The Road Builder (1971)

There might be spoilers here. Gonna try to keep from it but I have to describe the plot as I heard it verses what it really was when I saw the film. THE NIGHT DIGGER, also known as THE ROAD BUILDER, was a movie I read about that sounded interesting. It seems a spinster and her mother are in an old decaying mansion in England when a young man comes along to stay with them and work as a handy man while also working as a builder on a road being constructed. It seems this young guy is a psycho who also rapes and kills women and buries them in the road. Meanwhile the spinster is taking a shine to him. Sounded like the recipe for a pretty good thriller to me. Well, in spite of Bernard Herrmann's score and Alex Thompson's excellent, moody cinematography, this film doesn't play out anything like I thought it would have. The plot takes detours that really made me wonder if the director knew he was supposed to be making a horror film. There comes one part that has several people sitting around gossiping and although I imagined a suspenseful thriller where you wondered if the old woman and her mother are in danger, someone, maybe the director, or maybe Roald Dahl pretty much succeed in killing any degree of suspense. It's almost like they decided to shoot a scary movie and then later tried to turn it into something else altogether. It has gloomy cinematography and a fine score and even a kind of threatening title but that's where the horror/suspense elements end. The movie fizzles badly and the climax is just plain stupid. Maybe I was supposed to be moved or sympathetic or something but I just thought the movie was creepy for all the wrong reasons. BEWARE! BIG SPOILER!!!!Still with me? Okay, there is a sex scene with the young man and old Patricia Neal. Luckily, you don't see much but just the thought of the young dude having sex with that old woman was about the creepiest thing I can think of in this entire movie. If she had been the young Patricia Neal from 20 years before this film was made, then fine, a sex scene might not have been so terrible but this was disgusting. When I read the title NIGHT DIGGER, I expected a movie where Patricia Neal discovers her handyman's is the murderer and her having to fight him off and struggle to survive. I imagined a pretty interesting plot when I read the title. Be assured that there is nothing in this film that is suspenseful, scary or thrilling unless you like watching old people have sex with young people, which is shot in front of a blurry lens, presumably to keep the audience from throwing up. Given the same exact actors, crew, locations and budget, I could have made a film that would have had audiences on the edge of their seats until the end credits. Someone took a good premise, a good crew, great locations, sets and actors and made a boring film about a guy who kills good-looking women and sleeps with old women who used to be good-looking. I wasn't impressed at all and cannot recommend this film - at least not as a thriller/horror film, which it was intended to be. No blood, no gore, no action. Just old ladies, psycho road-builders and boredom.

