Still of the Night

I think that writer/director Robert Benton was trying to make this movie akin to something Alfred Hitchcock would have made, but "Still of the Night" doesn't work as an homage or even a regular thriller. There is a real aloof feeling to this movie throughout - you don't really get a sense that any of the characters are those that are real flesh and blood. Roy Scheider was a talented actor, and Meryl Streep certain is, but even they seem overwhelmed by the depressing atmosphere and can't add much life. The main problem with the movie, however, is that it is extremely slow and boring. There are no shocks and there isn't even any real tension at any point. This extends even to the music score - there's almost no music in the entire movie. And it's extremely easy to figure out who the killer is, since the movie doesn't exactly give us a long list of suspects. Movies like this gathered dust in video stores for good reasons.

Dr. Sam Rice (Roy Scheider) is a Manhattan psychiatrist like his mother Grace (Jessica Tandy). He's recently divorced. One of his patients George Bynum has been killed. He is visited by the mysterious Brooke Reynolds (Meryl Streep) who worked with Bynum at the auction house Crispin's. She's also Bynum's mistress. They are interrupted by Detective Vitucci and she accidentally leaves behind a watch. Dr. Rice examines his files on Bynum and suspicions falls on Reynolds. I really like the Hitchcockian touches. I love the laundry room when the lights go out in the hallway. I did not like all the flashback re-examination of his files. The plot loses its way a bit and some of its tension. Meryl Streep is pretty good as the mysterious damsel-in-distress. Although she's not the classic sex bombshell. Scheider is still a good leading man. This could be a much better mystery thriller.

I saw STILL OF THE NIGHT for the first since I saw it 20 years ago at the movies. Everything about it is top notch except for one thing: the script. There's really no story. It's one of the flimsiest stories I've ever seen for such a high caliber production. It's a shame because everything is so great: great cast (I couldn't keep my eyes off of Streep), great cinematography, some excellent direction here and there (the dream sequence is memorable). I just wished they wrote a great script to go along the other great aspects of the production. But after watching it, I realized that we don't really see movies like STILL OF THE NIGHT anymore. They just don't make these kind of classy thrillers these days and watching SOTN sorta made me missed them. A lot!

No director has been imitated more than Alfred Hitchcock, and Still Of The Night is yet another in a seemingly endless line of homages to the Master's work. After the gory excesses of suspense movies like Dressed To Kill, it is quite nice to get back to a style of thriller-making that is comparatively subtle. Still Of The Night doesn't particularly rely on buckets of blood and graphic violence yet, thanks to skillful direction, atmospheric music and clever writing, it is genuinely jumpy from start to finish. Robert Benton, fresh from his Best Director Oscar for Kramer Vs Kramer, has fashioned a very effective thriller in which a few loose ends in the plotting are papered over with an air of sustained tension. Psychiatrist Sam Rice (Roy Scheider)is going through a mid-life crisis and really only has his work to cling to in order to maintain a semblance of normality. Among Sam's patients is a guy named George Bynum (Josef Sommer), an antiques dealer, and it is the gruesome murder of George that plunges Sam into a life-threatening mystery. Shortly after the killing George's neurotic mistress Brooke Reynolds (Meryl Streep) turns up at Sam's practice seeking psychiatric help. With his own emotions hardly at their sharpest, Sam quickly finds himself drawn to his new patient.... but is he playing a dangerous game with his own life? Sam's mother, Grace (Jessica Tandy), warns him that he should not trust this alluring stranger. The detective investigating the earlier murder, Joe Vitucci (Joe Grifasi), points up evidence that may indicate Brooke is actually the killer. Sam is convinced that she is innocent, but as the mystery unravels he finds himself in increasingly perilous danger.... As in any good suspense movie, the solution is kept well-disguised until the very end. Benton delights in leading his audience up various blind alleys, adding layers to the mystery and generating constant tension about what will happen next. The actors are uniformly excellent: Scheider convincing as the weary shrink, Streep twitchy and suspicious as a potential killer, Grifasi likably plodding as the detective on the case, and Tandy brilliant (as always) as the hero's worried mother. The film is shot in grey, dull colours that link very nicely with the dreary dead-end state that Scheider's character has reached in his life. This low-key approach also heightens the film's suspense, placing the frightening events into an everyday context that everyone in the audience can relate to. With its 87 minute running time, the film sticks closely to what is necessary and doesn't get lost amidst tons of extraneous detail. The lapses in logic prevent Still Of The Night from being a truly outstanding movie, but on the whole it remains a solid and very commendable thriller. Those who like these kind of movies will, I'm sure, thoroughly enjoy this one.

