A European sophisticate in King’s own brand Americana, he’s a Pied Piper type figure, but instead of taking the town’s most precious things, he offers them and waits for the people to lead themselves to ruin. Richter’s screenplay gives him a lot of ironical comments to work with, sly puns and wry asides that the veteran chews through with sinister relish. In a league of his own though is Max von Sydow, who is wonderful. There’s a weird, nasty edge to the film too in that it points you towards rooting for the people to start tearing each other apart rather than for Pangborn to bring everyone to their senses. The residents of Castle Rock are smalltown caricatures with little depth or development. Harris and Bedelia bring a dignity to their roles as the tale’s moral compass and Plummer is especially good as the shy Netty who finally finds her backbone to disastrous effect.Įlsewhere though, the secondary characters are largely myopic, selfish creatures who leave you with little to no emotional attachment. The central figures of Alan Pangborn and his girlfriend Polly Chambers (Bonnie Bedelia), who suffers from crippling arthritis in her hands, remain the only real sympathetic figures alongside Netty (Amanda Plummer). Like the book, its characters are one of the weak spots, unusually for a King story. The film, in contrast, feels more like fits and starts as Castle Rock goes into meltdown. In the book, it quite literally explodes into life and becomes unrelentingly more chaotic. It also doesn’t quite the escalation of carnage right. That repetitiveness is carried over once you’ve seen one townsperson turned by an object bought from Gaunt, you’ve literally seen them all, and little is done to add a new perspective to the sequence of events. This leaves the film with something of a tricky proposition, which it sadly fails to navigate all that well. All told, it’s not a great book the nature of King’s story means that it’s quite repetitive and there aren’t a whole lot of characters to root for. It is, however, one of the first King books that I read as a young ‘un and as such, I have a soft spot for it, despite its considerable flaws. Reviews were not kind to the first book that he wrote after his rehabilitation.
It contains his truly go for broke endings that work better than in some of his others (not for Castle Rock or its residents, mind). A satire on greed culture, small town politics, and mob mentalities, Needful Things is one of Stephen King’s more cynical works with a streak of dark humour a mile wide.
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