Revived & Deprived

Night Must Fall is a muscular new version of the 1937 screen classic based on a drama by Emlyn Williams. The original movie was a deftly understated exercise in terror, starring Rosalind Russell, Dame May Whitty and Robert Montgomery. Now Albert Finney plays the psychopath who moves into an English country house with a hatbox containing a severed head, and Susan Hampshire and Mona Washbourne are the women he victimizes.

Finney's performance as a charming, arrogant, boyish, vain and remorseless killer almost justifies redoing the film. But Producer-Director Karel Reisz errs in trying to update the melodrama with an overdose of back-to-the-womb psychology. The motherless Finney washes away dark deeds by splashing in a pond or immersing himself right up to the nostrils in a nice warm tub. In one embarrassingly childish sequence, he regresses almost to the toddler stage. The camera pays more attention to Finney's tortured mental processes than to the all-important hatbox. The new Night trades a real case of creeps for mere case history.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.