Endless Night (1972)

Hywel Bennett drifts from job to job and dreams of making it big, when he discovers Gypsy's Acre, a beautiful British country property, that seems to be a world in and of itself, quiet, private. He longs to build a house there. Then, one day while enjoying the landscape and the view, a vision of a dancing lady appears. Hayley Mills, an American heiress, has found this paradise too, while on holiday. Long story short, they fall in love, build their house and live happily ever after. Wait! They don't live happily ever after!? This is based on an Agatha Christie story. Yeah, you see, there's this curse on the property. Things start to happen, A rock is thrown into a glass window. Someone or some thing? doesn't want them there. And, a friend of Hayley's comes to visit, played by Britt Ekland. (In fact three actors in this production were in James Bond films, Britt as a Bond girl in one film, Lois Maxwell was Ms. Moneypenny throughout the Sean Connery and Roger Moore years and Walter Gotell, who was a KGB or Russian agent in a lot of the films.) I read the book years ago, and I think I saw this film years ago too, but upon seeing this again, I was blown away. This was genuinely scary and dark for an Agatha Christie story! Its interpretation and presentation were spot on and delivered some truly chilling and memorable moments. All of the players were excellent in their respective roles. George Sanders adds his very dry characterization to the film as Hayley's attorney. Even if like me, you have read the book and know the ending, I think you won't be disappointed. This movie stands on its own, even without having read the book. A lot of her books had British titles, which were changed for the American market. But this title stayed the same. Agatha really topped herself here in terms of depth and the human psyche. For a midnight movie, watch this "endless night."

Some time in the mid-Seventies (pick your own date) the British film industry quietly died. Hammer was the last company to carry the flag, but effectively withdrew from production after 1973.Of course, British movies continued to be made. There were films with British subjects, British directors, British writers, British casts and crew and even British finance, but they were all one-offs. They did not constitute an industry. However, some of these films were very good, some were very successful and some were both.Then again, some were like Endless Night: so desperately bad, so ill-conceived, so wretchedly executed, that the death of the British film industry seemed less of a tragedy than a merciful release.Where do I start? The cast is hopeless. Hywel Bennett was a good enough actor, who later showed a real flair for comedy in Shelley, but in 1971 he just didn't have the charisma, the looks or the technique to carry a feature film. I suspect the producer just wanted to cash in on his success as the baby-faced nutter in Twisted Nerve.Hayley Mills was probably cast to complete the set. Her character is supposed to be an American, but she makes only the most perfunctory attempt at an accent and quickly abandons even that. I know she has her supporters, but in this movie I cannot see anything beyond a basic professionalism: she could hit her marks and say her lines without fuss or endless retakes, but that was about it.As a pair of romantic leads, Hywel Bennett and Hayley Mills are non-runners.The rest of the cast fare no better. George Sanders just walks through his under-written role, while Britt Ekland, Peter Bowles, Lois Maxwell, Windsor Davis and Patience Collier were just 'names' looking for a part to play.However, the real problem is the material. The story is too diffuse and rambling. Characters are introduced and things happen with no real sense of what kind of movie it is meant to be, or what it wants to achieve. It takes forever to get started.We see scenes of Mike's background and aimless life, but without really getting to know his character and without building up any empathy with him. Then he meets poor little rich girl Ellie, they fall in love and marry against the wishes of her relatives. Together, the couple commission and take possession of their dream house (a vulgar atrocity).As the movie drifted listlessly from one flat, style-less, uninvolving scene to the next, I found myself thinking: "So what? Why are we being asked to care about this bland couple overcoming minor obstacles to consummate their tepid love affair? Where does this picture think it is going?"Then the arrival of Greta threatens the couple's apparently idyllic relationship and some vaguely ominous things start to happen. Half way through the picture it finally became clear that it was intended to be a thriller. However, with so little to occupy my attention, I started to ask why anyone would trouble with this mundane story and so I quickly spotted the probable plot twist that might justify it. I was right.Ellie dies and Mike is distraught. Ho hum. There is then some obvious misdirection, with a montage which seems to imply that Mike is being swindled out of his inheritance. Of course, nothing comes of this. Eventually, Mike returns home for the big surprise ending. Mike and Greta are lovers and have conspired to kill Ellie.Who could possibly have seen that one coming? About two thirds of the audience, at a conservative guess.It is less easy to spot that Mike is supposed to be going mad. The first real indication is his spooky vision of Ellie in the garden. He ignores this, enters the house and makes love to Greta. In the morning he is filled with remorse, goes mad and kills her. The movie then gets bogged down in a whole succession of 'wrap up' scenes that are especially clunky but are needed to tie up all the loose ends in this strained and confused scenario.For all Sidney Gilliat's experience as a screenwriter he cannot find a way to crack the problems of this Agatha Christie novel.The book is apparently a clever literary trick. It is the first person narration of a psychopathic killer who is trying to hide his real nature and intentions from the reader, while actually dropping a series of clues that things are not quite what they seem. It is this trick, rather the banal situation, which is the real reason for reading the book and it is obviously this trick that made Gilliat want to film it. The problem is that he could not find a way to replicate it on screen, because cinema only really works in the third person and people are generally uncomfortable with movies that tell lies. Occasionally giving Mike a few words of voice-over doesn't begin to do the job.But without the psychopathic narrator and his deceptions at the heart of the story, the big surprise twist at the end just seems a cheap and pointless artifice and Mike's mental breakdown comes across as arbitrary and unmotivated. It may be there are clues to his mental instability, but they are so subtle as to be nearly invisible on first viewing and, to be honest, why would I ever want to see this movie a second time?Agatha Christie apparently thought Endless Night was one of her best books and she might well be right. If she is, then this movie is a classic illustration of an old maxim: "what works on the page doesn't necessarily work on the screen."I wonder at what point this started to become obvious to Gilliat.

