🕯 Night Watch (1973) — The Gaslight Is On, But Nobody’s Home

Let’s be generous and call Night Watch a thriller. Let’s also be honest and call it what it is: a soggy melodrama in trench coat drag, clumsily masquerading as a psychological mind-bender. This Elizabeth Taylor vehicle—if we can call a sputtering moped a vehicle—is a stylish-looking but dramatically inert suspense piece that spins its wheels in a teacup and calls it tension.

⚰️ The Plot, or How to Stretch Ten Minutes Over Ninety

Set in London during one of those perfectly timed cinematic thunderstorms that always know when to strike, Night Watchbegins with Ellen Wheeler (Taylor) claiming she’s seen a corpse through the window of the abandoned house across the street. Her husband John (Laurence Harvey, visibly phoning it in from the next galaxy) and her gal pal Sarah (Billie Whitelaw, criminally underused) roll their eyes, pour more scotch, and suggest therapy.

This goes on. And on. And on. Is Ellen delusional? Is she being gaslit? Is there a corpse? Two corpses? Will someone please dig up that laburnum shrub and get this over with?

The plot trickles forward, occasionally bumping into the skeleton of Gaslight, though without that film’s urgency, craft, or emotional intelligence. Instead, we get Elizabeth Taylor wandering through her own house like she’s trying to find the bar cart again.

🦴 Elizabeth Taylor Deserves Better Than This

Taylor, still in her violet-eyed prime but burdened with a script written in crayon, does her best to sell Ellen’s breakdown. But her intensity feels mismatched to a film that can’t decide whether it’s a thriller, a soap opera, or a furniture catalog. She’s channeling trauma and suspicion like she’s auditioning for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf 2: Electric Boogaloo, while the rest of the cast stares blankly, as if wondering where the craft services table went.

Laurence Harvey, looking ghostly thin and visibly ill (which, tragically, he was), stumbles through the film with all the emotional range of a tax audit. His performance is so wooden it could be repurposed into garden furniture.

Billie Whitelaw’s Sarah fares slightly better, but the film treats her like a slightly sinister houseplant: always there, vaguely suspicious, but never worth watering.

🕵️‍♂️ Mystery? Not So Much.

Let’s talk suspense. Or rather, the gaping absence of it. Night Watch is the kind of film that tells you it’s a mystery without ever bothering to craft one. The setup is borrowed from countless better films, and the twist—when it arrives like an overdue cab—is too neat, too telegraphed, and too late to save the hour-plus of narrative chloroform that came before it.

We’re expected to believe Ellen has been plotting her revenge for ages, building a web of lies so elaborate she practically invented prank-calling the cops. But the film never sells the illusion. Instead, it feels like the final twist was decided on a lunch break and filmed with the urgency of someone checking their watch every five minutes.

And let’s not even get started on the pacing. Night Watch has all the narrative momentum of a foggy Sunday afternoon. There are entire scenes where people just… sit. Or stare. Or open curtains. I’ve seen IKEA assembly videos with more dramatic tension.

🪦 Style Without Substance

Credit where it’s due: the film looks decent. The Elstree Studios setting, the shadowy interiors, the rumbling skies—it’s all trying so hard to conjure a Hitchcockian aura. But cinematography alone cannot save a film that’s emotionally and narratively bankrupt.

Brian G. Hutton’s direction is flat, as though he directed the film via telegram from another project. He doesn’t build tension so much as quietly watch it wither on the vine.

And the music—despite lifting hefty chunks of Brahms and Schubert—only underscores how derivative and tone-deaf the whole thing feels. You can drape a corpse in classical music, but it’s still a corpse.

🎭 Final Act of Desperation

When the “reveal” finally comes—Ellen’s revenge plot, her coolly calculated murders, the twist on the twist—the film seems to think it’s clever. But it’s too little, too late, and far too self-satisfied. Taylor, bloodied and triumphant, exits stage left, and we’re meant to cheer her cunning. Instead, we’re mostly wondering why we weren’t watching Diaboliqueinstead.

There’s a good story in Night Watch—buried under bad pacing, flatter-than-flat performances, and a director asleep at the wheel. It might work better on stage, where Lucille Fletcher’s original play could keep things tight. On screen, however, it’s like watching someone slowly rearrange furniture during a thunderstorm and calling it cinema.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 faux-gothic windows.
When even the house across the street wants out of the movie, you know you’re in trouble.