They’ve Changed Faces (1971)
They’ve Changed Faces is an interesting take on the Dracula legend. The description that my boyfriend and I found originally called it a satire on capitalist culture, but there’s not much humor to be found in this movie. Nor is it a traditional horror film. There is little to no blood found in the movie. While the premise feels like a sci-fi movie of sorts, it’s not exactly that either, although it is somewhat similar to John Carpenter’s They Live, but pre-dates that film by 15 years.
The basic story is that a car designer at an auto company named Alberto is suddenly called to the CEO’s office one morning and told that the owner of the company would like to meet with him at his secluded villa. The designer has never heard of the owner, who goes by the name of “Engineer Nosferatu” (played by Adolfo Celi, the villain from Danger: Diabolik). The designer drives out to the villa, but gets lost along the way, and comes across a pretty, topless, free-spirited hitch-hiker named Laura. Once he arrives to Nosferatu’s villa, he ignores Laura’s pleas to not go in and to run away with her instead. What he finds is a large mansion where the inside is akin to a more spammy version of Bill Gates’ house. Everytime you sit on a piece of furniture, an ad over the loudspeakers plays. This even happens when our protagonist showers. He is seduced by Nosferatu’s assistant-in-a-terrible-wig Corinna. Much like vampire tradition, Nosferatu can only be seen in the evening. He tells Alberto that he controls basically everything in Italy, and would like to make Alberto a CEO. He allows Alberto time to mull it over, but as each day progresses, Alberto discovers more and more disturbing things about Nosferatu, including that Laura has disappeared from his car at the gates.
They’ve Changed Faces is a slow burn of a movie, but it is well paced at barely 90 minutes. There is a lot of ambiguity going on, it has a creepy atmosphere where modern technology and design meets the old world, and the ending is bleak. Since it does not really fall into one genre, the best I can describe it is how I heard Vanishing Point described the other day, “a movie about the death of the 1960’s”. Even in the early 1970’s, there was a dearth of movies discussing the evils of capitalism, or its far-reaching consequences. At times I felt this movie was an alternative answer to Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, like what if C.C. Baxter decided not to have a soul and go after Fran Kubelik and stayed Vice President at the company?
