In short: Dead of Night (1977)

This anthology movie was directed and produced by Dan Curtis, the doyen of US TV horror of his time and is, as was often the case with Curtis’s project, particularly the anthology films, scripted by Richard Matheson.

The first segment “Second Chance”, based on a short story by conservative semi-professional nostalgist Jack Finney (ask me privately about that man’s “Time and Again”, if you want to hear a proper rant) concerns a young, highly nostalgic man (Ed Begley) making a trip back through time thanks to a vintage car and inadvertently creating his new girlfriend by saving her grandfather before he can speed himself to death in that same car. It’s a competently enough realized tale, but it is also very slight and frankly not terribly interesting in any way that matters to me.

Story number two is “No Such Thing as a Vampire”. It sees Matheson adapting himself. Some 19th Century village is plagued by what looks a lot like vampire attacks. Particularly Alexis (Anjanette Comer), the wife of local rich man Dr. Gheria (Patrick Macnee) seems to be a victim of the bloodsucker, or at least that’s what the local peasantry believes. Gheria for his part is sceptical, but he still calls in family friend Michael (Horst Buchholz) for help. Until the tale ends with the sort of underdeveloped twist that left this viewer mostly surprised when I realized that this was indeed all twenty minutes of set-up ended with. Before that, it’s a pleasantly atmospheric tale, with fun performances – Comer does some particularly enthusiastic scenery chewing early on, and Buchholz milks being drugged in an utterly delightful way – and semi-gothic photography. Alas, for that terribly bland ending.

The anthology climaxes in “Bobby”, a script which Curtis would recycle a couple of decades later in Trilogy of Terror II. Here, a bereft mother (Joan Hackett) attempts to call back her drowned son with the help of black magic. A little later, her little Bobby (Lee Montgomery) does indeed knock at her door. Something isn’t right with the kid, though, as well as with the mother’s nostalgic remembrances of their time together.

Like twenty years later, this last tale is the high point of the anthology, its set-up using Matheson’s and Curtis’s flair for creating suspense with characters in a physically constrained space excellently and to great effect. The story also recommends itself by having a much harder edge than the first one and by being psychologically much more interesting and satisfying than the middle tale, really showing how dark and intense 70s TV horror could get in the right hands.

As a whole, though, Dead of Night (which one should of course not confuse with all those other films with the same title) is a bit of a disappointment, an anthology film where I’d be tempted to skip two out of three tales on my next viewing.

Will Penny (1968)

Aging cowhand Will Penny (Charlton Heston) has just ended a trail somewhere in the colder parts of the West at the beginning of winter. Together with two of his colleagues, Dutchy (Anthony Zerbe) and Blue (Lee Majors), who are probably as close to friends as the rather shy Will ever comes, Will’s planning on finding work at a nearby ranch.

Before that can happen, though, the trio encounters the crazy family of crazy “Preacher” Quint (Donald Pleasence). A pointless altercation about an elk leaves one of Quint’s sons dead and Dutchy badly wounded. Quint swears vengeance, but because there’s a river in the way, it’ll probably have to wait a bit. While Blue and Dutchy end up in the closest town, with Dutchy probably dying, Will goes on to that ranch they were looking for. There, he hires on as a line rider, a cowhand living at the edge of the ranch’s areal, keeping cattle from wandering off.

Unfortunately, while out and about in the increasingly snowy mountains, Will encounters Quint and his family again. They quickly overwhelm him and leave him to die, bleeding out in the cold. Fortunately, Will’s mountain cabin is being squatted in by Catherine Allen (Joan Hackett) and her little son Horace (Jon Gries) who have been left behind by a guide supposed to bring them to California and Catherine’s husband. Catherine saves Will’s life, and slowly, a romance develops between the unhappily married woman and the sensitive, even fragile, cowboy. Things might develop into a direction that may be good for both of them, as well as for the boy, but alas Quint isn’t finished with Will yet.

This description does make Tom Gries’s Will Penny sound like a more concise film than it actually is, when it is in fact, particularly during its first half, a rather meandering and episodic one. Most of these episodes do come together to make a whole later on, though, if you have the patience to follow the film where it leads. The meandering feel of the early film is of course also just a clever mirror of Will’s life, a slow, directionless drifting from no place special to no place special, something that is only focused through Will’s work, sudden bouts of violence one encounters in the place where Will lives even if one is as basically peaceful as he is, and finally his encounter with Catherine and her boy.

In what I can only call a completely unexpected turn of events, Heston plays Will, the absolute opposite of the larger than life grimacing assholes he specialized in and, in the end, seems to have turned into in real life, exceedingly well. I really didn’t think Heston had something like this in him, a character as believably sensitive, even shy, and emotionally pained as Will is, a man who is quite conscious of the fact that he’s going nowhere, the place he’s coming from not much worth mentioning either. There’s, believe it or not, a subtlety to Heston’s performance of Will that suggests he could have been a much better actor than he ever was a star. It is really Heston’s performance that carries the film through its necessarily slow parts, until what actually is his second encounter with Catherine after an earlier episodic moment starts the actual plot, and quite possibly the first great emotional upheaval Will has undergone in years, or ever.