Still of the Night is a mood picture, in the purest and simplest way. It can almost be said that it's a meditation on a full moon. It begins and ends with a long, still take of one. Both times are the only times the film is scored with music. The story is not a series of situations being vocalized and handled in the physical world. It's about things dawning on a character, that character's feelings being stirred and reacting to events that take place around him, or in the past. We don't get to the bottom of everything until he does, and to the extent he does. Gradually, he understands a woman about whom he only knows so much, and throughout is uncertain of how to feel about her. Indeed, it's a film so carefully measured, so understated that if the story of a scene can be told with no words, then we will hear no words. In this way, it's pure cinema. It's a flow of sequences that build a dark, quiet stairway of tension, yet they're also thoroughly self-contained because they're so finely and fully attuned to setting, atmosphere and the inside and outside of every character in these very moments. Roy Scheider is so masculine and intense and yet he is so mild-mannered and tenderly human in these beautiful surroundings, but it is the object of his experiences here, Meryl Streep, who fits in to the universe of the film with a profound naturalism as a sort of mirror image of it. Just as the film cycles to and fro between the beautiful mundanities of the present tense and the amber antiquity of the past so seamlessly owing to the stream of consciousness interconnecting these scenes, Streep, having so fully internalized through Kramer vs. Kramer and Sophie's Choice the persona of a woman who can't escape her bondage with her past, brings that same energy here with such naturalism that she evokes it in a performance so minimal in what she says or how much she betrays at all. And when she does, it's a film climax equal to any special effect, gun fight, chase or struggle. A crucial aspect of how Robert Benton fashions an atmosphere as real, certain and arresting as one of the wood furnishings in the murder victim's flashback scenes is how barely he employs music score. His choice to use it when he does is as emotively precise as when the score is sound itself, murmurs, humming washing cycles, strange sporadic thumps coming from the shadows, all cadenced to create tension in their own deliberate ways. Benton again substantiates that delicacy and understatement are his forte. It comes as practically a kick in the teeth to see a modern suspense picture as erudite, well acted and exquisitely made as Still Of The Night.

Alfred Hitchcock was certainly the most important director of the history of the seventh art when it comes to influencing his colleagues.It's so glaring here that the movie itself becomes some kind of game where you try to spot the hitchcockian elements which abound. 1.Meryl Streep 's hairdo and background are typically "Marnie".Not only she resembles her,but she also had a childhood trauma. 2.Roy Scheider 's mother seems to have a strong influence on him in the grand tradition of not only "north by norwest" but also "the birds" "strangers on a train" "notorious" "psycho" "to catch a thief"and more.Besides,she's played by Jessica Tandy-the mother in THEbirds-whose part is pointless as an user already wrote.And that's not all:Schneider alludes twice to his beloved uncle Charlie!Although this character does not appear ,it cannot be a coincidence :it hints at "shadow of a doubt" and Joseph Cotten. 3.When the unfortunate victim spies Streep behind her windows,we have "rear window" in miniature. 4.Of course the auction strongly recalls "north by norwest" and it is a scene which is much too long and does not sustain the interest as Hitchcock did. 5.The dream "explained" by the shrinks(mother and son) comes from "spellbound" but there's no Salvador Dali here. 6.The final,when the killer is in the place ,imitates both "rear window" and "vertigo". So where's creativity here?A superior actress like Meryl Streep cannot even play her game well in such a contrived plot. Like Mel Brooks's "high anxiety" (1978),this kind of movie can only appeal to people who know well Hitchcock's world and is not to be taken literally anyway.

This film has received quite a few negative posts. I also read Leonard Maltin's review, in which he said that it was full of holes and was a weak Hitchcock homage. I really think people are all wrong about this one; it's full of some very good old-fashioned suspense, and I love all of the Hitch touches many here have already noted. As well, it must be recalled that Hitch dealt in many implausibilities in his films. He hated those who constantly pointed out that "that could never happen in real life." It's not real life, it's a movie! That's one of the ways I thought this film succeeded, was in reflecting (or even gently parodying) Hitch's use of things that would never happen in real life. Loved the chemistry between Meryl and Roy, not to mention the lovely mentor/parent shrink/shrink relationship between Roy and Jessica. Nice work from Robert Benton. I love this film. --Matthew Hays

source: Still of the Night

Trailer—Still of the Night

Still of the Night