The Sentinel: The Gateway to Hell in Brooklyn

The premise of The Sentinel is one of the best in occult horror, and it takes eleven words to state. There is a gateway to Hell. It is in Brooklyn. The Catholic Church keeps a blind, elderly nun sitting at the top-floor window, day and night, as its lock.

Michael Winner filmed Jeffrey Konvitz’s 1974 novel in 1977, in the wake of The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and immediately before The Omen had finished making religious horror the most bankable genre in America. He assembled a cast that reads like a hoax. And he made a decision in the final reel that has followed the film for fifty years and should.

The building, and the tenants

Alison Parker (Cristina Raines) is a successful model with a history of suicide attempts and a father whose deathbed she remembers with revulsion. She wants her own place, away from her lawyer boyfriend Michael Lerman (Chris Sarandon), and Miss Logan the estate agent — Ava Gardner, doing more with a property tour than the part could possibly have deserved — shows her a furnished floor in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone at a rent that should have ended the film in five minutes.

The neighbours are the reason to watch. Burgess Meredith plays Charles Chazen, who arrives with a budgerigar and a cat and an invitation to a birthday party for the cat, and Meredith is delightful — a chirping, courtly, entirely unbearable old man whose good cheer is the most sinister thing in the picture. Sylvia Miles and Beverly D’Angelo play a couple on another floor, and D’Angelo’s introduction is one of the genuinely startling scenes in 1970s studio horror, performed in total silence while Alison stands there trying to be polite.

And at the top, at the window, always: Father Halliran, a blind priest played by John Carradine, motionless, looking at nothing.

Then the supporting bench. Chris Sarandon, Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum, Jerry Orbach, Eli Wallach, Tom Berenger, José Ferrer, Arthur Kennedy, Deborah Raffin, Martin Balsam. Walken and Goldblum and Berenger were nobodies in 1977 and would spend the next decade becoming the American cinema; Winner has them standing at the back of scenes holding props. Watching the film now is partly an archaeology exercise.

Winner’s problem, and Winner’s gift

Michael Winner was a British director of enormous commercial competence and almost no restraint, best known for Death Wish, and he is exactly the wrong man for this material in one respect and exactly the right one in another.

The wrong: The Sentinel has no interiority. Alison is a series of events happening to a face. Rosemary Woodhouse was a person before she was a victim, and Polanski spends an hour making you love her flat and her husband and her plans; Winner gives Alison a fashion shoot and a flashback and gets on with the phenomena. The dialogue is functional at best. The plotting creaks — a police procedural strand, with Walken and Balsam, that keeps interrupting a nightmare to ask questions.

The right: Winner had no taste whatsoever, and this film benefits from that enormously. He shoots the brownstone as a plausible New York building, and then he lets things happen in it with a bluntness that a more refined director would have modulated into safety. The night-time sequences on the upper floors — Alison with a torch, following a noise, finding a door — are shot without irony, without wit, without any distancing device at all. Winner believes the corridor. That earnestness is why the film still lands.

The best sustained passage is the middle hour, where Alison’s sleep is systematically dismantled: footsteps above an empty flat, a noise from a room where nobody lives, the growing certainty that the building has more residents than the lease says. Winner stages this with real patience, which is the only patience he ever showed on any picture.

The scandal

The climax requires the damned to be visible. Winner cast, for those roles, people with real physical deformities and disabilities — recruited, by his own subsequent account, on the basis that this would look more convincing than makeup.

There is no defence available and the film should not get one. The choice treats real human beings as a special effect, and it is the exact opposite of what Tod Browning was doing in Freaks in 1932, where the performers are characters with names, interiority, dignity and a moral position, and the film’s monsters are the able-bodied. Browning’s film ended his career and was banned in Britain for thirty years. Winner’s did fine.

That comparison is the honest one, and it disposes of the argument that this was merely how 1977 behaved. Forty-five years earlier a director had done the humane version of the same idea and been destroyed for it. Winner had the example available and reached for the exploitative version because it was faster.

The sequence is also, and this is the uncomfortable part, effective. Its effectiveness is built out of a real violation of the people in it, and a viewer can hold both of those facts at once. It is the reason The Sentinel is a difficult film to recommend without a paragraph like this one attached.

The lineage

The obvious parent is Rosemary’s Baby, and the debt is total: an apartment building, a conspiracy of neighbours, a young woman whose reports are indulged rather than believed. The parallel case is The Tenant, which Polanski released the year before, and which does the paranoid-building film with the psychological rigour Winner had no interest in.

The real ancestor, though, is older and more interesting. The Sentinel is a haunted-house film that has swapped the house for a lease. The horror of the gothic pile is that you are trapped in someone else’s ancestral property; the horror here is that you signed for it, at a good rate, in a desirable postcode, in a city where a decent flat is worth ignoring a considerable amount. Our piece on the architecture of the haunted-house film makes the general case, and the New York property market is the most 1977 possible expression of it.

Downstream, the “guardian at the gate” idea has been raided constantly — our survey of the possession film’s religious turn tracks where that machinery went. Konvitz wrote a sequel novel. Winner went back to Death Wish.

It circulates on the catalogue services and in occasional repertory occult programming, and it looks handsome; the Brooklyn Heights location work is the best-preserved thing about it.

The verdict: The Sentinel is a film with a magnificent idea, an absurd cast, one genuinely great performance from Burgess Meredith, and a moral failure sitting in its last reel that it never earned the right to commit. It is worth watching and it is not worth defending, and the discipline of holding those two positions is most of what film criticism is for.

Spoilers below

The reveal is theological and it is better than the film deserves.

Alison’s flat is in a building owned by the Archdiocese. The neighbours she has been meeting — Chazen, the two women, all of them — are dead. They are murderers and suicides, damned souls occupying the building as their punishment and their post, and the party for the cat was attended entirely by the condemned. Alison has been having polite conversations with Hell’s tenants for the whole picture, which retroactively makes Meredith’s chirpiness the best joke in 1970s horror.

Father Halliran at the window is the current sentinel, and he is dying. The Church selects each sentinel from among those who have attempted suicide and survived — the sin, then the sentence, then the duty. Alison’s two attempts are her qualification. Her whole life has been an interview.

The climax gives Chazen his real scene, and Meredith turns the courtly old dear into something reptilian without changing his voice much at all. He is there to make Alison finish the job on herself, because a completed suicide disqualifies her and unlocks the door. Michael Lerman’s investigation, which the film has been cutting to for an hour, arrives too late to matter — the procedural strand exists so that the answer can be discovered by a man who cannot use it.

Alison takes the crucifix. She refuses. And the film’s last movement is the one thing Winner gets unambiguously right: Alison in a nun’s habit, blind, elderly, seated at the window of a Brooklyn brownstone, staring at nothing, for as long as it takes.

The estate agent shows the flat to a new young couple. The rent is very reasonable. Nobody mentions the old nun upstairs.

That final image is genuinely great — salvation as an eternity of unpaid overtime, a woman who resisted damnation and got a chair by a window instead. Konvitz’s idea, Winner’s staging, and it is almost enough to make you forgive the twenty minutes that came before it. Almost.