The Night Digger

The difficult mother-daughter dynamic in "The Night Digger" instantly put me in mind of "Grey Gardens." We have Patricia Neal as the caretaker for her elderly mother, Pamela Brown, living live together in a dilapidated mansion. Brown is superficially friendly but often caustic, intolerant and manipulative, seizing on her daughter's guilt and self-doubt to keep her at home.

Neal has become increasingly regretful of the years she's spent tending to her mother's needs, as she thinks back on lost loves and missed career opportunities. The scenes between Neal and Barker are meaty enough to make up their own film, and Neal delivers a real master class in film acting. She's utterly believable in her every word and mannerism.

Like "Grey Gardens", the pair take in a young handyman to fix up their property. Despite Neal's initial hesitation, she grows increasingly fond of and attracted to the young man. Unfortunately for her, he turns out to be a *deeply* troubled individual, and the movie takes a macabre and progressively disturbing turn. Ultimately, this movie left me utterly heartbroken, despite occasional relief provided by screenwriter Roald Dahl's famously perverse humor.

"The Night Digger" is one of one of those boundary pushing, perverse psychodramas that the late 60s and early 70s provided us in ample supply. Although imperfect, this sits nicely alongside the likes of landmarks like "Reflections in a Golden Eye" and "Secret Ceremony."

Many people will say that this film was a botch up job of Joy Cowley's novel, but they would be wrong.

While I have to admit that the type of filming they used in the 70's is not among my favourite, it worked well for this film because it gave you insight into how each character saw things.

Patricia Niel was perfect as the spinster who was stuck caring for her blind and horrid adoptive mother, and who slowly but surely becomes sexually aware of the young drifter, played by Nicholas Clay.

Some parts of the film are vaguely confusing, but one comes to grasp them after rolling the idea around in ones mind for a while.

This film was very well done for an era that produced some awful movies that completely butchered famous books, and used skin instead of actual acting to portray a film.

The Night Digger aka Road Runner is a very watchable film, that sneaks up on you rather than attacks you head on like some psychological thrillers do.

The Road Builder is sadly not very well known, and that's a shame because this psychological thriller is a real gem and would certainly benefit from being more widely seen. The film is based on a book by Joy Cowley, although there were apparently some changes made to the story (I don't know what since I've not read the book). One of the more surprising things about this film is the fact that the screenplay was written by popular children's author Roald Dahl, although clearly he did also have a taste for the macabre if Tales of the Unexpected as well as his children's book 'The Witches' are anything to go by. The film is a strange love story at heart and we focus on a house inhabited by an old spinster and her middle aged daughter Maura. Their lives are changed one day when a young stranger on a motorbike turns up and they agree to let him stay. The young man becomes a popular figure in the house rather quickly, especially with Maura. However, there's something strange about him as evidenced by his sudden bursts of depression, apparently owing to the tragic death of his parents.

Most of the plot takes place in a grandiose mansion and it makes for a really good location for the movie - it's very isolated and is nice to look at. The atmosphere is very good throughout and this excellently compliments the plot which is thoroughly dark and largely unpleasant. The plot doesn't move particularly quickly, but it's always interesting thanks to the way that the characters are built up progressively and director Alastair Reid focuses on their relationship with one another. The acting is very good and the film stars Roald Dahl's then wife Patricia Neal in the lead role. She gets on well with the other two main players, Pamela Brown and Nicholas Clay and these actors help to ensure that the film works well. There's not a great deal of shocking moments, but the way that the unpleasant happenings are handled works very well as it's nasty yet completely believable. It all boils down to a very good ending and The Road Builder is certainly a film with a 'sting in the tail'. Overall, I really hope this gets a decent release soon because it's a great thriller and well worth seeing!

Middle-aged spinster Maura (Patricia Neal), the adopted daughter of wealthy widow Edith Prince (Pamela Brown), isn't too happy when her mother appoints drifter Billy Jarvis (Nicholas Clay) as their handyman. However, as the days pass, and Billy sets about fixing up the house and clearing the garden, Maura begins to form an attachment to Billy. What she doesn't know is that the young man is actually a serial killer, who abducts and murders women, burying their bodies in building sites.