I had heard of this film but had not taken the time to watch it for many years. After all it does have one of the great George Sander's final performances(albeit brief and rather tame)to recommend it. I finally sat down and was actually pleasantly surprised and not surprised it is not better known too. A newly married couple move into their newly constructed home called Gypsy something built by a great Greek architect who is dying(unconvincingly played by a Swede I might add). The young man, played rather nicely by young(then) Brit Hywel Bennett, is a poor, job to job fellow who enjoys beautiful things. He meets a young, attractive American, also played nicely by Haley Mills, who turns out to be one of the richest women in the world. The two meet, fall in love, move in to their dream house, and then the girl dies. Why? What happens to her? Is it her family that is concerned of their inheritance? Is it the young man? It is the strange family friend - played with her usual aplomb and sexiness by Britt Ekland? Only sitting through the movie will make me divulge(not really even that I suppose). Endless Night is a bit plodding at times. But - it is strangely watchable even though so little happens AND the ending - for me - could be seen a mile away. There is Bernard Herrmann's haunting score. There is Sidney Gilliat's workmanlike though not astonishing direction. But the acting by a cast of British stalwarts helped me stay focused despite the somewhat muddled script, the unlikely transitions, and the plot holes. The leads are all pretty good, but then you get folks like Madge Ryan(Who's Killing the Great Chefs of Europe), Lois Maxwell - very good here(James Bond's Moneypenny), Peter Bowles(To the Manor Born), and people like Ann Way and Patience Collier who you know you know but don't know what they were in at the moment. Then there is Mr. Sanders. This is generally seen as his second to last film(his last being the bizarre horror film about a frog demon and death-wielding motorcyclists)before killing himself from what he referred to as "boredom." He still looks suave and sounds great despite looking pretty old here. He has really two good scenes and makes the most of what he is given to do. Endless Night is an entertaining little thriller with some selling points despite some obvious weaknesses.

I think heavy drinking must have fuelled this movie, otherwise how to explain the lurid colour-clashes in the art direction, the amateurish accents (American and Welsh), the deliriously out-of-place music, and the insane and incomprehensible plot? Drunken producers must have green-lighted it, drunken casting directors picked the actors, and a drunk directed it, indeed directed it so incoherently that parts of it seem to have been inserted from a different movie. Only someone bordering on the deranged could have found the new house installed at Gypsy's Acre attractive; and a prop was never more artificially inserted for plot reasons than the in-lounge swimming pool in which the naked Britt Ekland sinks (why?), and the horrid truth about the hero's childhood crime is revealed. The drunken delirium is complete in this climax, which unveils a series of half-a-dozen layers of deception, each more perplexing and unsubstantiated than its predecessor. The cumulative effect is of a somnolent viewer getting slapped repeatedly to wake him up. Two gorgeous actresses have rarely been so wasted in a feature film. They have horrible hair, lousy accents, sexist roles, bad lines, and inexplicable motivations. Both are humiliatingly murdered, Hayley without revealing an inch of skin, while Britt (although naked) remains obstinately reversed. With those dreadful US accents, I am not at all surprised that US distributors refused it. The phony Welsh accent of the family doctor, by contrast, went unpunished.