The Moneychangers (1976) Review

Six Hours About a Bank

I didn’t expect to like a miniseries about a bank this much. The Moneychangers is six hours of executives arguing about lending policy, reserves and a single enormous loan, and it’s gripping from the first episode to the last. Much of that is down to Christopher Plummer, who plays a villain as satisfying as any in seventies television, and much of it is down to Arthur Hailey, who knew exactly how to turn an institution into a drama.

Boris Sagal directed it for NBC, and it aired in four parts in December 1976, a month before Roots turned the miniseries into a national event. It was overshadowed almost immediately, and it deserves far better. I give it an 8, and it’s the rare piece of seventies television I’d recommend to anyone who works with money.

Hailey’s Method

Arthur Hailey made a career out of a single method. He would pick one big institution, a hotel, an airport, a car company, a bank, spend a year inside it learning how it really worked, and then follow half a dozen people through a crisis that tested it. Hotel, Airport, Wheels and The Moneychangers all work the same way, and they were all bestsellers.

The miniseries format suits that method far better than a feature film ever could. Six hours gives Hailey’s several storylines room to develop separately and then collide, the way they do in the books. A two-hour film would have had to cut half of them, and the story depends on every half.

The Succession

The story begins with the president of First Mercantile American Bank, an old-fashioned banker who built the institution, announcing to his senior staff that he’s dying. Two executive vice presidents want his job, both have spent years positioning themselves for this moment, and the board has to choose between them before the old man is gone.

Alex Vandervoort, played by Kirk Douglas, believes a bank has obligations to the people who keep their money in it: small loans, housing, the neighborhoods around its branches.

Roscoe Heyward, played by Christopher Plummer, believes a bank should make as much money as possible and look respectable while doing it. Both have allies on the board. Both are sure they’re right.

The series gives each side a coherent case. That’s why it works. This is a fight between two ideas about what a bank is for, and the rest of the story is the price of the choice.

The Supranational Loan

Heyward’s route to the top runs through a single enormous loan to Supranational, a conglomerate with a charismatic chief executive and accounts nobody on the board examines closely. Heyward pushes it through because it will make him look like the future of the bank and because the man behind it flatters him and offers him more than money.

Vandervoort objects, loses the argument and is proved right far too late. The series is sharp on how this happens. Nobody is stupid. Everyone has a reason to believe the numbers, and they dismiss the one man asking hard questions as timid and old-fashioned. Anyone who lived through 2008 will recognize every scene: the flattering executive, the complicated structure nobody fully understands, the board that doesn’t want to look foolish by asking. Watching it now, it reads less like a period piece and more like a warning nobody bothered to heed.

Plummer’s Heyward

Christopher Plummer won the Emmy for outstanding lead actor in a limited series for this role, and he deserved it. Heyward is devout, ambitious and utterly convinced of his own righteousness. He quotes scripture in meetings, speaks softly about duty, and sells out the depositors without a flicker of doubt.

Plummer never plays him as a cartoon, and that’s what I admire most in the whole series. He lets you see the calculation behind every pious remark without ever winking at the audience.

The scenes where he’s alone with the Supranational man are the finest acting in it: Heyward knows exactly what he’s being offered and pretends, even to himself, that he doesn’t. You can see how a board full of sensible people would fall for him. That’s what makes him frightening.

Douglas’s Vandervoort

Kirk Douglas plays Vandervoort as a decent, stubborn man who isn’t always good at politics. He cares about the right things and argues for them clumsily, and he’s often too sure of himself to build the alliances he needs. His private life is complicated, and the series lets him be flawed without losing sympathy.

It’s a quieter performance than Douglas usually gave, and it’s a good one. He’s the moral center of the story because he’s not a saint. He’s a man with a conscience working inside an institution that has less and less use for one.

The Teller

The second main story follows Miles Eastin, a young teller played by Timothy Bottoms, who steals from the bank to cover gambling debts and is caught. He goes to prison, and when he comes out, he’s offered a chance to redeem himself by going undercover inside a counterfeit credit card ring that has been robbing the bank.

