Crew
Director – Brian G. Hutton, Screenplay – Tony Williamson, Additional Dialogue – Evan Jones, Story Based on the Play Night Watch (1972) by Lucille Fletcher, Producers – George W. George, Martin Poll & Barnard Straus, Photography – Billy Williams, Music – John Cameron, Art Direction – Peter Murton. Production Company – Brut Productions Inc.
Cast
Elizabeth Taylor (Ellen Wheeler), Laurence Harvey (John Wheeler), Billie Whitelaw (Sarah Cooke), Bill Dean (Inspector Walker), Robert Lang (Mr Appleby), Michael Danvers-Walker (Sergeant Norris), Tony Britton (Tony), Rosario Serrano (Dolores)
Plot
At home in suburban London, Ellen Wheeler insists that she sees a dead body in the abandoned house next door. However, there is nothing there when her husband John and their visiting friend Sarah Cooke look. Ellen is insistent on bringing in the police who find nothing in the house. The issue of what she saw preys on Ellen’s mind and John begins to wonder if she is losing her faculties.
Night Watch is called the only horror film to star Elizabeth Taylor. I would dispute that somewhat. She also stars in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), which I would call a borderline horror film. There was also her appearance in Doctor Faustus (1967) and Hammersmith is Out (1972), both films centered around deals with Devil figures. In addition, she has appeared in a couple of other oddities that have been reviewed on this site with The Blue Bird (1976) and The Flintstones (1994).
At the time Night Watch was made, Elizabeth Taylor was one of the biggest stars in the world. She had been acting ever since she was a child back in the 1940s and appeared in classics such as National Velvet (1944), A Place in the Sun (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Cleopatra (1963) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1965), among many others.
The film is adapted from the play Night Watch (1972), which had just enjoyed a successful run on Broadway. In any other context, it could easily have been one of the Psycho-Thrillers made by Hammer Films during the 1960s – see the likes of A Taste of Fear/Scream of Fear (1961) Paranoiac (1963), Maniac (1963), Nightmare (1964), Hysteria (1964), The Fanatic/Die, Die, My Darling (1965), The Nanny (1965), Crescendo (1970) and Fear in the Night (1972).
As a Hammer film, Night Watch would mostly likely have been shot in black-and-white, featuring an ingenue actress in the lead. It is however the calibre of the casting – Elizabeth Taylor, her Butterfield 8 (1960) co-star Laurence Harvey. and Billie Whitelaw – that elevates the film to a different level altogether. The flip side of this is that it feels like a film that is cruising on its star power as opposed to one that is trying to be appeal to regular horror audiences.
Director Brian G. Hutton creates a passable atmosphere of paranoia and tension, although you cannot help but think how much better the film would have worked if it had been placed in the hands of someone like Hammer psycho-thriller specialist Freddie Francis. The scenes with Elizabeth Taylor thinking she sees the dead body where we cannot quite be sure what we see across the way are reasonably well delivered. On the whole though, the suspense and thriller aspect is not up to much as the genre goes.
Both the film and play are both founded around quite a solid twist at the end of the film that throws everything we think is going on on its head. This does lift the film somewhat. Although it [PLOT SPOILERS] did leave me questioning exactly how much of everything that went on was part of the set-up and whether Elizabeth Taylor did actually see anything in the empty house across the way or not.
Night Watch should not be confused with several other films with identical titles including the Danish thriller Nightwatch (1994) and its English-language remake Nightwatch (1998), or the Russian supernatural film Night Watch (2004).
Elsewhere, Brian G. Hutton, a former actor, was mostly known for directing war films such as Where Eagles Dare (1968) and Kelly’s Heroes (1970). He had previously directed Elizabeth Taylor in X, Y & Zee (1972). His one other entry of genre interest is the police procedural The First Deadly Sin (1980).
Trailer here