When it was released in 1973, I was too young to see it but was so disappointed when I finally did.

The film, playing locally at the Cinema I, is the biggest thing to hit the industry since Mary Pickford, popcorn, pornography and “The Godfather.” When I dropped into the Cinema I the other weekday morning at the first showing of the day, it was apparent that here was a movie a lot of people wanted to see, including old ladies, single men with brief cases, loving couples and teen‐age kids (seemingly with and without parents). The kids especially, several of whom lay in an orchestra aisle near my seat and smoked and talked about basketball during those sections of the film in which the tormented child on screen was not vomiting bile at the priests, masturbating with a crucifix, screaming obscenities about the young priest's dead mother, or, for fun, turning her head 180 degrees to the rear.

If “The Exorcist's weren't so popular, and if it didn't obviously fulfill the expectations of the aUdiences who are going to see it„ it wouldn't be worth writing about. True, it has a cast of good actors. Its settings, including those shown in a prefatory sequence shot at an archeological dig in Iraq, are handsome and give the production an impressively expensive look. It's been very fancily put together, with a good deal of canny crosscutting to build the mood of menace.

Yet “The Exorcist” is claptrap. It has hardly any narrative to speak of, and what it has contain* more loose ends than the first draft of a 2,000‐page novel. The entire Iraqi sequence is superfluous window‐dressing.

While watching the film the first time at a press screening, I kept trying to figure out what the movie was really up to. Critics are like that. They keep trying to find hidden meanings in the most explicit, bald‐face narratives. One friend later suggested it was actually about mothers and daughters, but that friend had just had a fight with her mother and was full of her own bile.

NY Times Vincent Canby

Yet “The Exorcist” is claptrap. It has hardly any narrative to speak of, and what it has contain* more loose ends than the first draft of a 2,000‐page novel. The entire Iraqi sequence is superfluous window‐dressing. Unlike a lot of extremely dumb vampire movies, it's about nothing else but what it says, demonic possession and exorcism. Though I admit to being skeptical, even that would be defensible and possibly fun. I enjoy how‐to movies about exotic occupations, whether the occupation is climbing Annapurna or saving rich, high‐strung Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney, ‘Jr.) from the lycanthrope that lurks within.