Best Friends

I ended up with a couple of Burt Reynolds movies on my DVR. I already did a post on The Man Who Loved Women, which I think aired during a night dedicated to Julie Andrews; the other movie is an early 1980s film I had surprisingly not heard of before TCM ran it: Best Friends. Once again, having watched it, I can finally do a review on it.

As the movie opens, Richard Babson (Burt Reynolds) and Paula McCullen (Goldie Hawn) are sitting in a house together reading the sort of dialogue that sounds like it would come from a bad imitation of Tennessee Williams. You could be forgiven for thinking that they're actors auditioning or rehearsing for a play. In fact, they're screenwriters working on a film for producer Larry Weissman (Ron Silver), and they're a successful screenwriting team.

Richard and Paula have been working and living together for years, but... they're not married. Obviously, during the Production Code this could never have been a thing, but it's the early 1980s so now it's not such a big deal. Except that it's beginning to be a thing for Richard, who feels that maybe the two of them should get married. Paula isn't so sure, because she believe the two of them being unmarried gives them greater spontaneity; presumably, she's also seen how a lot of Hollywood marriages don't really work out in the end. But Richard pushes enough that Paula eventually agrees to get a quickie marriage, only it's in a Spanish-language wedding chapel in Los Angeles instead of Las Vegas where you'd think quickie marriages would normally take place.

Having finished the movie and gotten married without telling anybody, they decide to go visit the respective sets of families to tell them the good news. First up are Paula's parents Eleanor (Jessica Tandy) and Tim (Barnard Hughes), who live in Buffalo, several days' train ride from Los Angeles. They're about to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary, and they're getting to the age where their age is beginning to show, which is understandably worrying to Paula. For the audience, it's supposed to be an opportunity for laughs concerning things we don't necessarily want to hear our parents talking about like the geriatric sex drive.

After that, it's time for the two to visit Richard's family. His parents live in a giant condominium community in northern Virginia, with father Tom (Keenan Wynn) having worked for the federal government and still being married to Richard's mother Ann (Audra Lindley). Where you get the feeling that Paula's parents were always a bit more reserved, Richard's are more outgoing to the point that it really starts to irritate Paula. It also doesn't help that Richard's sisterhas moved back in due to yet another failed marriage, this time with two children in tow.

And then, to make matters worse, it turns out that the movie Richard and Paula was working on has hit a snag and that the script is going to need rewrites which necessitate their going back to Los Angeles before they planned. The couple has already begun to bicker over finding out their families aren't all they're cracked up to be; can they survive having to fix the script under a tight deadline?

Best Friends is another of those movies where you can see why everybody involved would want to be involved with it. There's fodder for what should be incisive comedy about whether married life is better than staying single; also, the was the chance for some pretty talented people to work together: apparently, Goldie Hawn and Burt Reynolds really enjoyed working together. And yet, somehow, the resulting movie winds up sterile. It feels as though the movie went for the obvious humor instead of something thought-provoking, and everybody is going through the motions. It's not exactly a bad movie; it's more that it's yet one more movie where things feel like they could have been so much better.

Cross No. 7

I've got a couple of World War II movies that I haven't blogged about before on my DVR. One that's technically not a war movie, although it was released during the war and is set in Nazi Germany, is the Spencer Tracy movie The Seventh Cross.

The movie opens up with a shot of several crosses outside one of the old concentration camps inside the borders of Nazi Germany as it was before they annexed any territory or other countries declared war on them; these were not quite the same as the extermination camps set up in present-day Poland to kill the Jews, and had a bunch of political prisoners. Seven men escape from the camp, and one of them, Wallau (Ray Collins), narrates their story, even though he gets captured early on and killed. Since most of them get caught, and Wallau is narrating from beyond the grave, it's mostly the story of one escapee, Georg Heisler (Spencer Tracy).

Heisler along with the others, escaped, but doesn't really have anywhere to go. At least, not many places that could offer him any amount of safety. However, Wallau had been talking about going to Mainz since he had a friend there who is part of the anti-Nazi resistance and might be able to help the men get forged documents that would allow them to travel somewhere, hopefully out of Germany. So Heisler heads there even though he's got a badly injured hand.

