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The Night Digger (1971)

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067486/

The Night Digger is a 1971 film that was based on
the novel Nest in a Falling Tree by Joy Cowley. It
was adapted by Roald Dahl and starred his wife
Patricia Neal. The Night Digger was the title of
its American release; it was originally released
in the United Kingdom as The Road Builder.

 Patricia Neal ... Maura Prince 

 Pamela Brown ... Mrs. Edith Prince - Mother 

 Nicholas Clay ... Billy Jarvis 

 Jean Anderson ... Mrs. Millicent McMurtrey 

 Graham Crowden ... Mr. Bolton 

 Yootha Joyce ... Mrs. Palafox 

 Peter Sallis ... Reverend Rupert Palafox 

 Brigit Forsyth ... District Nurse 

 Sebastian Breaks ... Dr. Ronnie Robinson 

 Diana Patrick ... Mary Wingate 

The Road Builder (aka The Night Digger) 

What do you get when you mix together a serial
killer thriller, a May-December romance between an
older woman and younger man and a masochistic
mother-adopted daughter relationship melodrama
with echoes of Now, Voyager (1942)? The result,
The Road Builder (1971, aka The Night Digger), is
much more homogeneous than you'd expect and is
an unjustifiably overlooked curiosity in the
filmography of Patricia Neal.

On first glance, the project would seem to be an
unlikely project for short story writer and
popular children's novelist Roald Dahl
(Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the
Giant Peach) who was married to Ms. Neal at the
time but the bizarre imagination and black humor
that made the Willy Wonka books so memorable soon
emerges in this gothic tale set in a crumbling
mansion in the English countryside. Edith Prince
(Pamela Brown), the blind, elderly owner of the
mansion, and Maura (Neal), live alone in a
master-servant relationship that began years
earlier when Maura had a stroke and Edith took her
in and paid her medical expenses. Then the
relationship reversed and Maura became the
caretaker. Now middle-aged, Maura sees her chances
for personal happiness slipping away until the
arrival of Billy (Nicholas Clay), a young handyman
who is hired against her wishes. At first
suspicious and resentful of Billy, Maura soon
finds herself falling in love with the strange but
emotionally volatile man-child. Meanwhile, a
serial killer is running amok in the countryside,
raping and murdering women and burying their
bodies in the path of a soon to be paved public
highway.

Based on Joy Cowley's novel Nest in a Falling
Tree, Dahl agreed to write the screenplay as a
showcase for his wife, who had returned to acting
after recovering from a series of debilitating
strokes in 1965. Part of the attraction for Dahl
may have been the fact that the story's
protagonist was also a stroke survivor but more
importantly, Neal hadn't received any
promising job offers since her post-stroke
comeback film, The Subject Was Roses (1968), for
which she received an Oscar®
nomination for Best Actress. Producers were afraid
to hire her for health and insurance reasons.
Luckily, funding for The Road Builder was secured,
Alastair Reid was hired as director and an
exceptional cast of British character actors
assembled. 

The filming of The Road Builder, which was mostly
shot at Twickenham Studios and on an estate near
Windsor on the Thames, proved to be an unpleasant
experience for Neal. According to author Stephen
Michael Shearer in his biography of Neal, An
Unquiet Life, ...Patricia sensed that the cast and
crew were against her. Some actors and the
director himself made unkind remarks about
Patricia behind her back. Stroke survivors develop
their senses, and I could hear their talk, she
would say later. After filming of The Road Builder
ended, Patricia told American celebrity writer Rex
Reed, I don't really care about making films
now. I was so ambitious once. But I don't
really want to work. I would not care a lot if I
don't do another film. I'm just pleased I
am married to the man who is my husband. 

