When Michael Calls (1972)

[SPOILER after the footnotes.]

Another MoW* it took me 50 years to catch up with, When Michael Calls turned out to be reasonably satisfying.  Well reviewed when it first aired, it normally wouldn’t warrant discussion here, but while watching it recently I notice some subtexts that weren’t apparent when originally broadcast, as well as some influence on latter trends.

Let’s get the details out of the way first:
Filmed in Toronto but trying to pass itself off as Vermont, When Michael Calls is based on the novel of the same name by John Farris (I’ve not read the book so many of my observations below about the source material are supposition).  Starring Ben Gazzara, Elizabeth Ashley, and Michael Douglas just before he hit the big time with Streets Of San Francisco, it’s a well made thriller directed by Philip Leacock (a journeyman UK / US film and TV director) off a script by James Bridges (who went on to write The Paper Chase and The China Syndrome among others).

It fits perfectly within the limitations of TV of that era, relying less on gruesomeness or art design to convey its chills but rather contrasting a very typical TV quality slice of life look with the genuinely unnerving phone calls from Michael, a 13 year old boy who just happens to be dead.

This intrusion of the uncanny into the commonplace works really well, and while the ending stretches credulity almost to the breaking point, it does prove satisfying…but in an oddly down key matter as opposed to the tsunami of horror films about to be unleashed in the wake of Last House On The Left and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

But more on that later…

The three American actors are well supported by a Canadian cast, with Gazzara wisely turning his intensity down to TV acceptable levels.  He plays Doremus Connelly, the lawyer ex-husband of Helen Connelly (Ashley), and as soon as he arrives unannounced at her new small town home to visit his young daughter (Karen Pearson as Peggy Connelly), Helen starts getting phone calls from Michael, her nephew who ran away from home at age 13, dying of exposure, his remains not found until several months later.

Michael’s brother / Helen’s other nephew Craig (Douglas) arrives soon after this.  He’s a therapist at the Greenleaf School, a home for troubled boys, and Helen wonders if one of his charges might be pranking her.

It needs to be said that When Michael Calls does a fairly good job in the red herring department, but I wonder of Doremus doesn’t come across as a lot more suspicious looking in the novel.  I think the production decided to tip he was a good guy early on because his daughter is indirectly imperiled by the phone calls and holy shamolley, have you ever seen Ben Gazzara not look like he was about to bash somebody’s head open with a baseball bat?  Making his character the clear hero early on may have been a studio or network fiat but I honestly can’t fault them for that.

Anyway, the phone calls continue, and people associated with Michael’s death also die in some gruesome-for-TV ways.  Craig and Helen finally reveal to Doremus that Michael and Craig came under her care when she had to have their mentally ill mother committed.

That’s one of the weak spots in the production:  Ashley and Douglas are only five years apart in age, and while they tried to make him look younger, he’s clearly in the same age cohort as her.  Again, I suspect the book makes note of the necessary difference in their ages, but it undermines the movie.

While the audience might be anticipating a supernatural explanation for the phone calls, the movie never goes there.  The possibility that Michael might still be alive is raised since the only way his remains were identified were by his clothes.  A likely suspect is trotted out and sure enough, he’s a petty criminal but it’s soon revealed his arrest record proves he can’t be Michael.  

The next time Michael calls he asks Helen to come to a remote farm.  Doremus goes instead, sees what might be Michael but gets clonked on the head by another mysterious figure, and from there you’ll just have to scroll down to the SPOILER at the end.

Like I said, not a great thriller but a good one, and considering the average quality of MoWs of that era, pretty near the top of the list.

Could a 21st century audience enjoy it?

Yes -- but only if they view it as a period film!

Much of the film hinges on technology limitations of the era.  Today DNA would identify Michael’s remains beyond question.  Phone calls are far easier to trace today, and call waiting eliminates the tension that busy signals produce in this story.

And while the Greenleaf School fits in with popular 1970s conceptions of institutions for “troubled” children, we’ve fortunately learned enough since then for those scenes to play false today.

But as a story set in 1972?  
Yeah, works like the aces.

This is far from the first movie or story of this kind.  Literature is replete with revenge tales, and the mystery genre certainly features a lot of them.

What is interesting about When Michael Calls is its place in the transition of horror films from their Gothic / supernatural roots to a full embrace of psychotic killers in the late 1970s and 80s -- even though those psychotic killers often eventually revealed supernatural abilities (looking at you, Michael Myers).

Prior to Halloween in 1978, horror films didn’t focus on revenge as a motive.

Oh, the villains could be horrendously sadistic and rack up impressive body counts, but typically those were ancillary to their actual motive.  In fact, when revenge was a motive in 1960s horror films, as often as not it was aimed at the villain who in turned used whatever excessive means necessary to thwart it.

We need to clarify the difference between revenge and vengeance and the act of avenging.

Revenge is always about an insult to one’s honor.

The insult may be in the form of someone the insultee knows and loves getting killed (let the record show I coined the you-killed-my-dog-so-you-must-die trope long before John Wick) but it is never about the victim, it’s always about the insultee.

As a result, revenge is never ethically or morally justified.  Typically in a revenge story the insultee -- even if they already hold a position of authority such as a law officer or a soldier -- step outside of that authority to obtain revenge.

Revenge is not justice, nor is it retribution (although retribution may be part of revenge).  It is not about righting wrongs but is about making the insultee feel better about themselves.

As such, it differs from avenging.