The Nazis are making a big deal out of trying to find Georg, no surprise, and are watching as many people who knew Georg as they can think of. As a result, those people who would like to help Georg find themselves unable to do so since they can't reach Georg. The best he can do is see an old girlfriend Leni (Kaaren Verne), but she's no longer able to help him. He's able to get help from a couple of Jews who already know what's coming for them in Nazi Germany, but that is once again only temporary.

Eventually, Georg can only think of one person left who knew him and who, as far as Georg knows, doesn't have any political views, which seems astonishing in a country like Nazi Germany: factory worker Paul Roeder (Hume Cronyn). Paul now has a wife Liesel (Jessica Tandy, who was of course Paul's real-life wife) and kid, and doesn't seem to know anything about Georg's wanted status or why he just suddenly dropped out of society. Paul, however, is fundamentally decent, so he decides that he's going to try to come up with some way to help Georg, even though it's going to put himself in great danger.

There's still a good ways to go in the movie, however, so Georg has a lot more hiding to do until he can either get out of the country or be caught. Considering when the movie was made, I think you can guess how the movie ends.

The Seventh Cross is one of the earliest movies directed in Hollywood by Fred Zinnemann, who does a fine job here. Unsurprisingly, Tracy is also quite good even though I don't think of him as realistically German. Neither is Hume Cronyn, who got an Oscar nomination for his part. If the movie has any flaws, it's in the script which doesn't really get to be subtle since the movie had to be something that would please American audiences during the war. In that regard it succeeds in spades. The Seventh Cross is a fine example of a World War II-era suspense movie.

The decisive valley

Another of those movies that I saw a bunch of times in the TCM schedule but never got around to watching for some reason was one of MGM's prestige films from the mid-1940s, The Valley of Decision. It aired some time back so I watched it before it left the Watch TCM app, writing up this review and waiting for it to show up on TCM again so that I could finally do a review of it. Well, that next TCM showing is coming up tomorrow (August 14) at noon as part of Greer Garson's day in Summer Under the Stars, which means that now's the time to schedule this post.

Garson was probably MGM's biggest star at the time this movie was made, as it was just after Joan Crawford's contract was not renewed and before post-war stars started to make names for themselves. Garson plays Mary Rafferty, a young woman from the poor part of Pittsburgh in the 1870s. Steel was king in Pittsburgh, and Mary's father Pat (Lionel Barrymore) worked for many years at one of the steel mills, at least until getting injured in a workplace accident and requiring the use of a wheelchair. As a result, Dad hates the Scotts, the wealthy family that owns the mill where he worked.

Pat being an adult woman without a husband, needs to go into work, and there weren't all that many jobs available for women in those days. Two of the biggies were teaching and being a servant, and Pat has possibilities of a job in that second field. The only thing is that her employers would be... the Scotts, which pisses Dad off to no end. But she needs a job, and takes it after the matriarch of the family, Clarissa (Gladys Cooper), takes a liking to Pat.

Pat walks into a house where she discovers a family that's somewhat divided over the family business. There's an old saying of going from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, and the younger generation is the third generation. Patriarch William (Donald Crisp) inherited the business and has run it as well as he can, intending to bequeath it to at least one of his four children. The only thing is that the four children have different views on what they want for the business. Daughter Constance (Marsha Hunt) doesn't particularly care since women weren't expected to be titans of industry in those days; she ends up marrying a titled Englishman. Youngest son Ted (Marshall Thompson) is a bit of a drifter; and, as the youngest, probably isn't intended to be the inheritor anyway. That leaves Paul (Gregory Peck) who has an interest in metallurgy, and William (Dan Duryea), who's hard-nosed and doesn't care much for the workers unlike Dad and Paul.

Things get complicated when Paul and Pat fall in love with each other. Since they're from totally different social classes, they really can't marry each other, so Pat leaves with Connie to go to the UK and work as maid to Connie and her husband when those two get married. But during her time in the UK, there's terrible labor trouble brewing at the industry. Pat's father and some of the other more militant men want to form a union, but William is staunchly opposed to that idea. Pat eventually returns to the US just in time for all the labor strife.

