Pretty much every Thursday I take part in the Thursday Movie Picks blogathon. This past week's theme was "Gaslighting", and I not only had three movies in mind, but one sitting on my DVR that I thought would probably fit the theme, only I hadn't gotten around to watching it. That movie is Night Watch, and I finally watched it last night.
Elizabeth Taylor plays Ellen Wheeler, a woman living in London and married to her second husband, John (Laurence Harvey), a financial advisor in the days before it was easy to buy index funds and when brokers like John were considered a high-paying job. They live in a nice house opposite one that's been boarded up for years, with a garden in between, where a now-poor former resident of the Wheeler house, Mr. Appleby (Robert Lang) spends his time gardening. The Wheelers also have a houseguest in the form of Sarah (Billie Whitelaw).
As I said, Ellen is married for a second time, and therein lies part of her problem. Her first husband Carl died in a horrific car crash, and Ellen had to identify the body. That's something that still gives her nightmares and really screws up with her sleep in general, to the point where the doctors have her on tranquilizers and whatnot. It also means that John and Sarah both worry quite a bit about how well Ellen is doing.
They're about to get quite a bit more worried, and for good reason. One night during a thunderstorm, Ellen is looking out the window at the abandoned house, when one of the shutters starts flapping open, allowing Ellen to look inside and see -- a dead body! Not just any dead body, mind you, but one that sure looks like it's been knifed to death and therefore murdered! Ellen gets John to call the police, who send over Inspector Walker (Bill Dean).
Walker and his men take questions, and more importantly, do a search of the old abandoned house, and find... nothing. Well, not quite nothing. Ellen saw Appleby doing some digging in the garden, enough in fact that you could forgive her for thinking it was something the size of a grave for burying a murdered human being. And when Appleby plants a couple of trees into that digging, well, the obvious guess is that perhaps there really was a murder and Appleby dumped the body there, planting the trees over the dead body. But you'd think there would be an awful lot of dirt left over, which the police don't find.
So, with nobody finding any evidence that anybody might have been murdered -- and seriously, you'd think that if somebody had been knifed to death, there would be blood in the old house -- talk turns to worrying about Ellen's mental state. Perhaps she's not just seeing her first husband in her nightmares, but now seeing him in her waking hours, too. Other things transpire that sure make it look like John might be trying to gaslight Ellen, especially considering how John tries to get his psychiatrist friend to try to treat Ellen.
There are, however, still a lot of twists and turns before we find out what really happened in the old dark house and just how crazy Ellen is, twists that make this movie more than just a reworking of Gaslight or other movies you can think of it sharing plot points with (Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window being another obvious example).
Elizabeth Taylor had some movies later in her career where she really goes over the top, thanks in part to the script. X, Y, and Zee, which Taylor made in the UK around the same time she was making Night Watch comes to mind. The script of Night Watch is one that really gives her the opportunity to play things up, and Taylor takes that opportunity and runs with it. This may cause a problem for some viewers, but the script has a method to the madness it makes her suffer.
As I was watching, I was also noticing some plot holes, but surprisingly, the script more or less does a good job of tying them up at the end, making Night Watch a satisfyingly interesting movie, but one that does require the viewer to suspend disbelief a good deal.
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