And while this is very definitely Will’s story, the film leaves space for Joan Hackett to turn Catherine into much more than just someone the cowhand could anchor himself too, a plot device with breasts. Instead the film shows us a woman as complex, complicated and curiously practical as her male counterpart is, with plans, and agency, and a life all her own. Hackett and Heston do work very well with one another, too, making clear what attracts them to each other without any need for the film to ever spell it out, going far beyond the point of lonely people feeling attracted to one another.

The weakest link in the acting chain here is, strangely enough, good old dependable Donald Pleasence who lays his crazy person shtick on a little too thick, going from threatening to cartoony, standing quite in opposition to the rest of the actors. It’s the kind of performance you’d use in a Heston film when Chuck does his usual Moses, but not between naturalistic and subtle performances as they’re found here. It’s hardly enough of a flaw to ruin the film even a little, though, because Quint isn’t the point of the film. It is – very pointedly – not Pleasence’s character that begins or ends the relationship between Will and Catherine, but Will’s own inability to get over a fear that finds an easy confederate in his frontier pragmatism, which is an easy shield against the risks of the heart.

If I haven’t really mentioned anything about Tom Gries’s direction of the film, then it’s because Will Penny, following the suggestion of its title, is very much a film about people and landscape, and Gries’s part of the job in bringing his own script to life is letting the people and the landscape do the talking. Which he does quite perfectly.

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Assignment To Kill (1968)

An insurance company, quite unwilling to pay out a load of money to beyond the law multimillionaire Curt Valayan (John Gielgud) for the "accidental" sinking of a few ships that left twenty-eight dead bodies behind, hires cynical investigator Richard Cutting (Patrick O'Neal). The company hopes that Cutting will be able to find information Walter Green, a man formerly in the employ of Valayan's chief of illegalities Matt Wilson (Herbert Lom), may have left behind when he died in a plane "accident" over the Swiss Alps just before he could sell off said information to them.

Cutting quickly finds out that Green isn't as dead as everyone expected, and seems to have fled to his native Zürich, where he now has been hiding out for six months. Unfortunately, Wilson realizes this interesting fact at about the same time Cutting does, so it becomes a race to find Green and get him to - respectively - cooperate or murder him. Cutting's efforts are supported by Dominique Laurant (Joan Hackett), Green's former part-time secretary who helped him out with the hiding business without ever realizing what her boss was involved with. Dominique, a young woman with moral principles and a thing for a cynical old freelancer, might be able to break through Cutting's amoral shell, and drive him to do something good for once in his life, but when has that sort of thing ever been healthy for a woman in a movie like this?

Despite not featuring any actual spies, Sheldon Reynolds's Assignment to Kill is very much a spy movie, and one closer to the less silly Eurospy films than James Bond to boot. In place of professional spies, the film features various freelancers working a dirty business that is a lot like your usual spy game, and whose morals are just as fluent and ambiguous as those found in the more earnest spy movies. Interestingly, the characters "in the know" are talking about post-national spy politics before those were very much in vogue in the genre. It's only 1968 (and you'll know it) but patriotism is already no excuse the characters in this movie are willing to use for doing horrible things to innocents and each other; they do it for money, or because it's the only thing they're good at, or just because they never bother to think about the moral implications of their actions.

Given this - depending on one's tastes either bitter or honest - view of affairs it's neither a wonder nor much of a surprise the film's only character with uncompromised morals has to die to give Cutting some of his sense of justice back. Which he then proceeds to defend with the same mixture of lies, violence and betrayal he uses in less worthy causes - and that's without interpreting the film's final act exclusively as very personal vengeance that uses justice only as a pretext.

With this less than bright and shiny text and subtext, it may come as a bit of a surprise that Assignment's tone is quite a bit more chipper than one would expect. There's more dry humour than bitter tears on screen. The interplay between O'Neal and Hackett fluctuates between sarcastic repartee, surprising tenderness and hints of actual emotional complexity, and stands out as a particularly - and surprising - human relationship that counteracts what could be an exercise in nihilism. Of course, the film at hand is still pretty cynical once you think about it: after all, Cutting may have taken down the bad guys in the end, but Dominique is still dead, Cutting's methods are still the same they have always been, and the world won't change just because three particular bastards haven't any power in it any more.

What makes Assignment work as well as it does, though, is how little it tries to push these darker elements of its script at its audience. They are there when you're willing to think about what you are seeing, but they never try to take control of the movie's surface. This surface is that of a very well made semi-Eurospy movie made in the US, with some decent action scenes, quipping characters, many well-constructed moments of suspense, and a rhythm that's as snappy as anything you'll find in the genre.

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