Harlequin (1980)

The film that proves Jesus + Rasputin = Birthday Clown

Robert Powell IS Lucille Ball as Harley Quinn in GODSPELL!

Harlequin (AKA Dark Forces)
Directed by Simon Wincer
Written by Everett De Roche (original screenplay), John George & Neill D. Hicks (additional dialogue)

We open on a group of dark-suited, Italian-looking men who badly want you to believe they’re Secret Service agents, but whose mustaches barely qualify them for porn. They take their protectee, some powerful and important white dude, down to the beach to go snorkeling and promptly lose him. Then David Hemmings appears in an airport somewhere to show us how badly he’s aged since Blow-Up.¹ Meanwhile, the theme music and credits desperately want you to believe this is a mid-70s Quinn Martin production. (Incidentally, the music was composed by Brian May. But don’t get too excited—it’s not the guy from Queen, it’s the one from Dr. Giggles.)

Robert Powell, who played Christ for Zefferelli, is here playing a party clown, Bozo of Nazareth. He’s attempting and failing to entertain the birthday boy, a small, bald child in a wheelchair who looks a bit like a deflated Broderick Crawford, except Broderick Crawford is actually in this movie, and he looks bloated. I’m sure the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

By the way, Bozo’s act consists largely of mime—he makes balloon animals, but invisible balloon animals—and if you think a child dying by inches of leukemia is sad, your heart will truly break when you see the pitiable look he gives the clown, which seems to say, “You’re my fucking Make-A-Wish? Why couldn’t I have died yesterday?”

Still, the boy asks Mom if Bad Bozo can come back next year. Mom is evasive, but her manner clearly says, “My darling, you’ll be dead by then, but until you are, I have sworn that I shan’t book any engagements that are non-refundable.”

Later, the boy tries to brush his teeth, and blood gushes from his mouth and drools down the front of his jammies, which is horrifying, especially if you have sensitive gums like me and have to be careful when you floss, for fear you’ll hemorrhage and then an untalented party clown will psychically dominate your family. Because—and I hate to break it to you—this is basically the story of Rasputin and the Romanoffs. Think of it as Nicholas and Alexandra, if it were an Australian Made-for-TV movie, and their biggest problem wasn’t world war and revolution, but cane toads.

Let’s quickly run through the parallels. Rasputin’s given name was Grigori, Bozo’s character is called Gregory. The boy’s name is Alex, and like the tsarevich Alexei, who was a hemophiliac, he struggles with a potentially fatal disease (movie cancer, a traditionally vague and flexible disease that can come and go like seasonal allergies). Finally, the family’s name is Rast, which frankly sounds closer to Rasputin than Romanoff, but whatever. I’m just hoping it’s close enough to confuse a Bolshevik firing squad and they all wind up getting shot to death in a basement. (Spoiler alert: don’t get your hopes up.)

Alex’s doctor announces that he’ll be discontinuing the chemotherapy, because these drugs are expensive and the boy’s continuing to die anyway, which seems pennywise and pound foolish. Basically, he says, your son is defective, and rather than throwing good money after bad trying to bring him up to code, you should just toss him out and make a new one. Fortunately², Bozo makes a house call in the middle of the night to magically heal Alex, just as Rasputin reportedly did with the tsarevich Alexei. It’s unclear how he manages this, but thinking about drug mules and the way they smuggle their cargo by swallowing condoms full of heroin and cocaine, I suspect Bozo filled his invisible balloons with invisible cyclophosphamide and dexamethasone, and just kept the chemo going, because unlike the doctor he’s not a quitter.

Anyway, Bozo worms his way into the bosom of this dysfunctional band of crypto-Antipodeans, and at a white-tie dinner with David Hemmings and Mom, he implies that the man who disappeared while skin diving at the top of the film—and who it turns out was the governor (of what? They’d really rather not say) didn’t simply drown, but was assassinated! By aliens! So why this movie isn’t in heavy rotation on the History Channel I have no idea.

Two weeks go by, and now Alex has recovered his hair, but lost his voice, since he’s being dubbed by someone of indeterminate sex and age, but detectable levels of bad acting. Bozo puts on a Maude-style caftan, dangles the boy over a cliff above the sea and introduces him to “our invisible friend, the wind!”

Yeah. Let me introduce you to our opaque pals, Child Protective Services. Anyway, along with our invisible friend the wind, Bozo also introduces Alex to our invisible friend Death, who sits on your shoulder, like a vulture. That’s a fairly odd thing to say to a child with a terminal illness, and one hopes he’ll elaborate. Especially as it becomes obvious that there’s an entire bird motif running through the film. It’s implied that Bozo gets into Alex’s bedroom that first night by transforming into a bird (I think?). They later come upon a dead bird, then Bozo kills a pigeon during a party (yeah, we’ll get to that), and the boy ultimately seems to acquire the mystical power to control birds, so naturally I thought the avian theme would pay off at some point. But…nope. The filmmakers just gawked at their shitty movie, and decided to put a bird on it. I can’t really say it helps.

