The dreary existence of middle-aged spinster Maura Prince takes an unexpected turn with the arrival of young handyman Billy Jarvis, but there is more to Billy than meets the eye.
El enterrador nocturno, Das Haus der Schatten, Paixão e Crime, The Night Digger, 午夜掘墓人, Ночной мотоциклист
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A young man named "Billy" starts a job at a decaying house of a woman"Maura" and her blind mother "Edith" as a handyman. Billy's night time activies are not to be reckoned with.
This film is a intriguing watch that takes its time to get there and gets creepy at times but light on the thrills.
6.8/10
🕺70's Horror & Thriller Fever
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1971 Horror and Thrillers Ranked
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And Soon the Darkness… Hoop-Tober 3.0
#22
The Night Digger is a fascinating movie and, following on from yesterday's Unman, Wittering and Zigo, yet another unjustifiably overlooked and disquieting British film from 1971 - which was really quite the year; see the link below.
Look what it has going for it: a Roald Dahl-scripted screenplay, two toweringly great lead performances by Patricia Neal and Pamela Brown, photography by Alex Thomson and a beautiful score by Bernard Hermann. The swelling music is not the only thing that more than once conjures associations with some of the best work of Hitchcock; the film is touched with a couple of oddly blackly-comic moments in its scenes with Graham Crowden, one when his Mr…
Patricia Neal famously suffered a series of strokes that nearly killed her in 1965. Her rehabilitation was long and arduous, but she made what at first seemed a triumphant return to the screen in an Oscar-nominated performance in 1968’s The Subject Was Roses. Subsequent offers worthy of her abilities didn’t follow, though, so her husband Roald Dahl took it upon himself to adapt Joy Cowley’s novel Nest in a Falling Tree into a screenplay for her. The result was this film, which opens rather pointedly with Neal’s character helping rehabilitate the speech of a recent stroke victim, years after her own character underwent the same experience.
That backstory isn’t just a dig at producers who proved unwilling to hire Neal; it…
1971 In Review - February
#13
The dreary existence of middle-aged spinster Maura Prince takes an unexpected turn with the arrival of young handyman Billy Jarvis, but there is more to Billy than meets the eye.
The Night Digger is a bonafide cult film ready for an audience to see it. This is a story about an elderly blind woman (Pamala Brown) who has a live-in helper gal (Patricia Neal) whom she adopted when she was just a girl. She decides to hire another live-in helper, this time a handyman to work the garden. Unbeknownst to them Billy's a serial killer.
The acting is fantastic. Patricia Neal would have won another Oscar had this been widely released and not allowed…
Very odd, very British, very disturbing. slow burning film with a great score. Not as much depth of character that I would like to see when tackling this subject matter. Neal is good and Clay is creepy, but the pacing was a little too slow and I felt the focus should have been more about Clay's activities and less about the relationships between the characters.
If you were in any doubt that Roald Dahl had no business writing books for children, you should have a crack of this creepy horror movie that he wrote in 1971. If a prominent children's author wrote a film about rape and murder nowadays, their books would be stricken from the shelves.
I loved this. It has the same grim feel that only British horror of this time period has - movies like Frenzy, Our Mother's House, 10 Rillington Place, Fright etc that are basically no fun to watch. The characters are all mildly insane, yet believable, and the performances are amazing, especially from Patricia Neal. I find it hard to believe that I haven't come across Nicholas Clay before, but he's great here.
I can definitely see a lot of people hating this. Luckily I love watching miserable old British people being miserable, so I had my fun.
A really fascinating film that ticks plenty of my boxes but falls just short of greatness:
- a Golden Ager Getting Gruesome© (Patricia Neal) √
- an authentically grotty and ramshackle mansion inhabited by two mature ladies √
- 70s British location shooting √
- familiar face supporting cast including Dame Yootha Joyce, Jean Anderson, Pamela Brown and Thelma from The Likely Lads √
- atmospheric photography that captures well an English autumn √
- Nicholas Clay's buttocks √√
- a script by Roald Dahl √
- and, most certainly not least, a score by Bernard Herrmann √√√
It's the twisted tale of a drifter with a mother complex who gets taken under the wing (if you know what I…
An interesting character study of some unsavory and/or pathetic characters. Maura (Patricia Neal) is a spinster who has taken care of her blind, demanding mother for years, ignoring her own needs and desires. When young Billy moves in as a handyman, she falls for him hard, even after she discovers that he is a psycho murderer of young women. There's an unusual dynamic amongst the three characters and the deep cynicism of writer Roald Dahl (Neal's husband) shines through in their oddball traits. It's a slow film without a lot going on, except in spurts, but it's still rewarding. Neal always excelled at playing these sort of off-the-wall introverts and it especially helps that the role was crafted especially for…
In The Night Digger (a.k.a. - "The Road Builder"), Maura, played by Patricia Neal is a 40-ish single woman who volunteers at the hospital for a few hours each week, and spends the rest of her time taking care of her physically and psychologically needy mother. Since neither woman is entirely up to the task of maintaining their spooky old manor-house, they decide to take a chance on a live-in maintenance man, Billy Jarvis.
Roald Dahl, was responsible for adapting the book on which the story is based, and it comes through in the eerie tone that runs throughout the film. No doubt, it is helped in part by a moody score from maestro Bernard Herrmann. Now I'm not sure…
The cast is so great, why is this so boring??
I was genuinely amazed to hit up Pamela Brown's wikipedia (during one of the first times my attention wandered while watching this) and see she was straight.
In terms of Nicholas Clay objectification cinema, if you're into him, he's more naked here than in Evil Under the Sun or Excalibur, but it isn't half as fun to watch.
Patricia Neal is so throaty and captivating even when playing the frump.
I had a lots of other wandering thoughts while watching this, but I'll spare you them.
beat for beat exactly how i expect my life to end up
(i'm patricia neal in this scenario)
