The Changeling (1980)

Film: The Changeling (1980)

Stars: George C. Scott, Trish van Devere, Melvyn Douglas, John Colicos, Jean Marsh, Madeleine Sherwood

Director: Peter Medak

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-00's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

A trend started in the 1960's, and continued until the 1980's, where aging movie stars decided to give horror a shot.  This became known for a lot of women as "hagsploitation" or "grand guignol" where once glamorous actresses like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Olivia de Havilland were put in caked on pancake makeup & tortured by each other (and more so the director), but it continued for decades longer.  One example of this would be The Changeling from 1980, with an aging George C. Scott (and a nearly gone Melvyn Douglas, who would be dead less than two years after this film was released).  Neither actor is known for their work in horror, certainly not in their prime but given limited options, they both gave it a shot here, and ended up with something unexpected.  The Changeling, one of the most important Canadian horror films ever made, was a film I hadn't really heard of before this month (it was actually a movie I substituted last minute when I decided another one of our choices was going to be too hard to find in good condition), but it's well-done, especially some of the bits at the end of the film, and worth your time if you (like me) were unfamiliar with it.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in two halves.  The first half follows famed conductor John Russell (Scott) in the wake of the deaths of his wife and daughter after a horrific car crash.  He rents a mansion from a historical society in Seattle, and lives there despite no one having resided in the house for 12 years.  It turns out that there's a reason for that, as the house appears to be haunted, unexplained phenomena getting to John, particularly surrounding water, as he starts to see visions of a drowned boy in a bathtub, and he begins to investigate who the boy is.  It turns out he's Joseph Carmichael...which is a problem because Joseph Carmichael is still alive, an aging US Senator (played by Douglas) whom we learn was switched with a crippled & sickly boy as a child so that the healthy (fake) Joseph could inherit the family estate.  In the process, the sickly boy is murdered, drowned in a bathtub, and for much of the last thirty minutes it is clear the boy wants recognition of what was done to him, in the process needing to use John to get his fake brother to return to the house...where the true Joseph can have his revenge.

The movie is fascinating for a variety of reasons, not least of which is because the beginning has very little to do with the plot of the film.  There is no ghostly apparitions of John's wife and daughter in the house, and so it puts a fascinating spin on the haunted house story, where he is haunted by a literal ghost but also figurative ones, trying to understand what to do with his life after the unspeakable has happened.  I think this is really clever, and honestly something I didn't expect going into the movie-this red herring that also plays a B plot to the movie is a solid touch.

The film's many twists also generally work.  If there's a fault, it might be that they work too well.  Melvyn Douglas's character probably needs 1-2 more scenes with George C. Scott to really sell this, as you don't get a great sense of what his opinions are about what's happening.  It's possible that he's also an innocent victim here, being thrown into this circumstance as just a boy...but the ending wants him to suffer for these crimes.  That ambiguity doesn't quite work because you need a clear indication of whether or not the ghost is malicious or righteous.  That is, however, the only thing that doesn't work here, as the rest of the movie is a "start at 11 PM, and you'll be staying up past midnight" style horror movie classic.

1920's: The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera

1930's: The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dracula's Daughter, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Invisible Man, Mad Love, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Raven, Son of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London

1940's: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Cat People, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Invisible Woman, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Ghost, The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, Phantom of the Opera, She-Wolf of London, Son of Dracula, The Uninvited, The Wolf Man

1950's: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Outer Space, Revenge of the Creature

1960's: The Devil Rides Out, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead,Village of the Damned

1970's: The Amityville Horror, Black Christmas, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Don't Look Now, Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes, The Omen, Phantom of the Paradise, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, When a Stranger Calls, The Wicker Man

1980's: Altered States, Child's Play, The Evil Dead, The Fly, The Fog, Friday the 13th, Gremlins, Hellraiser, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist, The Thing

1990's-Present: Arachnophobia, The Blair Witch Project, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Candyman, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Paranormal Activity, Scary Movie, Scream

OVP: Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Film: Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Stars: James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, Arthur O'Connell, Eve Arden, Kathryn Grant, George C. Scott, Joseph N. Welch
Director: Otto Preminger
Oscar History: 7 nominations (Best Picture, Actor-James Stewart, Supporting Actor-George C. Scott, Supporting Actor-Arthur O'Connell, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Film Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

