The "Grand Guignol"-style in horror movies became a hot box office commodity after Robert Aldrich's runaway hit WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962)and, true to form, legendary film-making showman William Castle jumped on that band wagon (quite successfully, I might add) with one of that film's stars, Joan Crawford, in STRAIT-JACKET (1964). This immediate follow-up exercise in similar vein adds an intriguing element of Freudian psychodrama and cleverly casts a former royal couple of Hollywood, Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck (whose final theatrical feature film this turned out to be!), in the leading roles; I should be following this with their much earlier on screen collaboration, THIS IS MY AFFAIR (1937). Opening with a remarkably eerie animated sequence on the nature of dreams I even seemed to recognize the silhouette of the titular creature from that crazy Mexican flick, THE BRAINIAC (1962) as one of the haunting nightmare figures! it gives the audience its very first jolt immediately as a creepy, Mabuse-like, eyeless figure comes pacing towards the camera! It turns out he is no figment of the imagination but Stanwyck's blind, embittered millionaire husband (Hayden Rorke whose decidedly effective facial make-up is first-rate) walking around his mansion as his wife has her nightly dream of a romantic liaison with a mystery man (compulsively recorded on tape, as is every other conversation held within his household)! Taylor plays the millionaire's lawyer and, suspected of being his wife's lover, learns that his employer has had Stanwyck followed by detective Lloyd Bochner. After Rorke's death in an inexplicable explosion in his laboratory(?!), Stanwyck (who was virtually held captive by her deeply suspicious husband) bafflingly goes to live in the back-room of a hairdressing salon headed by young Judi Meredith who, lo and behold, is not really as sweet-natured as her attractive exterior suggests! As can be expected from such 'let's-drive-an-heiress-mad' scenarios, the plot thickens with new twists and turns every few minutes and, among the highlights we have: Stanwyck's dead-of-night wedding in a supposedly abandoned chapel with Bochner (who is amusingly billed as "The Dream" in the opening credits) presided over and witnessed by waxwork dummies and the climactic fistfight between Bochner and Taylor in Rorke's lab which is about to blow up for the third time in the film! Driven by a minimalist but catchy score by Vic Mizzy (of TV's "The Addams Family" fame) even if the main musical motif is oddly reminiscent of the "Food, Glorious Food" number from Lionel Bart's musical "OLIVER!" THE NIGHT WALKER is possibly the second best after the utterly unique oddity SHANKS (1974) of the 8 William Castle films I have watched so far (although, thankfully, I will soon be filling in some of the remaining gaps with 4 more)
which makes its absence on DVD (I had to make do with a full-frame VHS rip of acceptable quality) almost as big an enigma as the strange occurrences that befall the sturdy Stanwyck throughout the film!
Review of The Night Walker
