The Changeling (1980)

               After pinging back and forth between US and UK productions it’s nice to have another country represented, even if that country’s Canada. I kid, I kid, this is one of the better movies I’ve watched so far this month, and not all of it is due to George C. Scott. It’s been a while since I watched him in a movie and was struck by how great he is as an actor. I mean, I already knew that, everyone knows that, but it’s nice to be reminded every once in a while. I don’t even think he’s doing some of his more impressive work here, he just has such a specific screen presence. I’ve read a lot of articles and reviews that have tried to quantify or break down why and how some people are captivating on camera and some aren’t. As filmgoers we tend to focus on facial expressions or how much actors can display emotions, but I’m coming around to the idea that the simple ability to move or stand on camera in a compelling way are skills in and of themselves. I’ve heard very persuasive arguments that the reason Keanu Reeves continues to be such a big movie star is that the way he carries himself on film meshes well with the roles he chooses. Well, most of the roles, no one watches ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ for his Don John. Scott just commands space on film. His character is only a composer in this movie yet he quietly refuses to be intimidated by a police captain and then a US senator and we buy it because it’s him.

              We’re also back in the world of independent productions raising funds from the general public. I love this detail from the Wiki: “The film's budget was raised by selling $25,000 shares to 264 investors, who later made a profit of $9,229 on their shares.” Hopefully this sort of thing is still going on and it’s not only Kickstarters left. I mentioned Canada because it’s relevant, as in 1974 the country changed its tax laws and allowed foreign producers to deduct all investments in Canadian films from taxable income. This allowed local producers Garth Drabinsky and Joel B. Michaels to bring in Mario Kassar with Corolco Pictures to secure funding. I will also shock you by saying that although it’s set mostly in Seattle, it was filmed largely in British Columbia, specifically Vancouver and Victoria. The tradition of Canada doubling for the US is a long and proud one.

              The screenplay is credited to William Gray and Diana Maddox, with a story credit to Russell Hunter. Gray was a professional writer, with credits including ‘Prom Night,’ ‘The Philadelphia Experiment,’ and eventually a lot of tv. Maddox was primarily an actress with only two other writing credits to her name. Russell Hunter was a musician and playwright who claimed to have lived for a time in a spooky mansion in Denver, Colorado in an area of the city called Cheesman park. From the Wiki: “After experiencing a series of unexplained phenomena, Hunter said he found a century-old journal in a hidden room detailing the life of a disabled boy who was kept in isolation by his parents. During a séance, he claimed, the spirit of a deceased boy directed him to another house, where he discovered human remains and a gold medallion bearing the dead boy's name.” To say that his account is largely unsubstantiated is to put it mildly. Makes a decent basis for a ghost movie, though.

              The director, Peter Medak, was the third attempt at hiring someone after Donald Cammell and Tony Richardson quit blaming ‘creative differences.’ He came on with only a month left to supervise the script and finalize set designs, so well done to him for turning out something so well put together. Medak has done some interesting stuff including 1972’s ‘The Ruling Class,’ 1993’s ‘Romeo is Bleeding’ and some prestige tv work including episodes of “The Wire” and “Breaking Bad.” He was still working as of 2018 and IMDB insists he’s currently attached to a movie in development.

              George C. Scott plays John Russell, a widower and composer who moves to Seattle to start his life over after losing his wife and child in the opening scene. The rest of the cast is solid. His quasi-love interest in the movie and co-lead character is Claire Norman, a member of the local Historical Society who rents him a house that turns out to be haunted. She’s played by Trish Van Devere, Scott’s real-life wife and frequent screen collaborator. Melvyn Douglas plays Senator Joseph Carmichael in one of his last roles (his very last was in ‘Ghost Story,’ which is coming up). IMDB also claims that Giancarlo Esposito is an uncredited extra, but I can’t say I saw him.

              One thing I noticed over the course of the movie is the editing, which handles time jumps very well. There are a lot of hard cuts in this movie that are abrupt transitions in tone. The opening few minutes of the movie shows Scott along with his wife and daughter by the side of the road in a stalled car. While he goes to a nearby payphone to ring for help, they start playing in the snow. We soon see a car and a truck approaching in opposite directions and he watched helplessly as the car skids and causes the truck to plow into his family, killing them both. The screen freezes on Scott raging against the inside of the phonebooth and the title appears. Then a slow fade and it’s clearly sometime later as we see Scott slowly walking away from a building, briefcase in hand. He gets home to a mostly-packed apartment. He has a brief conversation with a maid, then it cuts to a plane. We see Scott collect his bags, then it cuts to a conversation with some friends where it’s established that he’s taken a teaching position at the local university. They discuss how he wants to rent a house, then it cuts to where he’s standing outside the gate of a mansion, waiting for someone. Claire from the local Historical Society arrives and they briefly discuss the house as he’s shown around. It’s an amazing set, by the way, constructed on a soundstage. Then it cuts to his first class, where he’s briefly startled by its size. He begins playing a piece to them and then it cuts to a full orchestra playing the same piece while he makes small talk with University donors and bigwigs. He flirts briefly with Claire, we get our first sight of Senator Carmichael, and then he’s home again.

It really is a good looking movie.

