MovieChat Forums > Night Watch (1973) Discussion > Underrated Taylor flick

Underrated Taylor flick


Just bought NIGHT WATCH and watched it tonight when it arrived. I don't think I've seen it since, say, I was a teenager and it was on the late show!

But it's a Taylor film no one talks about.

I actually think it's great, in its way (but, as with every Laurence Harvey movie he does with Taylor, I always want to re-cast him with James Mason).

Anyway, yes, I think it's a smidgen underrated. And has a nice, London-y, shrouded early-'70s melancholy flavor and that neo-victorian early-'70s thing what with the dark wood and the plush velvet-y furniture and the Tiffany lamps and the overgrown plants and deep shadows and the sprinkling of harpsichord in the score and the occasional fish-eye lens.

Great twist ending, too!


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[deleted]

Agreed!! This movie is fabulous and should be better known than it is. That ending is one of my favorites! It's totally insane.

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She did a few films late in her film career (which in my mind ends at 1980 as I don't count The Flintstones or the non-theatrically released Young Toscanini) which deserve rediscovery, including this film, Under Milk Wood, and Ash Wednesday.

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[deleted]

I had never seen it, but I do remember a VHS copy sitting on the shelf WAY back in the late 'eighties when even stores like 7-Eleven were renting movies. (This was the video section at Phar-Mor, remember them? 69¢ rentals.) I was curious about it even back then but never got around to renting it.

Anyway, there's a great review I found when Googling for info on the original playwright Lucille Fletcher, which I didn't read until after seeing it. [ur]http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/53159/night-watch-1973/[/url] The movie definitely has that great eerie Hammer Films feel to it.

I might beg to differ about James Mason though. Even in Age of Consent, released four year earlier, he looked more like he could have been Taylor's father. (Although he ends up with a much younger Helen Mirren in that one, and Liz would later play opposite the even older Henry Fonda in Ash Wednesday--but her character was an older woman who'd had major surgery to look younger.)

Len Cariou played John Wheeler in the play on Broadway; but he's not British, and it seems like they intended to go in a different direction with the film. I thought Harvey was fine and had a nice ass--unless it was an ass-double.

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Yes, the DVDTalk review is quite good --- but filled with spoilers I've removed:

"Delicious, creepy, Grand Guignol thriller, with the divine Liz going off the rails in splendid fashion. Warner Bros. essential Archive Collection has released 1973's hard-to-find Night Watch, based on the play by Lucille Fletcher and directed by Brian G. Hutton, and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Laurence Harvey, Billie Whitelaw, and Robert Lang. Long-sought after by fans of Taylor, Night Watch achieves the next-to-impossible with its overly familiar tale of a woman going mad: it genuinely surprises you with a triple-twist ending that's as unexpected as it is bloody (and bloody marvelous).

(...)

Bored, dreamily distraught London housewife Ellen Wheeler (Elizabeth Taylor), believes that something isn't quite right with the abandoned, shuttered, crumbling gothic mansion that looms menacingly over her back garden.

(...)

The prospect of Night Watch succeeding at the box office was probably doomed from the start, considering the circumstances and context of its production. Even though the majority of Night Watch's plotting and execution falls in line with the conventions of the tried-and-true traditional "whodunit" thriller, the film's savage final ten minutes firmly puts it in with the "all-star Grand Guignol horror" mini-subgenre that was already played out by 1973 (begun, arguably, with the classy Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and winding down with lesser, cheaper efforts).

Certainly by 1973, Elizabeth Taylor had played out her string with audiences, too. Having reached the pinnacle of both her commercial and critical appeal with 1966's masterpiece, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Taylor's further film excursions with celebrity husband Richard Burton met with increasingly dismal returns, from ticket buyers and critics alike. Soon, just the mere mention of "the Burtons" was enough to set peevish critics off in search of their Thesauruses for fruity put-downs of the actors.


So how ironic is it, then, that Night Watch turns out to be so good, from the performances, to the direction, to the neat little twists it gives to its hoary old clichés. After all, what could be more predictable than the old "woman going insane while getting gaslighted by cheating husband" storyline?


Based on the 1972 play by Lucille Fletcher (of enduring Sorry, Wrong Number fame), the mystery is well constructed, with obvious red herrings to mislead us into smug complacency, set against a beautiful production design that's at once glamorous and subtly menacing (drizzly, gloomy London is much better suited here than the play's Manhattan setting), and enacted by an impeccable British cast who wisely play everything in a very minor key―essential for tricking us into allowing all the clichés.


Looking back on the movie, Elizabeth Taylor deserves the lion's share of the accolades; her performance is technically spot-on. Director Brian G. Hutton's atmospheric, nervy adaptation of Fletcher's play starts out subtly and goes for broke during its horrific final moments, while Elizabeth Taylor gives a performance that should have brought her back into the critical limelight.

A genuinely creepy shocker that scores in all departments. I'm highly, highly recommending Night Watch.
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http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/53159/night-watch-1973/

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Non-sequiturs are delicious.

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This Taylor film is so good! A great thriller!

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"X Y and Zee"..."Hammersmith is Out"...Night Watch"..."As Wednesday"..."The Driver's Seat"..."The Mirror Crack'd" That's a DVD box collection I'd like to see.

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Would love to see that, they have'nt been shown on telly for years!! would love to see them again.

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plot seemed contrived to me, but still an ok movie 6/10





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