All right, we are on Day 2 of our week devoted to Best Supporting Actor.  One of my favorite things about doing reviews this way (where there's a common Oscar theme, but generally the films have little else in common, hopefully proving both the depth of each category within the Academy and forcing me to have a little bit more structure to knocking out some more great movies) is that when a movie gets a lot of nominations, you don't necessarily think of it first as a nominee in a category like Best Supporting Actor.  This is especially true for Anatomy of a Murder.  If you think of this movie today, it's obviously going to be as a "classic courtroom drama" one of the harbingers of eventual hit television series like The Defenders.  If you think of it in relation to Oscar, it's almost certainly going to be for its Best Picture nomination (weirdly the split in 1959 that meant Otto Preminger wasn't nominated was that Billy Wilder was for Some Like It Hot) or for being Jimmy Stewart's final nomination for Best Actor, which he lost to Charlton Heston during the Ben-Hur sweep.  However, Anatomy of a Murder is the only film we're going to profile this week that received two nominations for Best Supporting Actor, one for steady character actor Arthur O'Connell and the first nomination for a man who would one day turn down the Oscar: George C. Scott.

(Spoilers Ahead) Anatomy of a Murder has a lot of characters, but I'll attempt to summarize here.  At the center of the story is Paul Biegler (Stewart), a down-on-his-luck lawyer who recently lost his race for district attorney, and as a result is cash-strapped, unable to pay his secretary Madge (Arden) as he spends most of his time with his drinking buddy Parnell (O'Connell).  A case lands in his lap of a man  named Frederick Manion (Gazzara), a war veteran accused of murdering the man who raped his wife Laura (Remick).  Biegler tries the case on temporary insanity, as unlike a lot of dramas we would have seen at the time (where the defendant would be truly not guilty), there's never any question that Manion killed the man who raped his wife.  The film's central storyline largely unfolds in the courtroom, with Stewart and the prosecuting attorney Claude Dancer (Scott) going against each other in a series of rapid fire questioning rounds with witness after witness, until finally it's Mary Pilant (Grant, in one of the only roles she'd do after her marriage to Bing Crosby) provides enough evidence to the fact that her father raped Laura that they dismiss the charges against her husband.

There are a lot of things to unpack with a movie like Anatomy of a Murder, which at nearly three hours long (though it never feels like that, and indeed I was having so much fun I would have happily gone on for another hour) has a lot of plot.  The film at the time was landmark.  It was banned for a period in Chicago because it spoke so frankly about sex (this is the earliest chronologically I've ever seen a film use the word "sperm," for example), and is not shy about the realities of what happened to Laura Manion.  It's particularly interesting because of the way that Laura Manion is depicted in the film.  In Classic Hollywood, rape victims were almost always played as virginal saints (think of Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda or Hope Lange in Peyton Place)-Laura Manion is not a virgin (she's been married twice) and is not shy about clearly liking sex & liking that men are attracted to her.  That the film manages to show a woman of her proclivity as being a rape victim (that it shouldn't matter what a woman looks like, "no means no means no" is always right) is really progressive, and something I wasn't expecting going into this picture.

This boldness really hits well with the film though-this is a movie that cares about detail, cares about telling a complicated story.  We leave not really knowing if Fred Manion is guilty or not, or whether Stewart's Biegler (who gave him the idea of temporary insanity in what bordered on witness tampering) simply let a guilty man off by trying a different case (essentially stating that the man he killed wasn't worth a war veteran going to jail).  We also don't have a sense that the Manions live happily ever after-the ending heavily implies that Laura & Fred had a violent squabble, and that they are headed into another town to start over, but with the same character defects they had here.  It is only Biegler who has learned from this that he can move on past his election loss, and start helping he, Madge, and Parnell continue to make a living going forward.  It's the sort of open-ended finale you'd struggle to find even in modern day movies, and the ease with which it happens is enviable.

The Oscar nominations were uniformly strong-lots of strong competition when we eventually get to this year in the OVP, but know that Anatomy is coming with a winning hand.  Stewart is charming, but finds a rascal in his Paul that is fantastic, and proof that his career-best work in Vertigo the year before was no fluke-he was on a role.  The Cinematography is splendid, as is the editing, with the moving camera of the courtroom scenes working overtime to give us looks at being, in turn, the witnesses, the jury, the judge, and the lawyers.  I loved the screenplay too-it's hard to pull off a legal thriller and have people curious what will happen in the end, but they did just that, and the care that they handled the sensitive nature of the movie (but didn't handle it with kid gloves) is brilliant.

