La noche sin fin

True-blue Agatha Christie fans know better than anyone that the creator of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot did not always write crime-solving procedural. Endless Night, published in 1968, is a perfect example of the moody, psychological thriller Christie sometimes explored, particularly in the late years of her career. This 1972 adaptation, scripted and directed by seasoned British filmmaker Sidney Gilliat, is indeed a strange duck: a compelling tale of small, unsettling phenomena and events, but with no defining mystery, no apparent crime to pull the details together--not until quite late in the story, that is. Hayley Mills and Hywel Bennett, partnered together in several films (The Family Way, Twisted Nerve) during the 1960s and '70s, play an American heiress and an underemployed London chauffeur who marry and move into a dream house designed for them by a world-class architect (Per Oscarsson). In short order, things begin to get mighty weird. A crazy old woman stomps around the couple's property, whispering ambiguous warnings. The bride's nuisance of a sister (Britt Ekland) moves in, and a handful of disapproving relatives keep popping up to belittle the hero. Where this is all leading is entirely unexpected--Christie and Gilliat really have us falling without a parachute for a while--yet it's exciting and tragic all at once. Nice performances all around, with special admiration for Oscarsson's role as the dying architect.

How old was Agatha Christie when she wrote this? Pushing 70? She was pretty old, about my age, and that might account for the tragic emotional tonus of this story.

You wouldn't know this was a Christie story if it weren't so advertised. True, there are some of the usual themes -- British class distinctions, extreme wealth, jealousy, poison -- but they are submerged by a love story that seems at first to be going nowhere fast. The story lacks any of the novelist's usual subtle wit.

No point in spelling out the plot in any detail. A poor chauffeur-for-hire meets a blond sylph and they fall for each other. He discovers that she is the sixth richest girl in the world, her coming-of-age party having been covered in the newspapers, and he rejects her because, as he says, "I have my pride." (The audience may be forgiven for a few muffled chuckles at this point.) She dies under mysterious circumstances while riding. In these circles, "riding" is taken to mean horseback riding. He inherits the money. And things thereafter go a little berserk without there being a hell of a lot in the way of motivation.

The film is narrated by the young man, Michael (Bennett). At first his story seems perfectly reasonable and he is presented as a fellow of principle if not money. Hayley Mills is introduced in a filmy white dress, her long blonde hair wafted by the breeze as she capers alone in a meadow, slender limbs, radiantly healthy, and -- well, you know the type. Eminently edible. But Michael's story, though it begins normally enough, describing the approach-avoidance conflict from which he suffers, being in love with Mills and yet resenting her wealth, gradually changes.

He becomes less and less reasonable, and less nice. He's impolite to Greta (Eklund), Mills' tutor and possessive friend. Greta is often described as "bossy" but frankly her supposed obsession with power isn't well shown. There is just one argument -- a slightly bitchy one -- between Greta and Michael over the placement of a more than usually ugly statue of a cat. What evidence we see of her bossiness is rather weak tea. If they're going to have a domineering German nurse, couldn't the nurse and Hayley Mills have had a little consensual flagellation or something? The climax seems to come out of thin air. A sudden unmotivated reversal of the character of Michael.

It's not a bad movie though. Romance, yes, but a romance filled somehow with uneasiness and a gradually growing sense of dread. And when I first watched this and heard the first few notes of the score, I thought, "OMG, the composer is ripping off Bernard Hermann note for note." It turned out to BE Hermann, and a very effective Hermann at that, full of an eerie melancholy.

Maybe the reason it leaves a viewer feeling sad is that Christie seems to be stretching her talent so much trying to achieve "significance." And for the first time I'm aware of, we actually care about the character who dies, whereas in previous stories the victim was nothing more than a stereotype who, once gone, was forgotten. The death was only a pivot on which the remainder of the story could turn. Here, it's really too bad.

I won't say it's a bad film, but I have to believe the liberties taken with the adaptation of the story go well beyond the nudity and modern setting. (I will say that the house with the remote-controlled indoor swimming pool in the living room was a bit over the top.)

I will confess that I did not guess the direction the plot would take, but what was so disappointing was the profusion of loose ends and entirely pointless characters. Agatha didn't usually write them that way - everyone ended up with a role in the outcome of the story. Here we are presented with in-laws, neighbors, family friends, and a mysterious old woman --- all of whom have nothing at all to do with the resolution of the story. Most of them could have been omitted entirely and the story would have been essentially unchanged.

My DVD even featured an editing error: about 10 seconds of the film repeat precisely (when the girl's parents are observed getting back into their car to leave.)

There is also a broken window that is never explained, a ghostly appearance that is never accounted for or revisited, a car is observed to take an unusually long to get somewhere - but we are never given the significance. An architect seems to know things the audience does not -- yet no explanation is offered of how he knows them.

Like Agatha's best writing, characters and clues and complications pile up... but then they are inexplicably thrown away in favor of an unexpected, yet rather anticlimactic resolution.

Endless Night is one of those movies that is hugely flawed, and yet it sticks in the mind unlike many more polished movies. Extremely slow paced for much of it's length and with several sequences that feel almost unnecessary, and even a few which just seem wierd, the film than delivers a true knock out of a twist which makes one realise how well the story has been constructed. For this reason, in some respect it's more satisfying to watch the second time even if one is no longer surprised, because one can notice all the little clues that have been put in ,and many of the previously mentioned unnecessary or wierd bits seem more essential. There is, though, one huge red herring that seems rather pointless.

This was the last of the Hywell Bennett/Hayley Mills collaborations for the Boulting Brothers and it is possibly their most interesting. Cast are all excellent ,including George Sanders in one of his final roles, and this is just as well since the film is indeed extremely talky. The alternately eerie and romantic Bernard Herrmann score is very memorable, although they could have made sure Mills' singing voice [obviously dubbed] sounded like her normal voice.

Many will be unsatisfied with this film ,but try it if you fancy a somewhat different kind of thriller, even it's only really a thriller in the final half hour!

I just watched Julia McKenzie in the recent adaptation of the Christie novel, inserting Miss Marple where she was originally absent. I clicked on the IMDb and Amazon to learn more about the production and found that there had been a 1971 movie which hewed more closely to the original. A purchase of a used DVD gave me pleasure for my money. It's interesting to see how different script writers turned and twisted the basic story lines and how the movies surprised and shocked the viewer. I won't repeat the comments that have already been said on this forum about this '71 film, but I will emphasize the value of seeing the opening minutes again to pick up fat clues that might be missed on first viewing -- the footsteps heard in the Van Gogh museum and the statement of the mother later that her son had experienced something significant. The movie just seems to sail along making one wonder what the mystery is, what the crime was, until the revelations that suddenly come toward the end. Talk about the technique of the unreliable narrator in mystery stories! By the way, Jon Tuska in his great critical work THE DETECTIVE IN Hollywood casually dismisses this movie as not very good. He's wrong.