At the half hour mark Broderick Crawford finally gets a line. A whole bunch of them, in fact, which was clearly a mistake, because it raises the question why a guy who sounds like a Brooklyn longshoreman controls Australian politics.

Mom makes a pass at Bozo, but he stops her from touching his balloon animal, so instead, she and Hemmings stage a boring argument about their marriage. This is interrupted by a piano arpeggio as everyone in the house psychically senses the maid showing Bozo her tits.

Later, Bozo and Alex freak out the chauffeur, the dog, and some seagulls by shattering the car’s windshield performing an impromptu concert of Mongolian throat-singing.

The family throws a soiree and Bozo agrees to provide the entertainment, but things get off to a rocky start when the maid accuses him of rape. Mom pooh-poohs the allegation, so the maid goes upstairs and takes a bath. But after shampooing, she accidentally pours hydrochloric acid all over her head, which is a tragic mistake, because her hair was clearly crying out for a good cream rinse.

Downstairs at the party, Bozo goes into his act, but is almost immediately arrested and hauled off to jail for cutting a pigeon in half with the crash cymbal from a drum kit and chopping off an old lady’s pinky finger. (He claims he was curing her abscessed tooth, but it turns out he was just inducting her into the Yakuza).

Mom insists Hemmings abuse his position to get Bozo released, but the mooks from Flatbush who run Australia (and who are standing in for the Russian nobles who tediously and repeatedly assassinated Rasputin) insist he’s a con man and an illegal immigrant who deserves to rot in durance vile. But Bozo declares that no tank town jail can hold him, and he’ll be out by sundown.

He escapes by making the clock run backwards until it emits a high-pitched whine that makes the guard’s ears bleed. Because apparently genuine Rasputins can cure hemophilia, while Johnny-come-lately neo-Rasputins can only cause it. Anyway, it works, he gets free, but as these things go, it’s not exactly The Great Escape.

Now it’s apparently a picture wrap on Mom, so she grabs Alex and bugs out before the reviews come in, while Broderick Crawford calls Hemmings to warn him that “Bozo is free” and orders him to barricade the house like it’s the last act of Straw Dogs.

But the fortress hasn’t been built that can keep this party clown down. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Hemmings is having a really bad night. His family has abandoned him, his security guys are haunted and incompetent, while he’s paralyzed when he sees a county fair-style caricature of Bozo that has magically appeared, ala the Shroud of Turin, in the linoleum tiles.

Then he gets telekinetically attacked by his son’s Chinese checkers game—and those marbles really beat the shit out of him. And then he gets a call saying “The party clown is coming from inside the house!” And sure enough, Bozo is suddenly there, dressed in a Harlequin costume and carrying a bedazzled cricket bat. Yeah, I know, but don’t worry, it'll all make sense in the end.³

Bozo gives a lecture on the history of Commedia dell’arte, and how Harlequin is a character who cannot be seen by the other characters, but only by the audience. Lucky us. Finally, Broderick Crawford and his goons arrive, and the film becomes a deadly game of cat and mime.

Bozo tells Hemmings his whole life is a lie, that he’s just a pawn for powerful Brooklyn-Australian mob bosses, and that there are “other magicians” out there, controlling events and concealing the truth! So yeah, it’s nice to know we all saw the same paranoid political thrillers in the Seventies.

There’s a moment of aching ambiguity—what is real? What’s an illusion? Have the characters been deceived, or have we? Then they blow it all out their ass by having Bozo vomit up lightning and hover in mid air while smirking.

“Who are you?” Hemmings gasps.

“Peter Pan” is the obvious answer, but they don’t come up with it.

Broderick’s men shoot and kill Bozo, then dump his body in the ocean, where it later washes up and is discovered by Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Hemmings realizes too late that Bozo was telling the truth about the vast, shadowy conspiracy he never really explained—although to be fair he also barfed thunderbolts and murdered pigeons at parties, so I wouldn’t exactly call him an unimpeachable source.

We close with Mom and Alex sitting by the sea somewhere. Mom looks content, but as Alex turns toward the camera, we see he has Early Onset Ziggy Stardust makeup, which suggests that he’s inherited Bozo’s powers. Or at least his “Rouge” membership status at Sephora.

TL;DR: It basically feels like a late 70s TV movie made by somebody who once saw a Dan Curtis film, but was not themselves, in any way, Dan Curtis.

1. The airport is obviously in Perth, Australia, since that’s where this piece of “Ozploitation” was filmed, but they really don’t want to admit that.

2. Not for us.

3. I’m lying.