Endless Night

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.

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.

"Endless Night" follows working-class freewheeling chauffeur Michael (Hywel Bennett) who falls in love with a billionaire heiress Ellie (Hayley Mills). The two marry, and build a large estate on property in the English countryside known as Gypsy's Acre, which is purported by locals to be cursed land. After Ellie's relative Greta (Britt Ekland) arrives to stay, a series of bizarre events unfold, including ominous encounters with an elderly gypsy woman who roams the property.

Based on the Agatha Christie novel, director Sidney Gilliat takes the meat of Christie's novel and puts unique twinges on it that are reminiscent of Hitchcock (Bernard Herrmann's spooky score understates this). The film is admittedly slow, especially in exposition, and there are few quote-unquote thrills to be had, but I found this film strangely compelling in spite of its odd pacing.

There is a consistent sense of unease that permeates nearly every scene, although it's difficult to put your finger on what is exactly the cause. The photography in the film is fantastic, capturing the rolling landscapes and the cloudy skies surrounding the manor; this is punctuated by subtle scares that come in the form of various figures lurking below on the hillsides or in the woods, almost like indistinct figures in a painting. The film is at times reminiscent of English Gothic in its aesthetics, even though the house itself is very much "retro '70s" in both style and furnishings.

Solid performances from Hywel Bennett and Hayley Mills really shine here, with Mills being especially memorable as a good natured girl who happens to be a billionaire ("world's sixth richest!"). Britt Ekland is also great as the stalwart and fawning relative— her performance really comes full circle in the finale, which provides her the bulk of the role's dynamics, and she handles it fabulously. The conclusion to the film is fairly routine by contemporary standards, although I can honestly say that I didn't see the plot twists coming, so props to Christie and the filmmakers' handling of the material— I was definitely had by the film.

Overall, "Endless Night" is an enjoyable and well-acted picture that seems to have been forgotten in time. It is too slow to qualify as a full-blooded thriller, but there are tinges of a British psychothriller here with some genuinely bizarre and eerie moments that stand out among effective cinematography and a disquieting score. In spite of the film's lackluster pacing, it is unexpectedly transfixing, and manages to hold one's attention until the head twisting finale. 7/10.

Hayley Mills, Hywel Bennett, Britt Ekland,and George Sanders star in Endless Night from 1972, directed by Sidney Gillian, with a magnificent Bernard Herrmann score.

I saw this years ago and have seen other versions so I remembered bits and pieces. Bennett plays Michael Rogers, a ne'er do well who meets and marries a wealthy young woman, Ellie. Together they build their dream home.

All is not bliss. A crazy woman wanders the fields making wild prediction, and a friend/assistant of Ellie's, Greta (Britt Ekland), moves in, to Michael's consternation. The house, for all its beauty, has an eerie atmosphere.

Hayley Mills was part of my growing up years, and what a lovely woman and actress she is, very appealing as Ellie. She is supposed to be an American. Her British accent is prominent.

I won't spoil the film for those unfamiliar with the plot. This is a good film and, like most of Christie's stories, wonderful.

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.