Still of the Night jump-starts when a thief, casing parked cars on a Manhattan street one night, wrenches open a door and out tumbles a corpse. But then it slows down way down. The dead man's mistress (Meryl Streep) shows up at the office of his psychiatrist (Roy Scheider) for reasons vague enough to pique his curiosity and his suspicions. Scheider is robbed of his distinctive jacket in Central Park, then the mugger gets stabbed. The police grow more and more interested in Streep....
The slow menace that simmers through most of Robert Benton's movie is helped by Nestor Almendros' leached-out, dusky cinematography all taupes and duns and greys. But when it comes time to bring the plot to a boil, there's no more fuel. Jessica Tandy as Scheider's mother, also a psychiatrist, vanishes halfway through, while the director lavishes his attention on a long scene at the posh auction house where Streep works, a sequence so tedious that it's an object lesson in how not to mount a set-piece.
By the time Steep, in close-up against the night sky, sings an interminable aria about her dead father while a desperate ending is being cobbled up off-stage, it's clear that nobody bothered to think the script through. Benton showed more talent in the lighter, quirkier The Late Show five years earlier. The portentousness and pretentiousness of Still of the Night grind it to a dead stop.
The slow menace that simmers through most of Robert Benton's movie is helped by Nestor Almendros' leached-out, dusky cinematography all taupes and duns and greys. But when it comes time to bring the plot to a boil, there's no more fuel. Jessica Tandy as Scheider's mother, also a psychiatrist, vanishes halfway through, while the director lavishes his attention on a long scene at the posh auction house where Streep works, a sequence so tedious that it's an object lesson in how not to mount a set-piece.
By the time Steep, in close-up against the night sky, sings an interminable aria about her dead father while a desperate ending is being cobbled up off-stage, it's clear that nobody bothered to think the script through. Benton showed more talent in the lighter, quirkier The Late Show five years earlier. The portentousness and pretentiousness of Still of the Night grind it to a dead stop.