Peter Medak (1980)

Peter Medak, who came to Britain in 1956 to escape the political turmoil in his native Hungary, worked with some considerable actors in the first decade or so of his directing career:  Glenda Jackson (before she was a big name) in Medak’s debut feature, Negatives (1968); Alan Bates and Janet Suzman in the film adaptation of Peter Nichols’s A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1972); Peter O’Toole in The Ruling Class (also 1972); George C Scott and, in one of his last screen appearances, Melvyn Douglas in The Changeling.  Medak seems to have been, from an early stage, happy to genre-hop.  The three earlier pictures mentioned are black comedies.  A decade after The Changeling, he was into dramatisations of British true-crime stories (The Krays (1990), Let Him Have It (1991)).  Since the turn of the millennium, he has worked mostly in television but his most recent offering, The Ghost of Peter Sellers (2018), was screened at various film festivals:  it’s a documentary about Medak’s disastrous experience of working with Sellers, in 1973, on a pirate comedy, Ghost in the Noonday Sun, which proved such a fiasco that it never got a theatrical release.  The Changeling (written by William Gray and Diana Maddox, from a story by Russell Hunter) is a very different ghost story – a haunted-house psychological horror movie.

Made in Canada and set mostly in Seattle, the film starts well.  When his car breaks down in wintry weather, John Russell (Scott) goes to a phone box to call for a tow while his wife (Jean Marsh) and their young daughter (Michelle Martin) fool around together, laughing, in the snow.  A few screen moments later, both are dead, the victims of a freak accident:  John watches helplessly from the phone box as a snow plough runs over his wife and child.  Over the opening credits, John is shown returning to the family’s empty New York City apartment.  A few months later, he moves to Seattle to resume working as a composer and teacher of music.  He rents a mansion, vacant for the last twelve years, as Claire Norman (Trish Van Devere), who works for the local historical society, explains when she shows John round the place.  He hasn’t been in residence there long before the supernatural activity starts up.  The caretaker, Mr Tuttle (C J Gampel), calls John away from the piano; as soon as they’ve exited the music room, Medak’s camera, left to its own devices, zooms in on the piano, where a note plays without human agency.

That single note is a mere whisper of things to come in The Changeling, which features an awful lot of sounds.  John wakes each morning to a loud, disconcerting banging, though Mr Tuttle can’t find anything wrong with the pipes.  As well as fragments of Mozart and Brahms, there are bits of John’s own compositions – which are written, like the film’s abundant spine-chilling score, by Rick Wilkins.  There is, almost needless to say, a creepy music box in the attic:  this one plays a tune that is note for note identical to one that John thought he’d invented on the piano downstairs.  He also sees disturbing things that seem to happen autonomously.  A ball, once belonging to his daughter, bounces downstairs; even after he has disposed of it, the ball reappears.  A red stained-glass window shatters.  Bath taps are turned on – and John perceives in the bath the apparition of a drowned boy.  The proliferating scary effects proved, for this viewer, increasingly counterproductive.

George C Scott gives a good performance.   He keeps you aware, perhaps for longer than Medak’s direction or the writing deserves, of John Russell’s grief at the loss of his child (there’s strikingly little reference to his wife).  Scott is especially impressive when he shows John’s persisting sadness in unexpected, social contexts, like a fund-raiser for the local orchestra.  Once he and Claire have investigated the house’s history, John becomes convinced the place is haunted by the ghost of a young girl who, like his daughter, was killed in a traffic accident – one that took place just outside the mansion in the early years of the twentieth century.  With Claire’s help, he arranges a séance, at which a medium called Leah Harmon (Helen Burns) presides.  The voice of the spirit with which she makes contact is audible on a tape-recording of the séance, which John plays repeatedly afterwards.  The voice calls itself Joseph Carmichael.  This is the name of a six-year-old boy who, it soon transpires, died in the mansion in 1906 – drowned in his bath.

It’s a strong dramatic premise that a bereaved parent is particularly receptive to the spooky promptings of an unquiet soul whose earthly life ended in childhood.  And Peter Medak stages the séance well:  Helen Burns plays Leah Harmon straight and, when the medium launches into frantic automatic writing, powerfully.  I had no idea why Claire’s mother was in attendance at the séance alongside her daughter though Mrs Norman (Madeleine Sherwood – Mae in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)) proves a first-rate screamer.  But John Russell’s realisation that the source of the strange goings-on is a child the manner of whose death was unconnected to that of his own daughter’s is a turning point in The Changeling.  George C Scott shows tenacious integrity and never lapses into horror-movie mannerisms but his character, in gradually uncovering the house’s secrets, is no longer personally invested as he was before finding out about Joseph Carmichael.  In the second half of the film, John thus becomes a less individual detective figure, using newspaper research and so on to solve the mystery and somehow right the wrong done to little Joseph seventy-odd years ago.

The boy was murdered by his widowed father, Richard, who feared his sickly, crippled son wouldn’t survive to manhood – Joseph had to reach the age of twenty-one in order to inherit his maternal grandfather’s vast fortune.  To ensure the inheritance, Richard replaced the dead child with a boy from a local orphanage; he then took the changeling to Europe, from where they returned in due course so that the fortune could be claimed.  Melvyn Douglas is the film’s title character – the now elderly Joseph Carmichael Mark II.  A year before The Changeling, in Hal Ashby’s Being There, Douglas played (to Oscar-winning effect) a business mogul who had the ear of the American President.  This time, he’s a filthy rich US Senator; the boy he once was may not have asked to be taken from the orphanage but the grown man’s combination of undeserved wealth and choice of career make him the effective villain of the piece.  (The wicked Richard is merely glimpsed in a flashback to the drowning.)  Senator Carmichael is also patron of the orchestra (he’s first seen making a speech at the fund-raiser) and of the historical society that owns the house where his adoptive father slew the real Joseph.  Melvyn Douglas does a decent job in the role, even when Carmichael finally – and, of course, melodramatically – breaks down and gets his comeuppance.

Few of the rest of the cast are up to much.  Early on, the mechanical playing seems to serve a purpose:  you wonder if, for example, the inexpressiveness of C J Gampel’s Mr Tuttle is masking sinister intent on the caretaker’s part.  It’s rather the same with the blandly beautiful Trish Van Devere (the fourth and, by far, the longest-lasting Mrs George C Scott:  they were still together when he died in 1999).  The relationship between Claire and John is, I suppose, distinctive in that you assume something will develop between them and nothing does.  In the closing stages, though, both are swamped by horror paraphernalia, including Joseph’s wheelchair, which chases Claire along a corridor until she falls downstairs (not fatally).  In a 2010 article for The Daily Beast, Martin Scorsese included The Changeling in his list of ’11 Scariest Horror Movies of All Time’[1].  I’m sure I’d have been unnerved watching the film alone at night but a daytime viewing left me unshaken.  It’s better than the three other Medak pictures I’ve so far seen (Negatives, The Krays, Let Him Have It) although that’s damning with faint praise.  I probably just don’t watch sufficient things-that-go-bump-in-the-night cinema to appreciate The Changeling as the superior ghost story plenty of genre aficionados judge it to be.

31 July 2023

[1] Of the other ten, the five I’ve seen are Dead of Night (1945), Psycho (1960), The Innocents (1961), The Exorcist (1973) and The Shining (1980).