High Anxiety is now a drama

Imagine watching a Mel Brooks spoof like High Anxiety and thinking to yourself, "We should make a serious story with all the Alfred Hitchcock touches we can jam into it!" The result might look something like Still of the Night, which is airing overnight at 2:32 AM on MovieMax (part of the Cinemax premium package), and again later in the week on ThrillerMax.

The movie starts interestingly enough, with a guy subtly trying the doors of various parked cars to see if anybody was dumb or forgetful enough to leave their car door unlocked. Eventually, the guy does find an unlocked car door -- only to have a dead body fall out of the car!

Cut to a psychiatrist's office. Sam Rice (Roy Scheider) is a New York psychiatrist doing your standard-issue pyschiatric analysis. Into his office walks Brooke Reynolds (Meryl Streep). She presents Sam an engraved watch which apparently belonged to one of Sam's clients, George Bynum (Josef Sommer, in flashbacks). It was engraved with a message from George's wife, and obviously Brooke doesn't want Mrs. Bynum to know about her. George, you see, is the man who fell out of the car in the opening scene, having been murdered!

Police detective Joe Vitucci (Joe Grifasi) shows up to ask Sam about George. Sam doesn't divulge much information, claiming doctor-patient confidentiality. But it gets Sam to start thinking about his now dead client, wondering if perhaps he can figure out anything about who might have killed him.

George worked for an auction house as an appraiser of antiquities, and Brooke worked under him, which is how they met and became a couple. It also makes Brooke an obvious person of interest in George's murder. Now at this point, Sam does something profoundly stupid. He decides he's falling in love with Brooke, and wants to keep seeing her! His psychiatrist mother (Jessica Tandy in an all-too-brief role) warns him about investigating, although she doesn't know about his budding relationship with Brooke.

Sam unsurprisingly winds up in danger but keeps going on with the case, doing things that really ought to land him in jail, including one involving surreptitiously entering Brooke's office during an auction that really should have had her bosses pressing charges. But if they did that, we wouldn't have a climax to the movie.

I mentioned at the beginning that the filmmakers were obviously thinking of Alfred Hitchcock, and if you're a movie buff, trying to find as much as possible that relates to Hitchcock is part of the fun of watching this one. The auction house brings an obvious reference to North by Northwest, and the psychiatry a reference to Spellbound. Sam following Brooke is reminiscent of Vertigo, with a touch of the park scene from the non-Hitchcock Cat People thrown in during a scene in Central Park. The climax reminded me of Saboteur, and there are some other Hitchcock references too.

But that doesn't take away from the fact that Still of the Night isn't a bad little story in its own right, regardless of what you think of the Hitchcock references. Scheider and Streep both do well with their roles, although I do think there are a few implausibilities in Brooke's back story. Still, that's a fairly minor quibble.

If you want to be entertained, I think you'll enjoy Still of the Night. The TCM Shop had a copy on Blu-ray last I checked, while Amazon has it on DVD and Prime Video if you do the streaming thing.