Themes: Nightmare Vacations, Serial Killers, Woman In Jeopardy
Main Cast: Pamela Franklin, Michele Dotrice, Sandor Eles, John Nettleton, Claire Kelly
Release Year: 1970
Country: UK
Run Time: 94 minutes
Plot
Two British nurses -- Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice) -- take a vacation in the French countryside. Jane actually wants to tour the countryside, while Cathy wants to spend the time enticing men. After an argument while in a small French village, Jane leaves. When she returns, Cathy is gone. And if that weren't worry enough, it appears that the handsome young man Cathy flirted with on their journey is apparently a sex-crazed serial killer. In a panic, Jane tries to get some help from the villagers, but the townspeople are curiously uncooperative. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
Review
This dull, vapid and tired old thriller creaks along at a snail's pace for eighty minutes and then asks the audience to jump with the "surprise" revelation of the film's most unlikely character as a murderer. Veteran drive-in director Robert Fuest and his two scripters, Terry Nation and Brian Clemens, probably thought it ingenious to set this tale of a sex maniac stalking two young nurses (Pamela Franklin, Michele Dotrice) in the sunny, open and underpopulated French countryside, thus defying horror movie conventions. But that choice works against the picture: the audience can only stand so many ten-minute takes of empty agrarian vistas and through-the-forest tracking shots without payoffs before throwing up its hands in disgust. If there is a way to riddle this atmosphere with suspense, Fuest, Nation and Clemens don't find it. One consistently hopes, given the premise and setting, that the filmmakers will manage to create and sustain an atmosphere similar to the ambience in the first act of Rene Clement's Rider on the Rain, but that never happens - not even for a second. Resident heroine Franklin, with her constant whiny protests and cries of help, is utterly grating - ten minutes with this character and you'd want to strangle and off her as well; blonde Dotrice (whatever became of her?) is sexy, bubbly and talented but significantly underused. Danny Peary wrote memorably of the film, "Most often this movie shows up on the late late show with the strongest sex and violence excised." Wrong: the uncensored film is rated PG - a very soft PG - with precious little sex and violence in sight. One wishes that Fuest and co. had added some grisly violence or kinky sex to spice things up - that's how desperate this picture makes one feel. And while Peary's comment about the "late late show" is technically accurate - a glance at the New York Times index indicates that it cropped up ten or twelve times on local Manhattan stations during the mid-late '70s and early '80s, almost always after 11pm - it misleadingly imparts And Soon the Darkness with a kind of "night owl" mythos that it absolutely does not deserve. Looking for raw suspense involving a relentless maniac? Skip this stinker and try The Silent Partner instead. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide
Hana-Maria Pravda - Mme. Lassal; John Franklyn - Old Man; Claude Bertrand - Lassal; Jean Carmet - Renier; John Franklin - Old Man
Credit
Alain Bonnot - First Assistant Director, Robert Fuest - Director, Ann Chegwidden - Editor, Laurie Johnson - Composer (Music Score), Alan Wilson - Cinematographer, Ian Wilson - Cinematographer, Brian Clemens - Producer, Albert Fennell - Producer, Brian Clemens - Screen Story, Terry Nation - Screen Story, Brian Clemens - Screenwriter, Terry Nation - Screenwriter
Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice) are two young nurses from London, taking a cycling holiday in rural France. When they stop at a busy cafe, Jane wants to plan their route, but Cathy is more interested in a handsome man (Sandor Elès), whom she spies drinking alone at the next table. Later, as Jane and Cathy make their way along a quiet country road, the man, who rides a moped, overtakes them, and they pass him a few minutes later, as he rests by a cemetery gate. Cathy becomes intrigued by him.
Stopping for a rest, Cathy decides she wants to sunbathe for a while, but Jane wants to push on. Eventually they argue, and Jane decides to carry on alone.
A short while later, at a lonely café, the owner tries to tell Jane, in poor English, that the area has a bad reputation. She begins to reconsider her decision, and heads back to the spot where she left Cathy earlier, unaware that something has already happened.
Unable to find her friend, and increasingly concerned about the presence of the moped rider, Jane decides to look for the local police officer (John Nettleton). Jane becomes convinced that the moped driver, who is called Paul, and who says he is a plain-clothes detective, is in fact Cathy's attacker. She escapes from him and re-encounters the policeman, who is then revealed as Cathy's actual murderer.
Production
The film was directed by Robert Fuest, and made by the same production team that had recently completed the television series The Avengers. The screenplay was written by Brian Clemens and Terry Nation, both of whom had contributed to The Avengers, as well as to several ITC crime series made in Britain. Consequently, in spite of being filmed on location in France, the film has more of the look and feel of these earlier series. Notwithstanding the title, the film eschews the familiar use of darkness and claustrophobia to create suspense. In a way analogous to Stanley Kubrick's use of the large hotel interiors in The Shining (which it predates by a decade), the mounting drama unfolds in bright, open spaces. Similar parallels have been drawn with the isolation and dread of the open road in Steven Spielberg's thriller Duel.
Reception
The film did moderately well at the box-office on both sides of the Atlantic, but was not received particularly well critically. Time Out called it "nasty",[1] and the New York Times said it displayed "poverty of imagination".[2] The British film critic Leslie Halliwell noted that it had "some pretension to style".[3]
Release
It was released as a DVD in the US with an audio commentary by Fuest and Clemens, and released in the UK as a region 2 DVD at the end of January 2008.
