Hitchhiking the Mean Streets

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

STILL OF THE NIGHT Directed and Written by Robert Benton

This year's (or should one say this month's?) Alfred Hitchcock pastiche is of the sober rather than the raffish variety. It is intended not as a knockoff but as an hommage (the French pronunciation on that word, if you please) to the Old Master's late high style. The stars, Roy Scheider and Meryl Streep, are pleasing people; Nestor Almendros' carefully burnished cinematography imparts to Manhattan's streets a theatrically menacing glow that subtly transforms and romanticizes their mean reality. Writer-Director Benton, working from a story he and his onetime partner David Newman concocted a decade ago, proves to be a generally apt and tasteful student of Hitch's mature surface manner. Why, then, is Still of the Night such an irritating and unsatisfying film?

Mostly because it is . . . well . . . still. For a movie about a series of gory knife murders (and that had the working title Stab), it has an oddly reverential hush about it. This seems to arise less from a regard for the Hitchcock tradition than from a quiet appreciation of its own classiness. As a murdered man's psychiatrist, drawn into the investigation of his patient's death and also toward his suspiciously nervous mistress, Scheider is sober, stalwart and workmanlike, but one longs for the goofy exasperation Cary Grant used to bring to roles like this, not to mention his wary misogyny. Yet Scheider can play a loony tune or two (see All That Jazz) if anyone bothers to ask him. Streep fares better. She is either the homicidal maniac the police suspect she is or a woman driven to paranoid frenzy by those suspicions. Either way, she is an actress with a proven ability to suggest neurotic fires burning beneath a cool surface and the knack for enlisting a sympathy we know may be misplaced.

Still, there is something distant and unemotional about the way Benton presents her mysterious case. As the movie proceeds, one finds oneself examining its references (Vertigo, North by Northwest, Rear Window, Psycho, Spellbound) rather than getting truly involved with the story. Soon a longing for the rat-tat-tattiness of sleazier Hitchcock knockoffs like Dressed to Kill steals over the viewer.

There is a sort of bad-boy joy in the act of stealing from admired betters that is preferable to the cautious quotesmanship of this film.

There was, after all, a lot of the bad boy in Hitchcock. It was that cheeky, jokey quality in him, as well as his unobtrusive technical mastery, that allowed him the pretense of being simply an entertainer all those years during which he was dripping his obsessions into his audiences' unsuspecting brains. Lacking both sides of the old boy's schizophrenic sensibility, Benton can do no more than offer a dispassionate mimicry of someone else's style. There are a few little scares in his film, but nothing to stir our dreams or haunt our memories.

--By Richard Schickel

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