It’s the most thriller-like part of the series and the most violent.

That subplot is a smart counterweight to the boardroom. The small thief is caught, punished and made to risk his life to make amends. The respectable men who lose millions of the depositors’ money through a bad loan mostly don’t face anything of the kind. The series never says it out loud. It doesn’t need to.

The Boardroom Scenes

The best scenes are meetings. Men in dark suits around a long table, arguing about exposure, reserves and reputation, and every one of them is as tense as a chase. Sagal films them simply, letting the actors work, and the power shifts in every meeting are clear: you can tell who is winning by who is allowed to finish a sentence.

Any writer could learn how drama works from it. There’s no violence in these rooms, only decisions, and the decisions are frightening because we can see where they lead. A vote to approve a loan is as suspenseful as anything in the series, because by then we know exactly what it will cost the people who aren’t in the room.

The Miniseries Moment

The great miniseries boom was just starting when The Moneychangers arrived. Rich Man, Poor Man had been a huge success earlier in 1976, and Roots was a month away. Networks had discovered that bestselling novels could be turned into television events spread across a week, and for a few years every big airport paperback became four nights on a network.

Most of those adaptations have been forgotten, and this one mostly has too. That’s a shame. It trusted its audience to follow a plot built on interest rates, collateral and board votes across four nights of prime-time television, and a prime-time audience stayed with it.

Nobody would make it that way now. A modern version would cut the boardroom to the bone and turn the teller’s story into the main event, and it would be a lesser thing for it.

Where The Moneychangers Falls Short

It’s obviously seventies television, and some of it grates on me. The sets are functional, the direction is workmanlike and some of the supporting performances are stiff. The teller’s story occasionally feels like it belongs to a different, cheaper show, and I’d have trimmed a good share of the flat stretches across those six hours.

None of that touches the core. The central conflict is written with real intelligence, Plummer is magnificent, and the subject has only become more relevant.

It frustrates me a little, because bones this good deserved a bigger budget. It’s an 8, and it would be higher if it had been made with a feature film’s care.

Two Stars in One Room

The best scenes in the whole series put Plummer and Douglas in the same room. Heyward speaks softly, smiles and quotes scripture. Vandervoort interrupts, raises his voice and loses his temper. Each man’s style is the perfect irritant for the other, and the board members around the table watch them like spectators at a tennis match, heads turning with every exchange as the argument swings back and forth.

That’s a clash of acting styles as well as characters. Douglas plays big, the movie-star way, full of energy and conviction. Plummer plays small, the stage-actor way, full of calculation and control. The series lets both approaches work, and the contrast gives their arguments an edge that the script alone couldn’t provide. Their final confrontation, once the consequences of the loan are clear, is the payoff for six hours of build-up, and both actors know it. Plummer’s composure finally cracks, just slightly. It’s the most satisfying moment in the series. It’s also a lesson in how to stage an argument. Neither man ever wins a scene outright. Each exchange shifts the balance a little, and the audience keeps a running score without being told to, until the numbers on the balance sheet finally settle it for everyone.

Where It Sits

It’s among the best of the seventies novel adaptations, and far better than its obscurity suggests. It’s also one of the few films or series that takes banking seriously as a subject. It’s more instructive about how financial disasters happen than most documentaries. It isn’t easy to find. It has had limited home video releases and turns up only occasionally on streaming. If you track down a copy, watch the full four-part version. Shorter cuts lose the teller’s story, and the series needs both halves to make its point.

Craft Note

The Verdict on The Moneychangers

Yes, and I’d push it on anyone who has ever sat in a budget meeting.

It’s an 8. The production looks like seventies television, but the story and Plummer’s performance hold up, and the banking feels more urgent now than it did then. The cheap look and the flat stretches are what keep it from climbing higher. Find the full version and give it the six hours.

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