Both a tragic love story and a psycho-sexual thriller (in flashbacks, it is shown that Billy was sexually molested as a child and has problems being intimate with women), The Night Digger is, for the most part, a mood piece, the film set predominantly in and around the rundown Prince house, with Billy's murderous nature remaining undisclosed for the first 45 minutes or so. Director Alastair Reid fleshes out his characters and builds an unsettling atmosphere (there are bizarre conversations about sex-ops, and Maura's relationship with her mother is awkward), and the pace can only be described as 'slow-burn', all of which makes the first moment we see Billy in psycho mode all the more disturbing: creeping into a nursery teacher's bedroom, he takes off all of his clothes, unfurls a large leather strap and places it around the sleeping woman, who wakes to find herself bound to her bed and faced with the naked intruder. It's a bizarre, unexpectedly twisted moment that doesn't end well for the teacher.

Reports of the teacher's disappearance are in the following day's news, and it is revealed that she is the seventh woman to fall prey to 'the night digger' in the past three months, previous victims being from the very same towns and cities that Billy said he worked at prior to arriving at the Prince property. Victim number eight is Edith's young district nurse (played by Brigit Forsyth of The Likely Lads fame), who Billy kills while Maura is visiting her mother in hospital following a heart attack. When Maura returns home ('home' being regular Hammer horror location Oakley Court), Billy tries to confess to Maura, but is unable to go through with it. The cogs in Maura's mind are set turning, nevertheless.

When Edith suddenly announces that she wants Billy to leave, Maura tells her 'mother' that she has had enough and is packing her bags as well. Maura gets herself a nasty hair-do, empties her bank account, tells Billy that she loves him, and suggests that they buy a cottage in a remote part of Scotland, away from other people; it would seem as though she knows his secret, and is trying to help by removing temptation from his path. Things aren't that simple, though, and it's not long before Billy is eyeing up a pretty Scottish lass as victim number nine.

With a director unafraid to tackle bold subjects (Reid also gave us Baby Love, the UK's answer to Lolita), a great leading lady, a script by none other than Roald Dahl (Neal's husband at the time), and music by Bernard Herrmann (the score will sound very familiar in places), The Night Digger already has quite the pedigree, but it also benefits from solid turns from a decent supporting cast (Graham Crowden, as salacious neighbour Mr Bolton, is a hoot, and there are brief but fun roles for familiar UK TV faces Yootha Joyce and Peter Sallis), brooding tension, and a memorably downbeat ending that doesn't spell everything out for the viewer but which makes them assess what they have seen and draw their own conclusion.

Another one of those great forgotten movies of the 1970s. I caught this on late night TV about 20 years ago and have never forgotten it.

It was about a young man named Billy (Nicholas Clay) helping out Maura Prince (Patricia Neal) and her elderly mother (Pamela Brown) in their crumbling old house in England. Neal starts to fall for him (despite their age difference)...but she's not aware of what he does when he goes out alone every night...

Spooky little horror film. When I first saw it it was edited for TV so there were some unexplained pieces (like a bit about something that happened to him as a child which explains what he does as an adult) and, I assumed the violence was gone. I was finally able to see the entire uncut film and loved it! It wasn't a blood and guts horror movie--it's an excellent psychological horror. In fact the two violent acts in it aren't even shown! It concentrates on Billy and Maura and their feelings and thoughts. Clay and Neal are such great actors that just their expressions tell you what they're feeling. The growing romance between them was touching and believable. Also there's an excellent score and the ending was a stunner! This film has an R rating for some dialogue and a lengthy nude sequence with Clay. Well worth catching just for Clay and Neal.

This movie is available on DVD through the made to order system with the Warner Brothers Archive Collection. It's complete and the transfer is pristine. Well worth getting. It might disturb you but you'll never forget it. Avoid the cut version on TCM.