In Britain "The Night Digger" is shown from time to time on TCM, normally late at night, under the alternative title "The Road Builder". It is not, however, a particularly well-known film, even though the script is by one of Britain's best-known writers (Roald Dahl) and it stars an Oscar-winning actress (Dahl's wife Patricia Neal).Neal plays Maura Prince, a middle-aged spinster living in the English town of Windsor with her mother Edith. Several years earlier Maura suffered a serious stroke, which left her temporarily paralysed, although she has now recovered and works as a therapist helping other stroke victims. (Dahl inserted this as an obvious reference to the fact that Neal had herself suffered such a stroke in 1965). Maura is finding it difficult to cope with the demands of looking after her elderly mother and maintaining their large Victorian Gothic house, obviously once luxurious but now run down and dilapidated.Their lives are changed when they hire a young man named Billy as a handyman. Billy is a road-builder working on a new motorway which is being built in the area. (The motorway runs from Liverpool to London via Manchester, Birmingham, Oxford, Reading and Windsor. In reality no single motorway has ever been built along this route, although the southern part of the route corresponds roughly to the M40, which did not exist in 1971, not being completed until 1988).Billy claims that his surname is Jarvis and that he is originally from Cheshire (in north-west England), which causes Edith to claim him as a long-lost relative as she has family with that surname in that county. (Billy's accent, however, is a south-eastern one, which must cast some doubt on his claim; he may have discovered Edith's family background and invented a story to deceive her). At first he seems to be a godsend to Edith and Maura; he is polite, friendly, helpful and a competent worker whose efforts soon have the dilapidated house and overgrown garden looking smarter. Billy, however, may be hiding a dreadful secret. A young woman from the area is found murdered, and the police attribute the crime to a serial killer who has taken the lives of several other women in different parts of the country. Ominously, the other killings took place in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Oxford and Reading- the cities close to which Billy was previously working on the new motorway. There is, however, a further complication in that Maura- previously a dutiful daughter obedient to every whim of her domineering mother- finds herself becoming attracted to the handsome young man.The plot is not always satisfactory, and the ending, after Maura and Billy have run away to the Scottish Highlands together, is particularly enigmatic. (This is surprising given that Dahl was a gifted short story writer whose stories normally ended with a satisfying twist). Although it is clear to the audience that Billy is indeed a killer (and there is an attempt to explain psychologically why he became one), we are never sure how much Maura knows or suspects about his guilt. Is she convinced of his innocence, or is she closing her eyes to the obvious. Or does she know all along that he is guilty? Our view of Maura depends very much upon the answers to these questions, so it is surprising that they are never definitely answered. Perhaps Dahl felt it made for a more satisfactory film to keep us guessing. (The title "The Night Digger" refers to Billy's habit of disposing of his victims at night, by burying them under the motorway workings. The plot has many similarities to that of another British film from a few years earlier, "Night Must Fall", which also regularly appears on TCM, and which also features a mother and daughter living together and a psychopathic handyman. "Night Must Fall" (a remake of a 1937 American film with the same title, which I have never seen) is a rather dull film with one of Albert Finney's weakest performances at its centre. "The Night Digger", although it has its weaknesses, is an altogether better film.Rather surprisingly for a winner of the "Best Actress" award, Neal never really became a household name, certainly not when compared to other "Best Actress" winners from the sixties such as Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren and Katharine Hepburn. Her performance here, however, shows just how good she can be as the sexually repressed spinster dominated and emotionally manipulated by her mother. Although we may suspect that she is knowingly covering up for a murderer, we always retain some sympathy for her. Pamela Brown is also good as the terrifying Edith, even though she was really too young for the role, being only nine years older than Neal.Besides the acting, "The Night Digger" is also notable for its brooding, mysterious feel. Even without the macabre nature of the story, the photography of the damp, autumnal English countryside and the decaying, Gothic mansion, aided by the score from Hitchcock's favourite composer Bernard Herrman, would be enough to conjure up a sense of nameless dread. Director Alastair Reid was no Hitchcock (he worked mainly in television, and only made a few feature films) but he brings a few atmospheric touches to this film. His use of unusual, oblique camera angles and his technique of concentrating on only a part of a speaker's face (normally the eyes or mouth) add to the general strange and unsettling atmosphere of this film. Despite the obscurity into which it has fallen, "The Night Digger" is a tense thriller and character-study which it is worth staying up late to see. 6/10

The movie has some messy storytelling and most of the elements in the movie don't really work out.This movie certainly isn't a terribly interesting to watch. It's a bit of a psychological thriller but it isn't scary, tense or compelling enough to call it a good one. It has a good concept but the end result is pretty disappointing.Main reason why the movie is a bit of a failed one is because of the weak storytelling. Most of the elements in the movie feel very muddled, especially the ending and at times it takes ages before something really interesting to happen in the movie. It isn't exactly a dull movie though, it's more like an uninteresting one, even though the story itself really isn't a bad one.The characters are portrayed nicely in the story but to be frank, they were to boring and distant to feel for. Patricia Neal, who also had a stroke in real life, prior to this movie, is a good leading lady and also good was Nicholas Clay in his very first movie appearance. He does provide the movie with some good moments but it all simply is not enough to make the movie interesting and recommendable enough.From a movie with Patricia Neal, Roald Dahl and Bernard Herrmann involved, some more fireworks was to be expected.4/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Small spoilers....I saw this movie under the title : the Road Builder. Only that title alone sounded interesting to me. I got especially interested when I learned that the screenplay was written by Roald Dahl. We all know that he wrote some remarkable stories, but most his most memorable work in the field of children's literature. The screenplay of The Road Builder isn't really meant for a young audience...It's a dark story and really creepy from time to time. It's very psychological and therefore difficult to follow at certain moments. I saw this gothic suspense thriller on TCM but without any subtitles. So the dialogues were hard to follow sometimes. Especially with a rather complicated story. It's about a spinster, Maura, who lives with her blind mother is a large house. Their lives change when a young handyman - named Billy - comes to live with them. Billy is charming and really helpful around the house, but he hides some terrifying secrets. It seemed that Billy faced some trauma's in his childhood years and he still hasn't put them behind him. Thus, some nights ... Billy goes out on his motorcycle to do horrible things. The developing of the story is really fascinating and also the terrific acting performances keep you close to the screen. Patricia Neal - who was married with Roald Dahl for forty years and gave him 5 children - is really outstanding in her role of shy and quiet middle-aged woman. Also the young Nicolas Clay impresses as Billy. Clay died in 2000 after a long disease. The Road Builder certainly is worth a watch when you're in the mood for seeing a scary psychological thriller or a deep character study. Just make sure there aren't too many aspects to distract you. You'll need full attention to enjoy this movie.