It's hard not to recommend a film starring Roy Scheider and Meryl Streep, especially when they deliver the goods, as they do here, and even more especially when they are both natives of the late, great state of New Jersey. But, sadly, I can't recommend it, unless nothing else is on. There are simply too many problems with it.
The story is simple enough. Scheider is a shrink. His patient, the always professorial Josef Sommer, has been a patient for more than two years (not that long by Woody Allen standards), and winds up murdered, evidently by a woman. Scheider finds himself drawn to Streep, Somer's lover, who, as is usually the case in these narratives, seems as often suspicious as innocent. Streep is a kind of assistant auctioneer at a fancy outfit called Crispin's, which has nothing to do with anything except to give director Robert Benton another chance to rip off a situation from Hitchcock. (As a subterfuge Scheider finds himself having to bid thousands of dollars for a painting he hates.)
That's not the end of the ripoffs. There's a quick reminder of the climax from "Saboteur" and a couple of others I thought were coincidental until I learned that Benton used them deliberately. As "homages", he claims. Benton must be a real macher. He practically made a career tapping into current trendy sentiments. He co-authored the script for "Bonny and Clyde" in the late 1960s when the boomers were busy bashing the establishment. When the boomers grew up, married, and got divorced, and the men had to discover their anima, he made "Kramer vs. Kramer." Running out of themes he made a tribute to his grandmother and her milieu, "Places in the Heart," which, whether he knew it or not, was about a pretty mean town.
"Still of the Night" was originally designed to be a comic slasher flick, mining that particular slurry, something on the order of "Scream," but then it turned serious, or let's say, plodding. The photography is too dark, on top of everything else. But Scheider and Streep rise above the material. As an actor, Scheider is hard to place. His background includes Shakespeare, if one can imagine, but he retains an everyman quality in his appearance and behavior that makes him easy to identify with. Although his sinewy frame looks fine in good clothes, he's of medium height and his accent too class-bound for him to pass as anything resembling debonair, and in no way could he be brutal enough to pass for another Mitchum, especially in glasses. He looks like the guy next door, only more handsome, and more capable too, as if he is perfectly composed doing nothing but reading a book but were capable of striking quickly if called on to do it. He's pretty masculine, but not too much so. Just about right.
Streep, a marvelous technical performer, is usually comely. But she is rarely as sexy, as she is here during a massage scene, lying on her flattened-out breasts, her buns coyly draped with a sinfully red towel, smiling up at Scheider and giggling at his discomfort. She's a pale, vulnerable woman who looks blonde all over.
She and Scheider do a splendid job in "Still of the Night," but to what end? It's one cheap shock after another, with an fantastic interpolated dream right out of "Traumdeutung."
The story is simple enough. Scheider is a shrink. His patient, the always professorial Josef Sommer, has been a patient for more than two years (not that long by Woody Allen standards), and winds up murdered, evidently by a woman. Scheider finds himself drawn to Streep, Somer's lover, who, as is usually the case in these narratives, seems as often suspicious as innocent. Streep is a kind of assistant auctioneer at a fancy outfit called Crispin's, which has nothing to do with anything except to give director Robert Benton another chance to rip off a situation from Hitchcock. (As a subterfuge Scheider finds himself having to bid thousands of dollars for a painting he hates.)
That's not the end of the ripoffs. There's a quick reminder of the climax from "Saboteur" and a couple of others I thought were coincidental until I learned that Benton used them deliberately. As "homages", he claims. Benton must be a real macher. He practically made a career tapping into current trendy sentiments. He co-authored the script for "Bonny and Clyde" in the late 1960s when the boomers were busy bashing the establishment. When the boomers grew up, married, and got divorced, and the men had to discover their anima, he made "Kramer vs. Kramer." Running out of themes he made a tribute to his grandmother and her milieu, "Places in the Heart," which, whether he knew it or not, was about a pretty mean town.
"Still of the Night" was originally designed to be a comic slasher flick, mining that particular slurry, something on the order of "Scream," but then it turned serious, or let's say, plodding. The photography is too dark, on top of everything else. But Scheider and Streep rise above the material. As an actor, Scheider is hard to place. His background includes Shakespeare, if one can imagine, but he retains an everyman quality in his appearance and behavior that makes him easy to identify with. Although his sinewy frame looks fine in good clothes, he's of medium height and his accent too class-bound for him to pass as anything resembling debonair, and in no way could he be brutal enough to pass for another Mitchum, especially in glasses. He looks like the guy next door, only more handsome, and more capable too, as if he is perfectly composed doing nothing but reading a book but were capable of striking quickly if called on to do it. He's pretty masculine, but not too much so. Just about right.
Streep, a marvelous technical performer, is usually comely. But she is rarely as sexy, as she is here during a massage scene, lying on her flattened-out breasts, her buns coyly draped with a sinfully red towel, smiling up at Scheider and giggling at his discomfort. She's a pale, vulnerable woman who looks blonde all over.
She and Scheider do a splendid job in "Still of the Night," but to what end? It's one cheap shock after another, with an fantastic interpolated dream right out of "Traumdeutung."