Harlequin

• Screenwriter Everett De Roche built the names as a modern Rasputin overlay: faith healer Gregory Wolfe stands in for Grigori Rasputin, Senator Nick Rast for Tsar Nicholas II (the surname 'Rast' is 'Tsar' spelled backwards), wife Sandy for Tsaritsa Alexandra, and the gravely ill boy Alex for the heir Alexei Romanov. The film swaps Alexei's real hemophilia for leukemia.
• De Roche wrote the lead with David Bowie in mind, and the production actually held conversations with him before getting cold feet at the last minute and handing the part to Robert Powell.
• Orson Welles was the first choice to play the geriatric political power broker and quoted $80,000 a week for two weeks of work; the production balked and cast Broderick Crawford as kingmaker Doc Wheelan instead, while David Hemmings played Senator Rast.
• It was shot in late 1979 over six weeks in Western Australia on a budget of A$800,000, helped because the West Australian Film Council's involvement was estimated to save the production around $100,000. The Rast family home exterior was millionaire Alan Bond's Perth mansion.
• Producer Antony I. Ginnane sold it to U.S. audiences under the retitle Dark Forces; it took A$364,000 in Australia and pulled around A$1.2 million internationally.
• Wolfe's conjuring tricks were built by credited magic consultant Willie Kay, and the score came from Australian composer Brian May (the Mad Max man, not the Queen guitarist). The film took Best Screenplay (De Roche), Best Cinematography, and the International Critics' Prize at the Sitges fantasy festival.

The film never lets you decide whether Wolfe is a healer or a fraud, and that's the whole point. Willie Kay's illusions are staged so every miracle has a possible trick behind it, which makes Wolfe a mirror for how power actually works in the Rast camp: nobody knows if the kingmakers' man is blessed or bought, only that the believing is what gives him control over the household.

The ending plays Wolfe's death as a deliberate handoff rather than a defeat. He predicts his own killing, teaches the boy his sleight-of-hand beforehand, and the final shot of Alex in the harlequin makeup reads as the power transferring into the child. Read that way, the assassins didn't kill a man; they just promoted the next one, which is the franchise model of Rasputin's curse.

De Roche's script quietly rehabilitates Rasputin. Unlike the leering monster of every prior screen version, Wolfe is the only character with genuine tenderness toward the sick boy and the ignored wife, while the suit-and-tie political operators are the real predators. The horror isn't the mystic in the house; it's the respectable men who decide he has to die for getting too close to the family they're using.

Rasputin gets dragged into 1980s political machinery and dressed up as a clown. When Senator Nick Rast's young son Alex is dying of leukemia, a smirking faith healer named Gregory Wolfe walks in off the street, cures the boy, and refuses to leave. He charms the senator's neglected wife Sandy, unnerves the kingmakers grooming Rast for higher office, and keeps every onlooker guessing whether he's a genuine miracle worker or the slickest con man alive. The power brokers want him gone. Wolfe, calm as a saint, already knows exactly how this ends.