The Valley of Decision is another of those movies that's of a type MGM did well, at least if you don't think too hard about the labor strife section that probably would have been handled a lot differently at Warner Bros. Garson is way too old for the role at least at the start of the movie, but I don't know that MGM had a younger actress with the heft to play it. Lana Turner was on her way up at MGM, but she would have been terribly miscast in any of the female roles. This was made not long after Gaslight, but I don't think Angela Lansbury would have been able to carry Garson's part. Duryea is playing yet another of his bad-guy characters and Peck is pretty good as the good brother. Lionel Barrymore badly overacts, but at least his overacting is entertaining enough.

If you like glossy period pieces from the studio era, The Valley of Decision will be right up your alley.

Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man

Another of the movies that's been back in the FXM rotation over the past couple of months is Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man. It's going to be on FXM again, tomorrow (June 21) at 6:00 AM, so I'm mentioning it now.

As you can probably guess from the title, the movie is based on works by writer Ernest Hemingway. Specifically, it's the Nick Adams stories, which I don't think I've actually read although as I understand it they're loosely based on some of Hemingway's own experiences. After all, they always tell starting writers to write what you know about. Nick Adams (Richard Beymer) is a young man of about 20 circa 1916 living with his parents, Dr. Henry (Arthur Kennedy) and Helen (Jessica Tandy) in a small town in northern Michigan. Mom runs the family and is frankly dominating, trying to force Nick into a marriage to nice local girl Carolyn (Diane Baker) and henpecking Dad. Nick has had enough of it, so after a bender one night with his friend George (Michael J. Pollard), he decides he's going to run off and grow up.

Nick tries to ride the rails, but gets knocked off by another man, ending up in the countryside where he makes the acquaintance of a man nicknamed the Battler (Paul Newman). The Battler was a boxer back in the day, but as with Anthony Quinn's character in Requiem for a Heavyweight, he's obviously taken a few punches too many and isn't good for anything. The Battler has a trainer in the form of Bugs (Juano Hernandez). Unfortunately, while Bugs doesn't dislike Nick, he realizes that the Battler needs to be kept away from everybody, so Bugs ultimately sends Nick on his way.

Nick ends up in another small town where he meets the chronically drunk Billy Campbell (Dan Dailey). Billy's job is to put up posters advertising the burlesque show run by Mr. Turner (Fred Clark), only to leave for the next town before Turner shows up to find Billy drunk and try to get Billy into rehab (or "taking the cure", as they called it back in the day). Ultimately neither Billy nor Turner is ultimately a bad person, but they're just incompatible and Billy really doesn't want to deal with his boss' hectoring him about his drinking. Billy and Nick sleep in late one day, not getting out of town before Turner shows up.

Since Nick hasn't been able to do much in life so far, he thinks about giving up, wiring Dad for the money for a ticket home (James Dunn plays the telegrapher). But just before the telegraph gets sent, Nick decides that no, he doesn't want to go home, and goes to New York City, where he thinks he can get a job writing for a newspaper even though he's never done this before. The editor tells him to come back when he gets experience. He then does some odd jobs, ultimately working as a busboy/waiter who is serving an Italian-American effort to raise money for the war effort in Italy, the Great War going on and the US not yet being involved in the war.

Nick signs up to become an ambulance driver in Italy, even though again he's got no experience and can't speak a word of Italian, qualities which understandably vex his commanding officer, Maj. Padula (Ricardo Montalban). Nick gets paired with another American, John (Eli Wallach), and actually does a fairly good job as an ambulance driver. But a bombing campaign leaves him badly injured and sent to a hospital in Verona, where he meets Rossana (Susan Strasberg), a nurse who takes care of him and with whom he falls in love.

Some people are going to like Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man, but I had three substantial problems with it. First off was the episodic nature of the story, although that's the smallest of the problems. There are a lot of people in the movie, but for the most part they come and go and you can't really get that invested in them. Secondly, the movie runs at a very leisurely pace, ultimately lasting 145 minutes. Boy does it feel slow at times.

But the biggest problem was with the casting of Richard Beymer as Nick Adams. To me he just didn't have the charisma to pull off the role. Most of the supporting players do well with their roles, drawing an even sharper contrast with the bland Beymer just walking through his part.

I'm not certain whether fans of Hemingway will enjoy seeing the Nick Adams stories put on film, or feel that Hemingway has been butchered and dislike the movie as a result. In either case, watch and draw your own conclusions.

The Years of Color

One of the movies that I hadn't seen before this years 31 Days of Oscar is The Green Years. It's going to be on TCM tomorrow at 1:45 PM, and fortunately, I had it on the DVR to watch and do a review here.

Robert Shannon (played by Dean Stockwell as a child) is a young boy circa 1900 whose mother moved to Ireland to get married, but she and her husband have both died, leaving poor Robert an orphan. His family is mostly living in Loganford, Scotland, so the people who took care of Mom at the end of her life ship Robert off to that family.

The patriarch of the family is Papa Leckie (Hume Cronyn), Robert's maternal grandfather, married to Mama Leckie (Selena Royle), even though there are two great-grandparents around, known as Grandma Leckie (Gladys Cooper) and Grandpa Gow (Charles Coburn). There are also a couple of adult children who are Robert's aunt and uncles, but they mostly move out, having grown up, only to return now and then.

There are all sorts of conflicts right off the bat. Papa Leckie works for Loganford's sewer department, hoping to get a promotion when his boss leaves. Meanwhile, he's a severe penny pincher, to the point that it annoys everybody else in the house. Papa is more or less waiting for his father-in-law to die so he can get his hands on that sweet sweet insurance money. Grandpa Gow is also disliked intensely by Grandma Leckie, since Gow is a bon vivant and inveterate teller of tall tales who also has a taste for the drink.

Robert's entrance into the family also means that there's another mouth to feed. He shows quite a bit of aptitude at school, to the point that Papa will consistently point out later that he made a big sacrifice by not pulling Robert out of the Academy at the legal school-leaving age but letting him go on to graduate. Also complicating things is that he's Catholic, his Mom having converted while the family back in Scotland having remained whichever Protestant denomination they were.

So that's more or less the first half of the movie. The second half opens after several years have passed and Robert is about to graduate from the Academy. He's grown up and Dean Stockwell is obviously too young to play the ~18-year-old Robert, so he's now played by Tom Drake. He's got a best friend who's relatively well-to-do and can go off to university, and a girlfriend who's got a good enough singing voice that she might have a shot at a scholarship to the conservatory. As for Robert, he's in line to take the examination to get a scholarship to go to university with the aim of studying medicine and become a doctor. But there's a catch: Papa Leckie is going to have to sign off on it, and dammit, he only sees Robert as a source of revenue, so it's off to the local boiler factory for Robert, Papa having no qualms about crushing his grandson's dreams.

Thankfully, despite being three generations older than Robert and having had a lifetime of heavy drinking, Gow still hasn't dropped dead. He's the one member of the family who has always been kind to Robert (well, Mama Leckie has generally been on his side too), and even at this advanced age he's going to do all he can to try to fulfill Robert's dream, because, after all, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.

The Green Years is the sort of movie that MGM was good at making, and the polish that MGM could put on a movie like this really shines through. Now, a lot of it is probably nonsense; Coburn has a truly awful beard and I don't know that any two characters have the same Scottish accent. But, minus a couple of musical numbers since the studio was trying to promote Beverly Tyler, it's amiable enough. It runs a bit long at just over two hours, though, so be warned.

The Green Years did get a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection, but the TCM Shop has it on backorder, while Amazon has it listed as avaialble to buy from a bunch of non-Amazon sellers. Make of that what you will.

Cocoon

I can't recall the last time Cocoon showed up on FXM. It's been on TCM a couple of times, and I recorded it the last time it showed up. But it's finally on the FXM schedule, having gotten an airing today and on again tomorrow morning at 11:10 AM. So I sat down to watch it and do a review on it here.

Wilford Brimley plays Ben Luckett, who lives at a senior citizens' community together with his wife Mary (Maureen Stapleton) and several of his more recent friends. Ben being a bit younger (in real life Brimley was 20-25 years younger than most of the other retiree co-stars), he can still drive at least for the time being, and is somewhat more independent, as opposed, say, to the Lefkowitzes, Bernie (Jack Gilford) and Rosie (Herta Ware), the latter of whom has some form of dementia.

While a lot of people are doing the standard old-fart group activities that the retirement home puts on, Ben breaks in to the unoccupied home next door, which has a nice pool house that nobody is going to notice him and his friends using. These friends are unmarried Art (Don Ameche), and Joe Finley (Hume Cronyn), married to Alma (Cronyn's real-life wife Jessica Tandy).

Meanwhile, at the marina nearby, Jack Bonner (Steve Guttenberg) is running a struggling charter boat business. He's lucky to be able to pay off his dockage fees, but other than that, he's had a terrible string of bad luck. So how does all of this come together?

One day, Walter (Brian Dennehy) shows up along with friends including Kitty (Raquel Welch's daughter Tahnee) and Pillsbury (Tyrone Power Jr., although he's really the third or fourth member of the acting family with that name, since "Tyrone Power Sr." was a silent film star and there was one before that). They offer Jack a substantial sum of money in exchange for exclusive use of the boat for the next month. They also show up over at the unoccupied home, looking to rent that for a month, too.

This puts a crimp in the plans of Ben and his friends, who might not be able to use the pool any longer. They decide that they'll still go in when they see Walter and his friends go out on the boat; that way they know they'll have the pool for a while. As for Walter's group, they go scuba diving and bring up what look like large shells that have been lying on the sea floor for who knows how long, bring them on the boat, and then store them in the pool.

This last bit, unsurprisingly, gives the three old men a bit of pause, but they still go into the pool even with these rocks or whatever they are in the pool. They find out after getting out of the pool that they feel much younger -- and hornier -- with all sorts of similar anti-aging effects. Ben had failed the eyesight portion of his license renewal but now passes with flying colors, while Joe finds that his terminal cancer is suddenly in remission.

This should be good news, but there are consequences that aren't entirely positive, such as when Joe starts flirting with other women and it threatens to break up his marriage to Alma, whom he loves dearly.

As for that pool, it turns out that Walter and his friends are aliens, which we first learn when Jack is watching Kitty undress through a small hole in the boat. She doesn't just undress; she takes off her skin, revealing a bright light/pure energy being that obviously throws Jack for a loop. The big surprise is that the aliens don't seem to be afraid of Jack when he finds this out. Nor do they seem afraid of all the old people when Walter finds Ben and his friends in it.

As for those rocks or shells, they're actually the titular cocoons. Walter and his friends had led an expeditionary force from another star system millennia ago, but were forced to leave, putting their friends in these cocoons and depositing them at the bottom of the sea until they could return. (You'd think 10,000 years of geological processes might have done something to the cocoons, but apparently not.) Walter is back to retrieve his friends, and filled the pool with some sort of life force energy that would keep the cocoons and the beings in them alive until they can get back to the spaceship, where they'll live out their immortal days until the heat death of the universe.

But there's a limited amount of life force in that pool, and the energy revitalizing Ben and friends and making them young again ultimately saps all of that energy, making it no longer a fountain of youth and even resulting in the deaths of one of the beings, this being the first death Walter has experienced personally. It's that bit of emotion that leads Walter to accept Ben's sincere apology as well as Ben's offer to help put the remaining cocoons back on the sea floor until Walter can come one more time to retrieve them. In exchange, Walter offers to take Ben and his friends on the spaceship where they can be eternally young and a useful part of some alien society. But will they be willing to leave everything they know behind, and can they even escape?

