Gaslight Shadows

By JAY COCKS

NIGHT WATCH

Directed by BRIAN G. HUTTON

Screenplay by TONY WILLIAMSON

Elizabeth Taylor, looking unwieldy, appears here as a rich Englishwoman whose sleep is troubled by nightmares about her former husband. She is haunted by memories of his death in a car wreck, in the company of a young lady of dubious virtue. During one sleepless night, she looks out of her window at the spooky house across the yard and sees--or thinks she sees, or at least says she sees--a dead man sitting in an armchair with his throat cut. Later she sees light behind the house's rickety shutters and a woman's corpse in the same chair. The police are called, but they find nothing.

Taylor continues to lurch along the emotional curve between peskiness and seeming paranoid schizophrenia. She tries the patience of her unctuous second husband (Laurence Harvey) and frays the nerves of her best friend (Billie Whitelaw). Finally plans are made to ship her off to a Swiss sanitarium. No matter what she says at this point, it is doubtful that anyone would believe her.

The shadow that really lies across Taylor, of course, is that of Gaslight, that old movie chiller in which a woman prone to nervous disorders believes herself to be going mad, both despite and because of the fawning ministrations of her husband and a friend. Director Hutton incorporates most of the cliches of the Gaslight tradition, including squeaking stairs, hysterical phone calls and many looks of lingering menace. Screenwriter Williamson's script, adapted from the Broadway play by Lucille Fletcher (who wrote another classic of the genre, Sorry, Wrong Number, a few decades back), retains all the trappings of a three-act thriller except the proscenium.

There is one thoroughly nasty and frightening sequence in the old house, with glinting carving knives, rivulets of blood and grinning, pasty ghosts from the past. This is saved, quite properly, for the last. But in order to get hooked by it, and through it to learn the movie's fairly intriguing gimmick, it is necessary to endure all the melodrama that goes before. Everything considered, it is too high a price to pay.

sb Jay Cocks

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