock musician named Clive. According to imdb the mansion the action takes place at is actually Daltrey's and he allowed them to film there in exchange for a role! And presumably the chance to get first choice at the lavish spread of buffet food put on in one scene! (And the filmmakers certainly make full use of that ostentatious indoor swimming pool location!)
This has a lot of 'old dark house' elements, mixed in with a bit of justified paranoia of all of the employees and locals being in on the situation and working to keep the American couple from leaving (I particularly like in the early scenes that we get a second or two of showing the staff or other guests doing something incredibly suspicious just before our main characters enter a room without being aware of what people have been talking about, what book has been closed, or what picture has just been covered up by a curtain!). Then it gets steadily more supernatural, and witchcraft based, with escape attempts all leading back to the mansion. There is some great editing on display in the scene of the escape vehicle going up and down the same road, or through different turn offs of the same junction only to end up where it began. It perhaps should be noted that the editor of this film is Anne V. Coates, who died last year but who
had quite an interesting career including editing The Elephant Man just after The Legacy and going on to Steven Soderbergh's films Out of Sight and Erin Brockovich amongst many others. I particularly love the cutting back and forth in the scene that occurs late on between two characters, one loading their shotgun and the other their crossbow! In fact I would probably go as far to say that the skillful and sensitive editing, always able to highlight just the tiniest little character moment to add a little extra to a scene, is perhaps the very best aspect of the film.
I also wonder if perhaps there is some influence from Argento on this film, especially when a couple of the more set piece supernatural deaths occur, or whether something like Suspiria was just too recent to have been an influence at that point? Maybe Deep Red could have been?
Katharine Ross can easily do the role demanded of her here and handles the mounting concern of her character to the situation perfectly. This feels a bit more of a 'classical' version of the more modern set Stepford Wives (the same subgenre that encompasses the recent Get Out too), in the sense that Ross's Maggie is also moving from a feeling of urban security (in a brief opening scene) to travelling to another rural environment with different customs and steadily feeling more uneasy about the superficially civilised behaviour covering up something more sinister, where she eventually finds that she is intended to be used as an embodiment, or vessel, for the spirit of another idealised person. Sam Elliott is more the revelation here, as the extraneous figure (the incongruous sight of him in rural England is fully played into) that nobody else appeared to have factored into the situation. He gets to do all of the investigating, is the most threatened with being murdered, and amusingly is the one called upon to do the slightly exploitational nude shower scene! His character has to deal with all of the practical action-based stuff (including rather pointlessly trashing a hospital room near the end seemingly to vent his frustration more than anything, rather than just pulling the right couple of cables), whilst Maggie eventually has to have the final supernatural encounter by herself.
Leading to a strangely happy ending of Maggie beating out the other rivals to become the new mistress of the house! Which is not presented as being as being such an awful thing! At least not as bad as becoming a Stepford Wife!
It also has perhaps the best scene of people being so desperate to go off for a lyrical morning ride that they will punch and kick the (pitchfork and burning torch in the daytime wielding) locals in order to be able to do so!
