The Road Builder

One of the movies that I DVRed during Patricia Neal's turn as TCM's Star of the Month is The Night Digger (also known as The Road Builder from its British release).

Neal plays Maura Prince, a woman who's volunteering at a hospital teaching patients recovering from a stroke to speak again, something that's highly appropriate considering that Neal herself had suffered a stroke in real life a half-dozen years before this movie was made. Her boss says that Maura should work there full time at good pay, but she says that she can't, which is largely because she has a blind mother Edith (Pamela Brown) to take care of. Maura, in fact, hasn't been able to get married or anything because of having to be a caregiver for Mom.

It's taken its toll on both women. Maura is definitely isolated socially, while Mom's blindness threatens to do the same. Also, the two live alone in a big house that was obviously more full of people in a previous generation, but is now falling apart, reminiscent of a movie like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, but with a mother and daughter instead of two sisters.

But then a knock comes on their door. Maura opens up and finds a young man Billy (Nicholas Clay) who's been working on a road-building crew constructing a new highway from Liverpool to London. He's apparently heard that these two unmarried women need somebody to help take care of the house and garden, and Billy could use a place to stay. It seems like a convenient arrangement, but Edith, being that trope of the blind woman who can see things sighted people don't want to, has some misgivings.

Billy says his last name is Jarvis, apparently having learned a lot about the Prince family, because Edith claims to have some distant cousins up in the north of England with the surname Jarvis, so Billy could well be a relative. So Edith takes Billy in, with Maura eventually becoming happy to have a man -- any man -- around.

Perhaps they shouldn't have wanted this man. Billy starts sneaking out at night, when it's not as if there's anything much to do in the area the Princes live. It turns out that he's a serial killer who's been killing (and probably raping considering the nude scenes) young women and then burying them where the road is going to be built so that in a day or two, blacktop will be laid down and nobody's going to dig under the road to find the body, at least not before it decomposes.

Edith begins to suspect something, and eventually wants Billy out of the house for good. Maura may suspect nothing, as she withdraws all her money from the bank after Mom suffers a sudden illness that leaves her in the hospital, and runs off with Billy to Scotland. Does she know nothing, or does she not mind that Billy's a killer?

There's a premise for a really nice movie in The Night Digger, but unfortunately to me it didn't play out as well as it could have. Part of that is down to some slow pacing, while the other part is because of the ending which I found illogical. The performances are all good, however, and people who like more psychological thrillers will probably like The Night Digger more than I did.

The Night Digger has received a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive.