Uneasy Rider: The Night Digger (1971), by Roald Dahl

The Night Digger (1971), tagged a tale of the strange and perverse on contemporary posters, is one of those downbeat, deglammed crime films that proliferated in the seedy and sexploitive Seventies.  At first blush you might think it's as far removed as imaginable from a bright, cheery, escapist Agatha Christie murder confection like Evil under the Sun, recently reviewed by me here, but the script is by British fiction writer Roald Dahl, so you might expect a few wickedly sardonic curveballs along the way--and you indeed get them.  

into the night

Dahl wrote the screenplay for the film expressly for his wife, the great American actress Patricia Neal, who despite being nominated for an Oscar for the 1968 domestic drama The Subject was Roses, had not been offered any film work since.  Neal had suffered a near fatal series of strokes in 1965, from which, with her husband's help, she had made an impressive recovery--though at age forty-four when she appeared in the film she still suffered from some noticeable impairment.  

Dahl expressly wrote into the story that the protagonist, Maura Prince, is a stroke survivor, but even with that Neal later said that some of the people on the set made sneering comments ostensibly behind her back when she forgot lines and such.  I really admire Neal and her struggle to keep acting under such conditions.  

In the film Maura Prince is the adopted daughter of, Mrs. Edith Prince, a rather horrid, decayed, blind, elderly, imperious, widowed gentlewoman (wonderfully played by the British actress Pamela Brown), who keeps Maura yoked to her run-down country mansion as a put-upon house servant, cook and caregiver.  

In real life Pamela Brown suffered from severe arthritis and despite being only seven years older than Neal, who as discussed above had her own physical problems, credibly comes off as Neal's mother (though the fact that Edith is stated to have adopted Neal's character gives the film some leeway concerning age).  

Mrs. Prince begrudges her daughter even the few hours a week that she spends working at speech therapy with stroke victims at a hospital in the city.  The handsome, kindly doctor there wants Maura to take on a permanent job with them but her mother predictably goes into histrionics when Maura floats that little idea to her. 

The local church organist Mr. Bolton--a gossipy, insinuating gentleman who has "impending pedophile scandal" written all over him (great performance by Scottish actor Graham Crowden; he lived until 2010 appearing in episodes of Foyle's War and Midsomer Murders before his death)--has a nephew whom Mrs. Prince was going to hire as a live-in gardener (the gardens are in terrible shape), but he backed out of the deal.  Providentially (or not), an insinuating young man on a motorcycle shows up out of nowhere, seemingly, to offer the Princes his services around the house and grounds.  

How much is that doggy in the window?  

Maura's not interested (or is she).  You just can't trust strangers these days.  

Mrs. Prince is charmed.

But her daughter is dubious.

 

A churchgoer!  Mrs Prince is pleased.  Maura knows he's bullshitting Edith.

Whimsically, to say the least, Mrs. Prince decides that this young man, who gives his name as Billy Jarvis, is probably a family relation and he seals the deal when he convinces the formally devout old lady that he is a regular Church of England devotee.  

Maura thinks this is all nuts but she has no say so in this or any other matter concerning the house.  Her mother even gives the young man's Maura's bedroom to sleep in.  (Maura sleeps downstairs to be near her mother, but hates the violation of her upstairs sanctum by this upstart newcomer.)

Contrary to Maura's expectations, Billy proves a hard and enthusiastic worker around the house and estate.  But when Sunday arrives, Billy does not want to go to church.  At first Maura looks at this amusedly, thinking you made your pew, boy, now sit in it; but then she realizes that Billy is genuinely terrified--so much so that he hides cowering in a wardrobe closet.  What is going on?  

On his motorcycle are all the poor boy's worldly possessions.

already hard at work around the house

Can she bake an apple pie, charming Billy?

Yes, and more.  Maura blushes becomingly at a compliment.

Late to church! (love the composition with the beatific painting on the left)

Mrs. Prince does not approve.

Something's up.

He doesn't want to go to church.

He really doesn't.

What's wrong with Billy?

Something quite terrible is up with Billy, it turns out.  Billy does make it with the Princes to church, but in its sadly underpopulated congregation he spies a fetching girl and....

Soon Mr. Bolton is telling Mrs. Prince and another eagerly prying, censorious widow, Edith's bestie in bitchery, Mrs. Millicent McMurtry, that there has apparently been another one of those nasty sex murders, some ten miles away, of a pretty young brunette women, her body evidently carried off and disposed of most ingeniously by the murderer.  

For church, Billy has been forced to wear
Mrs. Prince's dead husband's best suit from the laying out.  Along with Billy's tennies.

 

Eh, who's this new boy?

Departing Billy gets a glimpse of...

...a pretty young woman!
(seemingly the only young adult there besides himself).

What's wrong with Billy?!

The mills of gossip grind exceedingly small.

It seems that, unbeknownst to Mrs. and Miss Prince, nice, young, boyish Billy, sweet and handsome and hard-working and only twenty years old, is a serial killer!  What makes it worse is that Maura, a repressed spinster for so many years, now seems to be falling for him, whatever the consequences.  

Roald Dahl adapted his screenplay from the recent first book Nest in a Falling Tree by New Zealand author Joy Cowley, adding a serial killer element to the tale.  (I do wonder what the author thought of this?)  

there's a devil in the summerhouse

not this guy

getting closer

Billy has great plans for the place.

Wearing his new pink shirt, bought for him by Maura
Billy gets lavished with two lamb chops
while she and dear Mother have to make due with one apiece.

bared torso

mustn't look

The Edgar Award winning Dahl is known not only for children's, but macabre fiction, having penned a goodly number of classic short suspense tales, like "Lamb to the Slaughter" and "Man from the South," which often were adapted for television.  Those two short stories, directed respectively by the Master himself and the late Norman Lloyd, were filmed as two of the best episodes of the great Fifties/Sixties television suspense anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

So it's not surprising to me that Dahl put a creepy twist on what was apparently originally a mainstream novel about the affair between a lonely older woman and a younger man.  Watching the film, however, I came to the conclusion that it could have stood on its own without the murder element.  Neal is quite moving in the role of the middle-aged "spinster" who had given up on love (just her facial expressions do volumes), while Clay--only twenty-four at the time of filming (two decades younger than his co-star)--in his film debut as an adult actor (as a child he appeared with Oliver Reed in the Hammer fright flick The Damned), is very good indeed as the troubled (okay, very troubled) young man.  

It's interesting to compare Clay's Billy in this film with his character of Patrick Redfern a little over a decade later in Evil under the Sun.  Patrick is so suave and smooth and posh, a total contrast with Billy, who though by no means stupid, utterly lacks sophistication and has a shaggy early Seventies hairdo, mutton choppish sideburns and beetle brows that bring out what one blog reviewer called his "caveman" aspect.  No one would ever liken Patrick Redfern unto a caveman.  

To me Clay's Billy resembles one of the members of the Sixties English rock band The Animals.  I guess you could say that Clay, who in films also played the famous literary figures Sir Lancelot and Mellors the gamekeeper, had range.  (He also played Shakespeare's implicitly queer patron the Earl of Southampton in the Seventies British series Will Shakespeare, starring none other than Tim Curry, a few years after his awesome trans turn in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, as the Bard.)

set photo of the film's two stars

The small supporting cast is terrific too.  Dahl has great wicked fun satirizing the backbiting churchgoers of the community, so eager to stick the knife in their neighbors, figuratively speaking.  Somehow it makes Billy, who seems literally not to know what he is doing when he murders and is genuinely an anguished soul, more sympathetic.  

There's a running joke where gossip, getting out of hand, runs wild with the tale that the mild, effeminate vicar (Peter Sallis, Wallace of Wallace and Gromit fame) is getting a sex change operation to become a woman and that his forceful, mannish wife (Yootha Joyce, Mrs. Roper of Man about the House fame) is having another one to become a man.  Millicent wonders worriedly whether "she" will become the vicar then.  This little side bit has surprising relevance today, over fifty years later, with the influencer-promoted panic over gender transitioning.  

the Reverend and Mrs. Pallafox
According to rumor they will soon exchange sexes and gender roles.

The good widows disapprove of this whole sex change business. 

Because of Dahl's genre alterations, it is as a crime film that we must analyze The Night Digger, however.  The film has effective macabre touches, but overall the conventional elements rather slow the story down in my opinion.  Patricia O'Neal, who probably really did not want to do a serial murderer film at all, bitterly complained after seeing the film that it was "pornographic,"  while Dahl was incensed about what he deemed deviations from his script.

Perhaps Neal saw the original x-rated cut, before thirteen minutes were excised from the film.  In the edited version there is absolutely no explicit sex or violence, though one of Billy's victims is seen dead with her bare breasts exposed, while Nicholas Clay, looking like an even more muscular David, bares his own ample naked bottom in one scene.  

Clay only did a small number of films, but the four with him I have seen--Night Digger, Excalibur, Lady Chatterley's Lover and Evil under the Sun, have been remarkably buttocentric, ass it were, where the actor is concerned.  In each of the first three films he exposes his naked bum, while in the last one he appears in a black bathing suit that can barely contain his "roundness," as the "tired old queen" youtube film reviewer Steve Hayes amusingly put it.  

Other scenes in Night Digger are shot with Clay squatting down in tight pants that you have to be amazed didn't split during filming.  All this cannot be an accident; apparently both Clay and the filmmakers realized the actor had a lot going on down there and determined to take advantage of it, like actress Bo Derek with her breasts (though Clay is a vastly better actor).  And I daresay maybe they would have done the same thing with Laurence Olivier had Larry been that thicc, as the young people say!  After all filmmakers did just that with Kirk Alyn in that Charlie Chan film I reviewed back in April.  

How does he ever fit into them?

Billy spies the pretty district nurse.

holding the door for a lady

a very pretty lady

cleaning up his bike after a deadly ride

But, butt me no butts, to slightly twist an old saying! Getting back to the story, despite the star's view that the film was Seventies sleaze, if anything it is, to the contrary, quite tastefully done, though obviously the murders by their nature are morbid and distasteful.  The problem really is that they aren't very thrilling.  

If you compare Night Digger to an older Thirties film it resembles to a degree, Night Must Fall, or one that began filming just a few weeks after Night Digger opened in the United States, Alfred Hitchcock's 1972 suspense flick Frenzy, you can see how it's comparatively lacking in thrills.  Both the older film and the more modern one are much more suspenseful, but then neither of those movies purports to be anything "more" than genre entertainment.  This is why the old aesthetic theorists of detective fiction used to say that you can't combine mysteries and thrillers with serious character studies.  Mysteries are all about escapism and pleasant diversion, they insisted.

I don't believe this is true inherently, but it is a challenge.  I'm not sure that Night Digger succeeds.  Still as a character study of a repressed middle-aged woman and a sadly troubled young man I rather enjoyed it. I think I would even have enjoyed it without the murders.  

Mr. Bolton is seriously creepy in this film, arguably rather more so than Billy.

Edith isn't a piker in the creep department either...

nor Millicent

Which isn't to say that Night Digger does not have some impressive eerie scenes.  When Billy's lovely blue eyes go blank as he enters some sort of murderous fugue state, he's genuinely frigtening.  His night biking scenes evoke menace, and the way he disposes of his bodies recalls one of John Rhode's ingenious Golden Age Dr. Priestley detective novels.  

There are some scenes that even made me wonder whether they influenced Hitchcock with his comeback film Frenzy.  The great director of course was well-familiar with the work of Dahl from his television series.  Night Digger even has a score by Bernard Herrmann, Hitch's shamefully discarded composer.  Apparently Herrmann didn't get along with Dahl, who wanted the screenplay altered to suit his scoring.  

The film's use of closeups is very effective too, both in eerie and non-eerie scenes.  (I think the pics give some indication of that.)  It was filmed by Alex Thomson, then early in career like the movie's director (see below).  Thomson was later nominated for a cinematography Oscar for the gorgeous film Excalibur, which, starred, incidentally, Nicholas Clay as Lancelot, literally a knight in shining armor in that film.  

He also later shot the Shakespeare films Hamlet and Love's Labour's Lost for Kenneth Branagh, Alien 3, The Scarlet Letter, Black Beauty, Cliffhanger, the Eighties fantasy films Labyrinth and Legend, and, for horror fans, the 1978 remake of that old dark house chestnut The Cat and the Canary and Seventies Vincent Price horror classic Dr. Phibes Rises Again.  He was no slacker in this department.  

Watching Night Digger you might well be reminded as well of one of Ruth Rendell's psychological crime novels built around the murderous activities of a psychopathic killer, of which there are quite a few in her oeuvre.  I was!

the end of a decidedly Frenzied sequence with a corpse in The Night Digger

The film received mixed reviews from critics (though the acting was generally praised) and it died a quick death at the box office.  In the US it played for a few weeks at New York art house theaters, suggestively on a billing with the pioneering gay prison drama Fortune and Men's Eyes.  (Bet that audience enjoyed Nick Clay.)  In 2011 Warner Bros. reissued Night Digger on an archive collection dvd, leading to its getting some attention on film blogs, but it deserves to better known.  

The film's young director, Alistair Reid, later went on primarily to television work, directing the praised crime series Gangster and Traffik (the basis for the Oscar-winning film) and a couple of episodes of Inspector Morse.  There was a lot of talent that worked on this film, and it should be better known than it is.

Billy as a young schoolboy

A flashback scene of some ghastly gypsy women to explain how Billy ended up the way he did
is probably the most frightening thing in the whole film.  Today this would be chalked up as 
ethnic/racial stigmatization by the scripter, Roald Dahl, whose children's books
recently were edited for indelicate language.