Billie Whitelaw makes a frightening discovery in the Elizabeth Taylor thriller NIGHT WATCH.
TV-style “documentary” nor an- other exploitive horror sequel, but represents one of the few serious treatments of the incident and its aftermath. Extras include an in- sightful commentary track with the film-makers and a brief featurette about Daniel Lutz and his circle of friends.
NIGHT WATCH
1973, Warner Archive, 98m 51s, $17.99, DVD-0 By Kim Newman
Based on a stage play (pro- duced on Broadway with Joan Hackett) by Lucille Fletcher, who is best-remembered for the often- remade SUSPENSE radio scripts “Sorry, Wrong Number” and “The Hitch-Hiker,” this enjoy- ably high-strung melodrama has a succession of twists. In a why-won’t-you-believe-me variation on the “boy who cried wolf” theme, neurotic, insom- niac, well-to-do housewife Ellen Wheeler (Elizabeth Taylor) insists that, when she gets up in the
middle of the night, she sees corpses in the shuttered-up, seemingly abandoned house across the garden. Her long-suf- fering, irritated businessman hus- band John (Laurence Harvey) repeatedly has to call the polite police, Inspector Walker (Bill Dean) and Sergeant Norris (Michael Danvers-Walker), to in- vestigate and find nothing. Get- ting more and more hysterical, and enervated by the near-con- stant rumbles of thunder in this quiet London suburb, Ellen also accuses her odd neighbor Apple- by (Robert Lang) of burying corpses under the shrubs he likes planting in the dead of night shortly after a rainstorm (when he’s not prowling around that vacant house for no good rea- son). John and Ellen’s best friend Sarah (Billie Whitelaw) are appar- ently endlessly sympathetic, but have their own secrets to hide— which threaten to tumble out as Ellen gets dottier and shriller. Flashbacks establish that Ellen might well he haunted by her dead
first husband (Kevin Colson), who died in a car crash with his young mistress (Linda Hayden). Fletcher put the plot to- gether with deliberate echoes of GASLIGHT, DIABOLIQUE, THE WINDOW and her own SORRY, WRONG NUMBER—and the screenplay by AVENGERS and DEPARTMENT S veteran Tony Williamson (with additional dia- logue from Evan Jones of THE DAMNED and WAKE IN FRIGHT) lays so many false trails that there is suspense as to which story the final set of twists (which have a Roald Dahl-ish feel) will be bor- rowed from. Brian G, Hutton made his directorial bones with macho war movies (WHERE EAGLES DARE, KELLY’S HEROES) but handled Taylor for the soap opera ZEE AND CO (aka X, Y AND ZEE) and stuck around to referee this Old Dark House hokum. Taylor really pulls all the stops out, and gets to do several different types of mad scene while swanning about in fabulous outfits (she’s the best- dressed dowdy housewife in ’70s
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