The Night Digger (1971) - Review.

Where Gothic Romance Meets Psycho

The Night Digger (aka The Road Builder) is a 1971 gothic horror most notable for being written by Roald Dahl. While far from perfect, the film's sense of humor and at least one relationship in the film save it and make it a worthwhile watch for anyone looking for something in the Hitchcockian vein (if decidely lesser than much of Hitchcock's canon).

Patricia Neal, Dahl's wife in real life, plays Maura, an aging spinster who tends after her disabled but thoroughly domineering adopted mother. We come to find that Maura was adopted at age 15 and, but for a brief respite, she has spent most of it as her adopted mother's servant. Maura has managed to convince her mother to let her out of the house for a few hours each week to serve as a speech therapist for stroke victims, but when Maura is offered a full-time job, Maura realizes that she can't find the strength to demand independence from her mother.

The relationship between Maura and her mother, played by Pamela Brown, is a strength for the film. Brown delivers a fine performance of the mother as the aging head of a crumbling and dying (formerly) rich family. Their once fabulous mansion is falling apart, bringing to mind Grey Gardens. But she wouldn't think of parting with her glorious house - she's blind and can't see it falling apart, but to sell it and live in an apartment would mean the end of her class illusions.

The mother, Mrs. Prince, is commanding and cruel, but also a delusional gossip. When a man tells her that he thinks a woman they know wears the pants in her marriage, Mrs. Prince invents gossip that she begins spreading that the woman is about to undertake a sex-change operation. Which Mrs. Prince's gullible friends of course believe - who are they to challenge the domineering Mrs. Prince? One can almost find a hint of satire here, as Mrs. Prince represents the aging head of a dying empire who still commands the fealty of the local peasantry due to her class stature, even if her once-proud estate is in ruins and the peasantry need not bow to her any longer.

For the first act of the film I suspected that I was to witness a psychological struggle between mother and daughter. But there's a terrific amount of wit in this early part of the film as well. Dahl and director Alastair Reid do not try to oversell suspense or foreboding - they stage the early parts of the film with a knowing wink.

As the film progresses, a mysterious young man, Billy (Nicholas Clay) shows up at the crumbling mansion and offers to provide repairs in exchange for lodging. Maura is against it, but her Mrs. Prince convinces herself that Billy is her grand-nephew. Billy openly cons the vain mother, and Maura knows it, but Maura lacks the fortitude to stand up to her mother even on this. As for her contempt for Billy, perhaps it is because she fears losing her place in the servile pecking order in the house.

Billy moves in and Maura's contempt eventually gives way to love for Billy. The film then takes some left turns into an exploration of sexuality, love, Freudian themes, and serial killing.

The love between Billy and Maura is occasionally fascinating but is fairly under-cooked overall. There's a wicked undercurrent to the film suggesting that Maura lusts after Billy not just as a lover, but as a son (at one point she protests against the suggestion of romance by yelling that she could be his mother). In Billy she sees both the lover that once abandoned her in her youth and the child she never had as a result of dedicating her life to her own mother. Billy is cruelly indifferent to Maura, but given his sexual history the lack of genuine sexual attraction to Maura might be the only way he can safely love her.

The problem for the film is that these undercurrents are too unexplored and it feels like 20 minutes have been unnecessarily cut out of the movie. We do not get enough of an explanation for how and why Maura falls in love with Billy - a switch flips and it just happens. We're left to fill in too many holes. And when they finally consummate their love, the film reaches a thoroughly unsatisfying conclusion that feels tacked on.

Of course, one can fill in some of the blanks given that the love seems to arrive when Maura begins to take on a subservient role to Billy - feeding him, ironing his clothes, rolling his cigarettes, bringing him tea, and even surrendering her bedroom to him at her mother's insistence while Maura is consigned to the servant's quarters. There's a sub-dom sexual thing going on here, complicated even more in that Maura's humiliating sexual submission to Billy raises questions about the true psychological scope of the relationship between Maura and her own mother (as soon as Maura commits herself to Billy, she finally gains the courage to reject her mother - so much Fruedian stuff going on here). Just how much of a replacement for her mother is Billy for Maura? Maura is all kinds of fucked up - as is Billy, who has some female issues of his own.

We also do not get a deep enough sense of who Billy is or how the relationship with Maura fills in the blanks. We get some flashbacks of some rather harrowing sexual experiences he has had, but while that explains his psychology in some respects, it does not help us understand why Billy would fall in love with Mother, err, Maura.

The lack of definition to the relationship between Billy and Maura hurts the film. We can fill in only so many of the potholes as viewers. Had the film fleshed out these two characters and their relationships a little further, the film would be a true gem. As it stands it is still a worthwhile and wicked little horror film.

Allegedly both Dahl and Neal hated the movie. Neal allegedly because she thought the film was pornographic, and Dahl allegedly because he feuded with Bernard Herrmann during production. The score is in the classic Bernard Herrmann mode but is only mildly distinguished. If anything, it only leads you to wonder how this material might have fared in Hitchcock's hands.

Screened via Warner Archive Instant.