Word: hitchcocked
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ROBERT BENTON, the writer/director who won two Oscars for introducing to the screen a new, more realistic depiction of family life with Kramer vs. Kramer, has now done the same for the mystery thriller genre. In Still of the Night, Benton expands on the Hitchcock tradition of studying the human mind as the true key to how and why crimes occur. Benton emphasizes character, not gore, the murder that precipitates the action is less the focus of the film than a device for exploring the inner lives of the characters involved...
Still of the Night is an intellectual thriller; it excites the mind rather than the trigger finger. As such, this stylish and excellently acted film grabs the audience's attention with an intensity reminiscent of Hitchcock's finest, keeping its suspense at a peak from start to finish. The question asked in the film's newspaper ads--"Did she or didn't she?"--is misleading. Only her psychiatrist knows for sure...
Mostly because it is . . . well . . . still. For a movie about a series of gory knife murders (and that had the working title Stab), it has an oddly reverential hush about it. This seems to arise less from a regard for the Hitchcock tradition than from a quiet appreciation of its own classiness. As a murdered man's psychiatrist, drawn into the investigation of his patient's death and also toward his suspiciously nervous mistress, Scheider is sober, stalwart and workmanlike, but one longs for the goofy exasperation Cary Grant used to bring to roles like this...
...something distant and unemotional about the way Benton presents her mysterious case. As the movie proceeds, one finds oneself examining its references (Vertigo, North by Northwest, Rear Window, Psycho, Spellbound) rather than getting truly involved with the story. Soon a longing for the rat-tat-tattiness of sleazier Hitchcock knockoffs like Dressed to Kill steals over the viewer...
There was, after all, a lot of the bad boy in Hitchcock. It was that cheeky, jokey quality in him, as well as his unobtrusive technical mastery, that allowed him the pretense of being simply an entertainer all those years during which he was dripping his obsessions into his audiences' unsuspecting brains. Lacking both sides of the old boy's schizophrenic sensibility, Benton can do no more than offer a dispassionate mimicry of someone else's style. There are a few little scares in his film, but nothing to stir our dreams or haunt our memories...