The Night Digger

Another one of those great forgotten movies of the 1970s. I caught this on late night TV about 20 years ago and have never forgotten it.

It was about a young man named Billy (Nicholas Clay) helping out Maura Prince (Patricia Neal) and her elderly mother (Pamela Brown) in their crumbling old house in England. Neal starts to fall for him (despite their age difference)...but she's not aware of what he does when he goes out alone every night...

Spooky little horror film. When I first saw it it was edited for TV so there were some unexplained pieces (like a bit about something that happened to him as a child which explains what he does as an adult) and, I assumed the violence was gone. I was finally able to see the entire uncut film and loved it! It wasn't a blood and guts horror movie--it's an excellent psychological horror. In fact the two violent acts in it aren't even shown! It concentrates on Billy and Maura and their feelings and thoughts. Clay and Neal are such great actors that just their expressions tell you what they're feeling. The growing romance between them was touching and believable. Also there's an excellent score and the ending was a stunner! This film has an R rating for some dialogue and a lengthy nude sequence with Clay. Well worth catching just for Clay and Neal.

This movie is available on DVD through the made to order system with the Warner Brothers Archive Collection. It's complete and the transfer is pristine. Well worth getting. It might disturb you but you'll never forget it. Avoid the cut version on TCM.

Middle-aged spinster Maura (Patricia Neal), the adopted daughter of wealthy widow Edith Prince (Pamela Brown), isn't too happy when her mother appoints drifter Billy Jarvis (Nicholas Clay) as their handyman. However, as the days pass, and Billy sets about fixing up the house and clearing the garden, Maura begins to form an attachment to Billy. What she doesn't know is that the young man is actually a serial killer, who abducts and murders women, burying their bodies in building sites.

Both a tragic love story and a psycho-sexual thriller (in flashbacks, it is shown that Billy was sexually molested as a child and has problems being intimate with women), The Night Digger is, for the most part, a mood piece, the film set predominantly in and around the rundown Prince house, with Billy's murderous nature remaining undisclosed for the first 45 minutes or so. Director Alastair Reid fleshes out his characters and builds an unsettling atmosphere (there are bizarre conversations about sex-ops, and Maura's relationship with her mother is awkward), and the pace can only be described as 'slow-burn', all of which makes the first moment we see Billy in psycho mode all the more disturbing: creeping into a nursery teacher's bedroom, he takes off all of his clothes, unfurls a large leather strap and places it around the sleeping woman, who wakes to find herself bound to her bed and faced with the naked intruder. It's a bizarre, unexpectedly twisted moment that doesn't end well for the teacher.

Reports of the teacher's disappearance are in the following day's news, and it is revealed that she is the seventh woman to fall prey to 'the night digger' in the past three months, previous victims being from the very same towns and cities that Billy said he worked at prior to arriving at the Prince property. Victim number eight is Edith's young district nurse (played by Brigit Forsyth of The Likely Lads fame), who Billy kills while Maura is visiting her mother in hospital following a heart attack. When Maura returns home ('home' being regular Hammer horror location Oakley Court), Billy tries to confess to Maura, but is unable to go through with it. The cogs in Maura's mind are set turning, nevertheless.

When Edith suddenly announces that she wants Billy to leave, Maura tells her 'mother' that she has had enough and is packing her bags as well. Maura gets herself a nasty hair-do, empties her bank account, tells Billy that she loves him, and suggests that they buy a cottage in a remote part of Scotland, away from other people; it would seem as though she knows his secret, and is trying to help by removing temptation from his path. Things aren't that simple, though, and it's not long before Billy is eyeing up a pretty Scottish lass as victim number nine.

With a director unafraid to tackle bold subjects (Reid also gave us Baby Love, the UK's answer to Lolita), a great leading lady, a script by none other than Roald Dahl (Neal's husband at the time), and music by Bernard Herrmann (the score will sound very familiar in places), The Night Digger already has quite the pedigree, but it also benefits from solid turns from a decent supporting cast (Graham Crowden, as salacious neighbour Mr Bolton, is a hoot, and there are brief but fun roles for familiar UK TV faces Yootha Joyce and Peter Sallis), brooding tension, and a memorably downbeat ending that doesn't spell everything out for the viewer but which makes them assess what they have seen and draw their own conclusion.

In a isolated mansion outside of London, spinster Maura Prince (Patricia Neal) cares for her blind adoptive mother Mrs. Edith Prince (Pamela Brown). Dashing handyman Billy Jarvis (Nicholas Clay) shows up looking for work. Maura is frustrated that Edith has given her room to him and initially feels uncomfortable with his demeanor. There is a lady killer on the loose.

It's a fascinating juxtaposition between the stuffy English mentality and the glee about the demented violence. That old guy describing the series of missing women is hilarious. Patricia Neal is great. Billy is a disturbing character and getting naked only makes it even better. All that is missing is his brutal murders. The movie is cutting away from the kills. It's the era of its time. This is fascinating.

Many people will say that this film was a botch up job of Joy Cowley's novel, but they would be wrong.

While I have to admit that the type of filming they used in the 70's is not among my favourite, it worked well for this film because it gave you insight into how each character saw things.

Patricia Niel was perfect as the spinster who was stuck caring for her blind and horrid adoptive mother, and who slowly but surely becomes sexually aware of the young drifter, played by Nicholas Clay.

Some parts of the film are vaguely confusing, but one comes to grasp them after rolling the idea around in ones mind for a while.

This film was very well done for an era that produced some awful movies that completely butchered famous books, and used skin instead of actual acting to portray a film.

The Night Digger aka Road Runner is a very watchable film, that sneaks up on you rather than attacks you head on like some psychological thrillers do.

As others have said, this movie was written by British poet/author Roald Dahl as a vehicle for his wife, American actress Patricia Neal. (I thought of it recently after seeing a similar American movie "Happy Mother's Day, Love George" that featured Neal and the couple's real-life daughter Tess Dahl). The basic story is pretty good. Neal plays a lonely spinster whose domineering mother rents a room to a traveling road worker (Nicholas Clay), and Neal's character finds herself drawn to the handsome, younger man, unaware that he might be a serial killer who has buried a string of female victims along the road he is building. . .

This definitely works as a vehicle for Neal, who is probably most famous for the Paul Newman movie "Hud" (even though her character in that was supposed to have been African-American, but such a thing would have simply been too incendiary in the early 1960's). She is very good in this. Unfortunately, she doesn't get a lot of help. Nicholas Clay would later play Lancelot in "Excalibur" and appear with an all-star cast in Agatha Christie's "Evil Under the Sun", but he was just too inexperienced here. For whatever reason, there was a plethora of handsome but psychotic young men in British movies at this time, and this role might have been better played by another "handsome young psycho" actor like Shane Bryant or Hywell Bennett (although neither of them might have been very convincing as a roughneck construction worker). If it have been made a decade or so earlier though, it would have been a PERFECT role for a young Oliver Reed.

The directing is also a little flat generally, but the first murder (following a motorcycle ride) is pretty inspired. The Bernard Hermann score is not one of his best, but it does add SOMETHING to the proceedings. This isn't great, but it certainly deserves to be more widely seen.