And as for our Supporting Actors?  Honestly, it's hard to tell which one's better.  Scott gets the showier role-the first hour or so you're going to wonder how he was nominated, but once you get into the film, you see his power and gravitas, particularly in his cross-examination of Lee Remick's Laura (Remick, who was cited by the Globes, had to have just missed with Oscar and it's disappointing she wasn't cited even in a strong field, as she's sensational & maybe the best performance in the movie, give or take Stewart), and suddenly you're wondering how he didn't win the Oscar, as this is the sort of performance that wins.  O'Connell's isn't the type that wins, but it's wonderful to watch his chemistry with Stewart, and the laid-back approach of his character.  There's layers in his work as it unfolds.  He's a drunk who was perhaps saved from being a lost cause by his friendship with Biegler, and the potential he saw in him, though O'Connell never gets the "I'll give up the booze!" sort of scene that would normally be required of an actor playing an alcoholic to get nominated.  Oscar wisely picked these two men as his nominees rather than the Globe-cited Joseph Welch, who portrays the judge.  Welch would have been an understandable if gimmicky choice that Oscar might have eaten up-he had been Chief Counsel for the Army during the McCarthy hearings, and was seen as the most important figure in taking down Sen. McCarthy (whose crusade, of course, had destroyed the careers of dozens of Hollywood figures).  This was his only role, and one he took on a lark-he's fine, if not particularly impressive in a plum role, and I'm glad if they were only going to give two citations to Anatomy, they went with O'Connell & Scott.

OVP: The Hanging Tree (1959)

Film: The Hanging Tree (1959)
Stars: Gary Cooper, Karl Malden, Maria Schell, George C. Scott, Ben Piazza
Director: Delmer Daves
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"The Hanging Tree")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

We're going to conclude our weeklong look at films nominated in the music categories at the Oscars with The Hanging Tree, a film on the tail-end of Gary Cooper's career (this morning we took a glance at Mr. Cooper's early work in The Cowboy and the Lady).  The Hanging Tree is during arguably my favorite period of the film western, when the industry was willing to start encountering the era's violent & problematic past, while still having the grandeur of the classic American western.  This film certainly comes in with a sense of history.  Gary Cooper was on the Mt. Rushmore of American western stars, rivaling John Wayne & Jimmy Stewart in that regard, and this is his final entry in the genre, and darn near his final film (he'd have three more films in him before his death in 1961 at the age of 60).  Being an on-again-off-again fan of Cooper's (sometimes I'm all there, other times I feel like he relies too much on his intense handsomeness), I was curious what I'd make of this film.  As it turns out, what I should have been more curious about is how I'd react to a truly strange movie.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on Joseph Frail (Cooper), a stiff-lipped doctor in Montana tending to the sick during the middle of a gold rush.  He's surrounded by prospectors, and takes in one who tries to rob from the main hoard of prospectors named Rune (Piazza), who he takes on as his ward (through blackmail-he keeps the bullet that Rune was shot with).  Eventually, Frail also has a beautiful young woman in his care, a Swiss woman who was in a stagecoach robbery, and was blinded as a result.  She regains her sight through Frail's care, but she also starts to see him for what he really is-a controlling man, wanting to "own" people through blackmail and debts they can't possibly repay.  This causes her to go into business with Frenchy (Malden), a local louse who has been trying to make moves on her the entire movie.

The film is, and I cannot stress this enough, strange.  I've seen countless westerns through the years, and there's definitely a lot of the tropes there.  The noble woman keeping her chastity in the hardest of circumstances, the lone frontiersman with the checkered past, and the villainous drunk who wants to tear them apart...these are classic western cliches.  But the movie doesn't really play with that idea.  It's more interested in the strange claustrophobia of these characters, all of them desperate for gold but perhaps more so for recognition, and doing whatever it takes (even if it's self-destructive) to get to that point.

This would normally make for a really good movie-this is, after all, what made films like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance masterpieces, that sense that the western needed to be dismantled.  But The Hanging Tree doesn't quite work, perhaps because it doesn't have enough vision in the way its characters are seen.  None of the performances are three-dimensional.  Physically Schell's work is impressive, but you don't leave understanding anything about her Elizabeth in a real way-she's still a cartoon.  The same is true for Cooper & especially Malden (who is actively bad in some scenes).  It's rare for a classic Hollywood film to fall apart not because of the writing but because of the acting, particularly since Cooper & Malden have genuinely been Oscar-worthy in the past, but this doesn't work because of the performances.  It always feels like it's trying for something higher, but none of them are giving the kind of work you'd need to ensure that it hits that plain.  Still, it's a valiant effort & a watchable curiosity (the art direction is also very strong-I loved all of the watermills).

The film's music nomination happened in Best Original Song, where the titular number is sang by Marty Robbins.  The tune is catchy, and quite the diddy (it was covered by Frankie Laine, the quintessential western crooner), and it definitely is connected to the story, but like the film itself, it feels a bit off-balance.  This is the rare situation (I'm running out of these) in the OVP where this is the first nomination I've had from a category-I haven't seen A Hole in the Head, The Five Pennies, The Best of Everything or The Young Land yet (has anyone...these are pretty obscure titles?), but this lands in the middle for me-fun, but forgettable.