Cocoon for much of the first half seems like a light silly science fiction fantasy, but with the draining of the life force in the pool it really turns into something thought-provoking and interesting. Of course the idea of not having to grow old and decrepit like Rose is appealing, but most of the time we don't really think about the consequences of an action like that. The material is handled well, and the performances of all these older actors getting another chance at a third act in life are reasonably good, even if Don Ameche's Oscar really seems more like a career award.

Cocoon is absolutely worth a watch, and I was surprised to see that it seems to be out of print on DVD. It does, however, seem to be available on Amazon streaming if you don't have FXM.

Nobody's Fool

I'm always looking to get more stuff off the DVR to make room for new things I want to record. Recently, I had the chance to watch the little 1994 movie Nobody's Fool.

Er, not that; that song is from Caddyshack II which isn't on TV any time soon as far as I could tell. Instead, this movie stars Paul Newman as Sully (short for his surname Sullivan), who ought to be close to retirement age but instead screwed up his life to the point that he's paying rent to an elderly teacher Beryl (Jessica Tandy), working odd jobs in a Rust Belt town in western New York called North Bath, and trying to get workers' comp out of his employer, Carl Roebuck of Tip Top Construction (Bruce Willis).

As Thanksgiving is approaching, one of Sully's odd jobs involves loading a bunch of cinder blocks onto his beat up pick-up truck and transporting them somewhere unstated. However, he puts enough blocks in the truck bed such that one of the rear tires goes flat, forcing Sully to walk home and try to hitch a ride.

Who should pick up Sully but Peter (Dylan Walsh), who is actually Sully's estranged son, not having seen Dad in three years and having been raised by his Mom after Dad walked out on the family when Peter was a kid only to move just a few blocks away. Sadly, Peter hasn't quite made a success of his own life either. He was an assistant professor of English at the University of West Virginia, but cuts in the English department have cost the non-tenured Peter his job. Also, his own marriage is failing, ultimately leading Peter to ask Dad for a job.

Indeed, pretty much everybody in North Bath is not much of a success. Carl's business isn't particularly going well which might explain why he's been trying to stiff Sully on the workers' comp; at the same time, Carl's own marriage to Toby (Melanie Griffith) is failing, to the point that she's been seducing Sully, who might finally be willing to go even further. Sully's lawyer Wirf (Gene Saks) is a shyster; Beryl's son Clive Jr. (Josef Sommer) is trying to get Mom to evice Sully but failing in his own job as bank manager financing an amusement park that ultimately doesn't come to North Bath.

While Nobody's Fool is somewhat about the whole town of North Bath, it's really about Sully's place in that town and the effect he's had on everybody in town (and to a lesser extent the effect they have on each other) without his realizing it until it's almost too late. Sully is a sort of caretaker to Beryl who treats her better than her own son despite Sully's own failings. Sully wants to reconcile with Peter and Peter's son, although it's also going to mean letting them go back into the wider world at the end. And perhaps that thing with Toby isn't going to work at all.

Nobody's Fool is one of those movies without a particularly deep plot per se, being more of a slice of life movie. Paul Newman is the decided star here, and got another Oscar nomination for his part which he plays quite well. But the rest of the cast is just as good and they really make the movie shine. Jessica Tandy, in one of her final films (she died before the movie's release and the movie is dedicated to her) unsurprisingly does quite well. More surprising is Bruce Willis, who shows that perhaps he really could act given some direction. Showing promise pre-stardom is Philip Seymore Hoffman as Raymer, a police deputy with a vendetta against Sully who somehow keeps screwing things up.

The atmosphere is also quite good, although I was mildly surprised to see that a couple of towns on the east side of the Hudson River that had not yet gentrified were used as locations. Western New York has been allowed to decay for generations thanks to corrupt state politicians who don't care about anything outside the New York City metropolitan area, and I can't help but think there are a lot of towns further north and west of the Hudson Valley that could easily have played the part of North Bath. (To be fair, I'd guess being closer to New York City would make production easier.)

Nobody's Fool is a little movie that absolutely deserves to be seen and become better known. The last I checked at the TCM Shop, it's available both as a standalone DVD as well as on at least one box set.

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.