'The Night Visitor' (1971) – Laslo Benedek.
Laslo Benedek's unusually compelling, nerve-strafingly tense psychodrama 'The Night Visitor' is a triumphant example where an immaculately made thriller's ominous style is readily matched by its scintillatingly sinister substance. Featuring a mesmerizing performance of menacing intensity by powerhouse Thespian Max Von Sydow as the morbidly meticulous maniac Salem, falsely accused of murder by cruelly conniving relatives, and given a life sentence in a vastly imposing, oppressively Gothic Asylum, unbowed, Salem secretively plots his brutal revenge! On par with the very best of Hitchcock, Chabrol, and Polanski, this masterfully crafted, skin-crawlingly creepy 70s blood-chiller has a singularly glacial atmosphere, the mediaeval, fortress-like Asylum making for an especially doomy backdrop, ceaselessly buffeted by wailing, icy winds, the teeth-grindingly tense scenes of Salem grimly descending this abject, monolithically miserable edifice are strikingly imbued with an unexpected grandeur, the bitter, wintry, wholly inhospitable landscape offering him little succour as he relentlessly goes about his exacting, quite legitimately cold-blooded revenge!
There can be little doubt that Benedek's 'The Night Visitor' benefits hugely from the luminous presence of Liv Ullman, Per Oscarsson, and Trevor Howard, with Hammer Films alumni Rupert Davis and Andrew Kier both delivering deliciously colourful performances! While the macabre subject matter is necessarily bleak, Laslo Benedek's sublimely atmospheric Gothic horror rigorously maintains its strange fascination, Salem's nocturnal peregrinations prove bizarrely edifying, Von Sydow's dark charisma being impossible to ignore, as is maestro Henry Mancini's spare, malevolently enthralling score!
'Laslo Benedek's starkly compelling, nerve-strafingly tense Gothic psychodrama The Night Visitor' has Max Von Sydow's darkly descending angel of death enacting a raven-hearted revenge worthy of Poe himself!'. Weirdlingwolf – Dirty Kunst Video.
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ReplyDelete(Drat! I accidentally deleted my prior ramblings!) Great stuff, I remember watching this when no more than a tadpole and I got a very strange, physically uncomfortable vibe that would not feel again (corrected and amped up to 11) until eons later, when I saw "Werckmeister Harmonies" by that great uplifter of moods, Béla Tarr. Or maybe it was just that the chair was wonky and the central heating was kaput (almost 40 years on it still is - should get around fixing the damn thing someday. Cold as a (particularly nesh) penguin's scrotum... But I digress). In any case, by golly, my good Sir, have you evoked with your usual masterful verbiage the distinctly, unforgettably cold, insalubrious atmosphere I felt that evening somewhere in the mid-eighties in front of the telly, still a jackanapesey whippersnapper who did not know what was in store...! Regards, Mayte :^)
ReplyDeleteOnce again, you have blissfully warmed my increasingly glacial cockles with your inspired, and perspicaciously perky vernacular, my goodly gabbling scribe-a-naut!
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