La notte del giorno dopo

This picture is worth time to see, but only if you've willing to invest the time to put in the effort to pay close attention. It is not a good choice as a movie to keep on in the background. The kidnapping goes wrong almost immediately, not from law enforcement personnel, but from within. We see the changing relationships between the kidnappers as the hours with their victim go on.

Added note: Try to rent the video. When NBC showed the movie on commercial television, the network added additional scenes featuring the brother of the victim working a police inspector. These scenes are not outtakes from the original movie that NBC restored, but new scenes that NBC filmed and added to make clearer the kidnappers' fate. They are unnecessary and rather insulting to the audience that the network felt they needed to "improve" the movie.

Seldom has a movie so wildly vacillated between being suspenseful and being irritating. It's about a kidnapping which goes wrong. In it, a chauffeur in Paris with a criminal record (Marlon Brando) reluctantly agrees to take part in the kidnapping for ransom of a young British heiress (Pamela Franklin), which is being masterminded by his good friend, a washed-up pickpocket (Jess Hahn). The girl will be held hostage at the English Channel home of a heroin-addicted stewardess (Rita Moreno), who is both Hahn's sister and Brando's girlfriend. Added to this motley group is a sadistic pimp (Richard Boone), whom Hahn brought in but Brando doesn't trust. The kidnapping goes well enough, but complications set in. A neighbor of the beach house is a French policeman. But even more importantly, the characters become increasingly mistrustful of each other while the captive is menaced by Boone, who is clearly a psychopathic predator. Of course, there is the inevitable climax when things go wrong at the last minute. The film alternates between crime drama and psychological drama, with a lot of chat and only a few action scenes. The talented actors and the nice scenery help make the film watchable until the end, in spite of the pretentious script. But then the entire story is undercut by one of the most stupid endings one could imagine, which could not possibly be more out of place. I had only grudgingly sat through this film because of the cast, only to have the rug yanked out from under me. It left me feeling betrayed.

The movie wanders through a small range of unusual characters, following the happenings that occur to them during a two days period, as fleetingly as a feather follows it's path led by the wind. This is the factor that helps 'The Night Of The Following Day' to deliver the refreshing quality that contrasts the morbid atmosphere the movie slowly builds so perfectly.

A contradictory statement? May be... yet, since the movie has such a slow pacing, the drama that surrounds it becomes much more obvious. And suspense is drama. Suspense is conflict.

A girl is kidnapped by an odd group of professional criminals - a man whose tough ways curtail his vulnerability, his stewardess girlfriend who is struggling against a serious drug addiction, her slow minded brother, and a sadistic lunatic.

During two days, we analyze through Hubert Cornfield's almost Bergmanesque eyes, each desperate character, and how they manage to bring up the worst in each other. Their emerging weaknesses manage to sabotage the plan, as the creeping tension begins to take over the viewer.

The ending is coherent. And soon after, you'll be able to see a beautiful representation of the beauty of that human being that the world had just lost. It's not a typical 'crime does not pay' ending. It's just their doomed fate - from the moment we begin to perceive those threatening hoodlums as fragile, unreasonable human beings, we know that the plan will not work.

This is a masterpiece, in every way. Music, Cinematography, Directing, Acting, and Specially, Pacing combine themselves flawlessly in order to build an allegory of desperate souls destroying themselves when face to face with an abyss.

Not for the ones who enjoy snappy paced flicks. This is for the one willing to think a tad more, and be rewarded greatly for their effort. :)

The Night of the Following Day (1968)

*** (out of 4)

A girl (Pamela Franklin) finds herself kidnapped by a group of kidnappers (Marlon Brando, Richard Boone, Rita Moreno) but is sworn her life is safe as long as her father pays the ransom. Soon it becomes clear that the kidnapper's most difficult thing is going to be dealing with each other.

THE NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY didn't make much of a splash when it was originally released and throughout the decades it still hasn't gained much of a cult following. For fans of Marlon Brando this was released during a period when the actor was struggling or just not really caring what type of movies he was doing as long as there was a paycheck attached. While there are certainly many flaws with the picture I think it's a rather underrated kidnapping yarn.

What I enjoyed most about the film was the cast. Brando delivers a pretty good performance here as the kidnapper who quickly realizes this plan isn't working. I thought the actor was quite good in the part and I enjoyed the more psychological nature he brought the character. Boone and Gerard Buhr as a friendly cop are also quite good and Moreno is also very memorable as the kidnapper with the drug problem. Franklin is also good here in a role that doesn't offer her much to do but it's still fun seeing her.

The film obviously wants to be like the various Euro crime films that the decade was full of. The biggest problem is that director Hubert Cornfield goes for a laid-back approach, which is fine but a bit more energy or tension would have been nice. I'd also argue that there's really nothing overly special about the screenplay and the main story. THE NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY doesn't last too long and it's mainly going to appeal to people for its cast.

What I like most about Night of the Following day is its sublime way in introduces France. The entire film is low-key, which is not quite seen nowadays in cinema. Plus there was Marlon Brando. Brando looks great in this film. His style of dress looks like he's modeling for some design that counts on black colors to the exclusion of all others. In one scene he's wearing an olive trench coat at an airport. Somehow I could not believe that this swank and bronzed and blonde-haired movie star could abet in the same crime as his associates. The only worth-while scenes are the ones Brando's in. Only because you don't know where they're going to end. Richard Boone, Rita Moreno, and the actor who plays her brother are all thinly written characters. Rita Moreno's character snorts heroin, her brother is an ineffectual non-entity who doesn't care whether he's killed as a result of committing this crime, and Richard Boone's character has sadistic tendencies. That's all the audience knows about these three characters. We even know less about Brando's character. But Brando can transcend the material in this shallow film because of his eerie star-quality. Night of the Following Day is indeed an ambitious film. Adapting a novel is ambitious in itself. A plot revolving around a volatile foursome kidnapping an heiress and hiding her out in a house somewhere in France sounds great on paper. But the audience must be engaged and somewhat let in on something. This film keeps the audience at a cool distance.