The Road Builder was an equally difficult
experience for Dahl, who would completely
disassociate himself from the project after its
release. His biggest challenge was working with
the brilliant but notoriously difficult and
temperamental composer Bernard Herrmann whose
contributions to the film were deemed as important
as Dahl's, if not more, by the producers. The
collaboration began on friendly terms but soon
deteriorated. According to director Reid (in A
Heart at Fire's Center: The Life and Music of
Bernard Herrmann by Steven C. Smith),
...everything depended on whether Bernard wanted
to do the music. When he first walked in to
Twickenham, and I saw this big, gruff person with
a Brooklyn accent, he immediately reminded me of a
gangster from some Hollywood film. We ran the
picture, and as the lights came up, Bernard's
one comment was, You'll have to change the
ending. To what? we asked
ΓΓé¼ΓÇ£ and he
told us, although I don't remember now how it
differed from the film....There was never any
money on that film, so even if we had a better
ending we couldn't have shot it. But Bernard
said we had to go out and film new scenes...The
producer and I eased our way out of the viewing
theatre and asked ourselves, Does he mean
we've got to change the ending before
he'll do it? We walked back into the theatre
ΓΓé¼ΓÇ£ and saw
Bernard had had the projectionist rewind the film
to the first reel and was already scribbling music
down.

The animosity between Herrmann and Dahl continued
as the composer succeeded in having Dahl's
script pared down in order to emphasize his score.
This is Pat's film! Dahl told the
mild-mannered Reid, a remark that sent Herrmann
into paroxysms: Do you think they're gonna
line up outside the box office in the cold and
say, 'Can I have two seats please for
Pat's film?' Herrmann's comment proved
to be prophetic as The Road Builder, which was
released in the U.S. as The Night Digger, was
quickly buried by the studio, MGM, in a limited
theatrical release and shelved as a tax deduction.
Reid later admitted, Patricia Neal, Roald Dahl,
and I were never paid a penny, since we all
deferred our payments to royalties...and to this
day we've never received a penny. The only guy
who came out okay was Bernard Herrmann, who
insisted on money up front. And he was dead
right.

The troubled production behind The Road Builder
would seem to indicate that the film was destined
to fail and it certainly has its flaws,
particularly in trying to establish Billy's
sexual dysfunction, depicted in overstated black
and white flashbacks. (Ten minutes of scenes with
sexual content were cut prior to its release). The
romantic relationship that develops between Maura
and Billy and their idyllic escape to Cornwall
also seems implausible. And when Neal and Dahl saw
the completed picture they were disgusted with
Neal saying, It's pornographic. Critics
weren't much kinder with Variety proclaiming
The exercise is only moderately successful, and
The New York Times critic writing, As a study of
understated tensions, vague psychopathic sexuality
and somber moods, the British made The Night
Digger...proves to be more polish than persuasive
drama. But even a mildly dismissive review by the
New York Daily News indicates both its peculiar
appeal and why it was poorly received: a strange
tale that builds slowly to a tragic climax...[T]he
tale is strictly for those with a taste for the
perverse. 

Indeed, The Road Builder is perverse. It is also
richly atmospheric, genuinely creepy, oddly comic
at times with macabre touches and is enhanced by
Herrmann's wonderfully evocative score which
conjures up associations with some of his best
work for Hitchcock but retains a distinctive
autumnal mood of its own. The ensemble
performances are also first rate with Neal and
Nicholas Clay creating believable flesh and blood
characters out of enigmatic stick figures,
presented with little or no backstory. The real
scene stealer though is Pamela Brown as the
stubborn, willful matriarch of the mansion whose
immediate empathy and attraction to Billy proves
she is blind in more ways than one. The Road
Builder would be Brown's next to last feature
film (she died in 1975) and was always more active
in theatre and British television though most will
remember her work with directors Michael Powell
and Emeric Pressburger on three films,
particularly her bewitching performance in I Know
Where I'm Going (1945).

Some other trivia of note: The Road Builder is
clearly ready for critical reassessment though at
least TimeOut reviewer Bob Baker noted its
virtues: Starting as an analogue of Night Must
Fall, Dahl's script segues fascinatingly into
areas explored contemporaneously in Chabrol's
Le Boucher. The contributions of [cinematographer
Alex] Thomson, [art director Anthony] Pratt and
Herrmann are exemplary... This film marked
Nicholas Clay's first major role (he had
previously appeared in a minor part in Joseph
Losey's The Damned [1963]). He is probably
best known for playing Lancelot in John
Boorman's Excalibur (1981). Unfortunately, he
died in 2000 at the age of 55 from cancer.
Director Alastair Reid has focused on television
work for most of his career with few film
opportunities. He did attract some favorable
attention for his lively exploitation feature,
Baby Love (1968), in which Linda Hayden plays a
sexually manipulative fifteen-year-old who
maneuvers her way into an upper class home to
seduce and destroy all the family members.