              We are fully up to speed and ready for the spookums a mere 18 minutes in. During that time we’ve learned a bunch of information that’s going to be important for the rest of the movie, but what I really appreciated about this sequence is how much information we get about Scott’s John Marshall. The first scene after the accident is just him walking by himself from a building. He briefly glances back at one point, and I don’t know how but Scott managed to convey with just his body language that he’s leaving a place he worked at for a long time. By showing us the packed apartment and having him reminisce over one of his daughter’s toys we understand he’s very, very sad but trying to move on. He’s shown as having friends who care about him, and the whole Historical Society angle is established. The way he enters the lecture hall and pauses in shock at the size of his audience, then turns it into a joke when he sits at his piano wryly wondering aloud how the hall is full when only 23 people registered, lets us know he can handle surprises. The way he’s comfortable attending a black-tie reception and hobnobbing with the rich and well-connected makes it reasonable when he doesn’t fold to authority later on. It’s all really well done.

              But we’re here for the spookums, and at the 18-minute mark we get them. Starting the morning after the concert there’s a booming sound at exactly 6am that lasts for a full 30 seconds. This happens several mornings in a row. During those days he starts composing a new piece and makes more small talk with Claire. He gets the handyman working on the sound, who tries to talk about air trapped in pipes and how it’s an old house, while John counters that it’s odd that it happens at the exact same time each morning for exactly 30 seconds. A little while after that he hears a faucet running at night, then when he turns that one off another one upstairs in a bath, and after he turns that one off he sees a vision of a small boy drowning in the tub.

              Roger Ebert complained in his review how Scott “makes the hero so rational, normal and self-possessed that we never feel he’s in real danger; we go through this movie with too much confidence.” And I can even see that as a negative, but to counter that Ebert hadn’t just watched a bunch of ghost movies in a row with idiots for main characters. At a certain point it’s nice to have a character react to ghostly goings-on by taking the rational steps that anyone would think to take before deciding that there sure does seem to be a ghost here. First Scott goes to the Historical Society to ask about the previous tenants. Turns out their records only go back to 1920 and there’s nothing odd in those. We also establish that there’s an old woman with the society who Knows Things. One morning after that he’s leaving for work when a window breaks somewhere above him, raining down red glass. He looks around the front of the house and sees a small window up on the far-right side of the third floor. He goes upstairs and finally finds a small room hidden behind a false wall in a closet. There he finds, under a thick layer of dust, a small wheelchair, some papers dated 1909, and a music box that plays the same tune he’d composed in the last few days.

              It was established earlier that Scott records almost all of his time at his piano, so he’s able to play a recording of the song along with the music box to Claire as well as take her upstairs to the hidden room, where she admits it’s all weird and agrees to help him dig further into the mystery. They head to the microfiche and dig up what eventually turns out to be misleading information about a little girl who died in front of the house from a coal-cart accident in 1909. They bring in a medium to do a séance, recording the whole thing, and she claims to contact a small boy named Joseph before the ghost throws a glass across the room. After listening back to the recording John thinks he can hear the ghost whisper a full name, Joseph Carmichael, as well as ‘Sacred Heart,’ ‘ranch,’ ‘well,’ ‘my father,’ ‘my body,’ and ‘medal.’ Then he has a vision of a man lifting up the legs of a small boy while he’s in a bathtub, forcing him to drown. The drowning face of the boy is the same vision he saw before. John calls Claire to tell her what he saw, then collapses.

I guess spoilers?

              It’s at this point that I should mention that there’s a full forty-five minutes left in the movie.

              The film doesn’t get bad or anything, it’s probably my own fault that I kind of thought we were almost at the end when the ghost finally reveals himself to John, because I’d forgotten that the movie had made a point of establishing earlier that a Senator Joseph Carmichael was both alive and a heavy contributor to the Historical Society. It also turns out that the Senator’s father lived in the house with his family in 1900, and isn’t it strange that a ghost and an elderly senator have the same name?

              To condense the rest of the plot, because it’s neat to watch play out but isn’t super complicated, it turns out that due to inheritance shenanigans the senator’s father killed his sickly, partially disabled child in 1906 and replaced him with a child from the local orphanage. They moved to Europe until after WWI, enough time having passed that nobody in the US would be able to identify the replacement son as anyone else. The father eventually died and the replacement child grew up into a powerful senator. The older woman who Knows Things at the Historical Society tips the senator off that John is poking around about things in his past, which gets that police captain on John’s case.

              The movie does reach a fairly satisfying conclusion, except I will complain about one aspect of it: the movie leaves it unclear whether or not the senator knew that his father killed the child he replaced. Maybe he was told the child died of natural causes and he made peace with being the replacement child? The kid was six when the switch was made so he definitely remembers being adopted, he had to have been coached to pretend he wasn’t, so when John confronts him with proof of his fake identity he seems to react in genuine denial. It’s certainly not an important point, he’s a minor character and his knowledge one way or the other doesn’t affect things, but it’s the only thing in the movie that confused me.

              One last note about Danse Macabre, the only book I’ve ever read. As I thought it does briefly touch on this movie, which seems to have come out while King was writing it because he briefly mentions how it’s doing well at the box office. He mostly just says how scary he thought it was when Claire was chased around the house by a possessed wheelchair. I thought that scene was the only one in the movie that came across as silly, but I’m certainly not the expert on scary that he is.

              I was really looking forward to this movie because I’ve heard very good things about it over the years and it did not disappoint. A lot of it might be just enjoying Scott strutting his stuff on screen, but he was cast in the movie for the reason. I read a bit on how the house interior was made up of interconnected sets on a soundstage and how the entire front of the house was a façade, this really elaborate piece of construction with working doors and windows, and I have to say I was completely fooled, movie magic for the win. We’re now three in a row for genuinely good movies, and I’d be hopeful for four but I know what the next one is, and while I’m certainly looking forward to it for very different reasons than this one.