The motive of an avenger is to balance the scales of justice for those who are unable to do so themselves. Avenging is about the victim, not the avenger.  While the avenger may know the victim, their motivation is purely impersonal and theoretically could be satisfied by any outcome that authoritatively restores balance to the equation.

The line separating an avenger from revenge is thin and porous, and there are fascinating stories to tell about those who come close to crossing it -- or fail and actually do.

The motive in When Michael Calls is personal revenge.  Helen has done nothing legally / morally / ethically wrong yet she is still being targeted for terror by someone feeling an insult to their honor.

While there were other psycho killer movies in the 1960s (starting with Psycho, the granddaddy -- or should I say grandma? -- of them all), they didn’t start to dominate the horror genre until the late 1970s with Halloween.

Even Last House On The Left, an ultra low budget knockoff of The Virgin Spring, isn’t a revenge story since the parents kill the gang who murdered their daughter because they know they can’t contact the police and live (it is a harbinger of things to come, however, in terms of on screen violence and sadism).

When Michael Calls doesn’t end as noisily as most of the horror films that followed it because in the end the killer is made to recognize their own complicity in Michael’s death, and the surviving cast feels no need to pursue vengeance past that (the killer is institutionalized, but they’re no longer a threat).

While the story seems truncated in places (again, I wonder if the original novel fills in gaps seen in the TV movie), it’s a bit more complex than the countless slasher flicks that followed it, particularly the Friday The 13th series, which start in When Michael Calls territory but soon moves into utterly mindless mayhem.

When Michael Calls isn’t the most sophisticated mystery movie made but it sure is one helluva lot more complex and satisfying than the overwhelming majority of horror movies that followed.

There’s something to be noted in the change in American pop culture and movie going tastes around that time, too.  The 1960s saw a rise of complex and questioning films in a wide variety of genres, reflecting the introspection that millions of young people around the world were experiencing.  It was a time of great social stress and upheaval, and films that offered simplistic solutions (looking at you, Green Berets) failed to satisfy.

But as the flower generation wilted and the hippies mutated into yuppies, the desire and fortitude for questioning and introspection faded as well.  People wanted simple pat answers, and rebelled when reminded of H.L. Mencken’s dictum that simple answers typically were incorrect.

This can be seen in the rise of Star Wars and similar simplistic good vs evil stories as well.

This is not a knock against Star Wars** but against the thinking that made its phenomenal success possible.  By the time the original trilogy ended with Return Of The Jedi it surrendered any claim of moral and ethical validity in a headlong rush to let Luke and his daddy feel good about themselves.***

Subsequent sequels / prequels only reduce the exciting comic book razzmatazz of the original Star Wars to a prolonged multi-generational family hissy fit that kills literally billions of humans / aliens / robots and destroys several planets in the process.

Again, not to fault the original Star Wars for this, but one can see the clear societal shift from American Graffiti -- which still fit into the complex story bin despite its lightheartedness -- to Star Wars and while a few films tried to follow in American Graffiti’s footsteps, most trudged after Star Wars’s pot of gold.

The movies didn’t cause this societal shift, but their success sure revealed it.

. . .

POSTSCRIPT:
I saw When Michael Calls on Creature Features.  While there are a couple of local shows and YouTube channels using this name, these guys are the best.  The host segments are witty / fun / informative, the guests are interesting, and they never rag on the films they show.****  

Check out the episodes they have on YouTube, everything from classics such as The Innocents to not-so-classics like The Creeping Terror, rarities like The Ghost Of Sierra de Cobre (a failed pilot from the creators of The Outer Limits) and oddities like Star Wreck (a Finnish Star Trek / sci-fi parody).

© Buzz Dixon

*  “Movie of the Week” (shorthand for ABC Movie Of The Week but often applied to any feature length made-for-TV production.  Around the world there are various running times described as “feature length” but in the US it’s generally accepted that anything 50 minutes or longer qualifies as a feature (thus excluding most hour-long TV show episodes since their actual running time is typically 48 minutes or less plus commercials).  Feature length productions have a long history on TV, including such prestigious productions as Marty and Requiem For A Heavyweight.  In the 1950s and 60s several anthology series offered 90 minute or longer live dramas (and live TV drama, a unique medium that mixes the best of stage dramas and filmed entertainment, deserves its own blog post that I’ll get around to wunna deez daze) and in the 1960s and 70s filmed TV series such as The Virginian, The Name Of The Game, and Cimarron Strip featured “90 minute” episodes weekly, and The NBC Mystery Movie offered a regular rotation of Columbo, McMillan & Wife, McCloud and other original mystery films.

** At least not the original non-CGIed Han-shoots-first version.

*** As I’ve posted elsewhere, Han Solo is the moral core of Star Wars.

**** “What, never?”  
“No, never!”  
“What, never?”  
“…Hardly ever.”

>>>SPOILER<<<

Craig turns out to be harboring a decades long hate against Helen and others that he’s successfully hidden all this time, angry at them for putting his mother in an insane asylum, thus causing Michael to run away and die of exposure.  He’s hypnotized a troubled mute young boy at the Greenleaf School (Chris Pellet, who despite being able to speak was typecast as a mute kid and after 4 voiceless roles said skrew dis noiz and quit show biz).  While the lad’s under hypnosis, Craig uses him to record the uncanny messages he plays over the phone to freak Helen out.  This really pushes my “Oh, come on now!” button but considering how farfetched so many other mystery solutions are, I don’t count this as a deal breaker.