The Night of the Following Day

Among Marlon Brando's brilliant filmography,"night of the following day" remains one of his most mysterious .I saw the movie twice (it was a continuous programme) when it was theatrically released and since,I have never talked about it with anybody afterward.

Yesterday ,when I finally saw it again after all those years,I realized I totally missed the point the first time:I had not understood the ending.It was a time unexpected twists were not that much common .Of course Fritz Lang's "Woman in the window" had already been made but I hardly knew Lang's name.

But if the ending eluded me ,blame it on the script too.To make sense,the whole story should have been seen through Pamela Franklin's eyes!Her part is underwritten ,she hasn't even got a name.Anyway,Brando's smile on the last picture is really spooky and makes me think of many films of today.

Cornfield's main asset is the perfection of his cast:apart from the two names I mention above,Richard Boone,Jess Hahn and Rita Moreno are first-class actors.Hats off to the latter who manages quite well in French: all the scenes with the cop are suspenseful ("Je vous ai fait peur?"=Did I scare you?)Cornfield's use of France is devoid of the usual clichés:no accordion tune,no Eiffel Tower,and,on the Champ Elysées ,we can't even see the Arc of Triumph.On the other hand,his depiction of the little bistros (French pubs) is accurate and the (Normandy?) beach where most of the action takes place is a good location.The house is wrapped in silence disturbed only by the sea.There's something bizarre which almost explains the eerie ending.

This story of kidnapping has been told and told and told.And however Hubert Cornfield 's movie is unlike all the other ones.Marlon Brando assumes an indifferent air,which increases the strange atmosphere .Towards the ending,everything is happening at once and we sometimes wonder whether the criminals' plans are that much good (in the bistro,they make blunder after another).

French director Robert Hossein certainly appreciated Cornfield's movie since he made "Point de chute" starring singer Johnny Hallyday which bore more than a distant resemblance to "night of...".Like Franklin,the victim has no name either !

Hubert Cornfield infatuation with France took the form of a ...French movie in 1976 "les Grands Moyens" from an Exbrayat's novel which sank without a trace.

What I like most about Night of the Following day is its sublime way in introduces France. The entire film is low-key, which is not quite seen nowadays in cinema. Plus there was Marlon Brando. Brando looks great in this film. His style of dress looks like he's modeling for some design that counts on black colors to the exclusion of all others. In one scene he's wearing an olive trench coat at an airport. Somehow I could not believe that this swank and bronzed and blonde-haired movie star could abet in the same crime as his associates. The only worth-while scenes are the ones Brando's in. Only because you don't know where they're going to end. Richard Boone, Rita Moreno, and the actor who plays her brother are all thinly written characters. Rita Moreno's character snorts heroin, her brother is an ineffectual non-entity who doesn't care whether he's killed as a result of committing this crime, and Richard Boone's character has sadistic tendencies. That's all the audience knows about these three characters. We even know less about Brando's character. But Brando can transcend the material in this shallow film because of his eerie star-quality. Night of the Following Day is indeed an ambitious film. Adapting a novel is ambitious in itself. A plot revolving around a volatile foursome kidnapping an heiress and hiding her out in a house somewhere in France sounds great on paper. But the audience must be engaged and somewhat let in on something. This film keeps the audience at a cool distance.

Released in 1968, "The Night of the Following Day" is a realistic crime drama featuring Brando as one of four professional criminals who kidnap a girl (a teenage Pamela Franklin) and hold up at a beach house in France. Richard Boone stars as the fiendish member, while Jess Hahn plays a likable loser, the brother of the pathetically drug addicted Rita Moreno.

At the time of this picture Brando was 44 years old and never looked better physically -- very trim and blond. Brando didn't start getting fat until the later-70's when he was well into his 50's. In other words, people need to quit envisioning Brando as some fat dude; most of his life he wasn't. Most men in their mid-40's would kill to look as good as Brando did at the this age.

BOTTOM LINE: Coming from the mid-60s when realism was fashionable this crime thriller is more of a crime drama, but suspense slowly builds to a compelling final act, which shows that crime doesn't pay, but people are redeemable if they qualify. There's also an unexpected twist that was fresh at the time, but is now eye-rolling.

The film was shot during generally cloudy conditions in France and runs a short but sweet 93 minutes.

GRADE: B-

This picture is worth time to see, but only if you've willing to invest the time to put in the effort to pay close attention. It is not a good choice as a movie to keep on in the background. The kidnapping goes wrong almost immediately, not from law enforcement personnel, but from within. We see the changing relationships between the kidnappers as the hours with their victim go on.

Added note: Try to rent the video. When NBC showed the movie on commercial television, the network added additional scenes featuring the brother of the victim working a police inspector. These scenes are not outtakes from the original movie that NBC restored, but new scenes that NBC filmed and added to make clearer the kidnappers' fate. They are unnecessary and rather insulting to the audience that the network felt they needed to "improve" the movie.

Although the acting is by all means above average, this movie suffers from lack of tension and suspense.The characters' actions are sometimes incomprehensible and the ending is too disappointing. Was this kind of ending supposed to be a novelty back in 1969? I don't think so.... Anyway, the Night of the following day is no garbage but it's no good either.

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