BY FRED BLOSSER
We
moviegoers are a caring, law-abiding community, or at least we’re assumed to
be, but regardless of how timid or tender-hearted we are, producers know that
we’re usually pushovers for movies about Big Heists. As long as the crime is perpetrated against
an institution like a bank, a multinational corporation, or a casino, and no
person is threatened or injured, the protagonists’ antisocial behavior becomes
an abstraction. We’re free, vicariously,
to admire their ingenuity and tenacity as they carry out their complicated
scheme. But what if the story is based
on a big payout that directly endangers an innocent person? Then it becomes harder to sell the concept as
escapist entertainment, as journeyman filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and Hubert
Cornfield discovered in the mid-1950s, when they both became interested,
independently, in a 1953 novel by Lionel White.
“The
Snatchers†revolved around a kidnapping, an acceptable premise for White’s
paperback readership at the time but anathema in Hollywood under the rigid
Production Code that governed movie content then. Given the unlikelihood of studio backing,
Kubrick turned his attention to another White novel, this one about a racetrack
heist, “Clean Break,†which became the basis for “The Killing†(1956). Cornfield continued to eye “The Snatchers,â€
developing a screenplay that he eventually proposed to producer Elliott
Kastner, his former agent. By then, the
studios had become less squeamish about the subject matter. Kastner and his executive producer Jerry
Gershwin attracted A-list talent for the starring roles. Written and directed by Cornfield, “The Night
of the Following Day†opened on February 19, 1969.
In
the movie, now available in a Kino Lorber Blu-ray special edition, a pretty,
well-dressed 18-year-old (Pamela Franklin) lands at Orly Airport in Paris. There she’s met by a chauffeur. As she soon learns, the fake driver, Bud
(Marlon Brando), is a career criminal who has teamed with three others to
kidnap her for ransom from her wealthy father. The girl recognizes Vi (Rita Moreno), Bud’s lover, as a friendly
attendant whom she had seen on the flight into Orly. Vi’s brother Wally (Jess Hahn) is Bud’s
friend and the one who devised the scheme. The fourth kidnapper, Leer (Richard Boone), has an intimidating demeanor. Initially he seems to be calm and reasonable,
but the girl remains frightened, and we can hardly blame her. Was any actor then or now more intimidating
than Richard Boone? The kidnappers hide
the girl in a beachside cottage on the Normandy coast and contact her father
with a complex procedure for delivering the ransom money.
Fractures
begin to open in the crooks‘ partnership in short order, endangering the
orderly completion of the crime according to plan -- a staple of the Big Heist
formula. The unstable Vi has a history
of drug addiction, and Leer is a sadistic pedophile who begins terrorizing
their hostage. Bud and Wally feel their
control slipping. Vi sneaks into the
bathroom to snort coke. She gets high
and fails to carry out an important assignment. Leer’s behavior becomes more aggressive, and in a quick trip to Paris to
nail down the gang’s planned escape by air, he secretly sabotages the
arrangement and institutes one for himself that will leave his associates in
the lurch, or worse. Al Lettieri has a
brief appearance in that sequence, credited as “Alfredo Lettieri,†under which
name he was also an associate producer of the picture. Back on the beach, Vi happens to meet a
friendly fisherman who turns out to be the local gendarme. Wally says not to worry, the policeman is a
“hick local cop†who can be kept in the dark for the two days needed to collect
the ransom, but Bud isn’t so sure. His
growing anxiety leads to a near-meltdown and a memorable line, delivered with
inimitable Brando intensity: “Do you
know what they do in this country? They
cut off your head, Wally. They cut off
your head!â€
On
its release, “The Night of the Following Day†was a critical and commercial
disappointment. “Dull, stilted, and
pointless,†Howard Thompson said in The New York Times. Roger Ebert said it “works . . . as a
well-made melodrama†but asked, “Should Brando be wasting his time on this sort
of movie?†It was a question that
critics usually asked in that era, whenever a new Brando film opened. Instead of examining the intrinsic merits or
shortcomings of the picture at hand, the critical notices became referendums on
the controversial star. Not that Brando
seemed to care.
Reviewers
and audiences were also confused if not offended by the ending of the thriller,
which seemed to undercut the neo-noir storyline that they had taken at face
value. Some viewers wondered whether the
final scene had been slapped on, post-production, to add a surprise departing
punch at the expense of maintaining the audience’s goodwill. In a commentary recorded for a 2004 DVD
release, before his death in 2008, Cornfield addressed the question. He said that he had written the movie that
way all along, inspired by the conclusion of a classic British picture from two
decades before. I like his subversive
twist, but your mileage may vary.
Cornfield’s
2004 commentary, included as a feature on the Kino Lorber Blu-ray, also
revisits the director’s troubled interactions with Brando. Cornfield says he was elated when Kastner
reported that Brando had signed on to star, but the two soon began to butt
heads, and the relationship became
untenable. We don’t have Brando’s side
of the story, at least not in so many words, but maybe it’s expressed in a
scene that Cornfield implies he didn’t direct. As he sees the ransom scheme unraveling, Bud (Brando’s own childhood
nickname) vents at Wally: “I want out of
this thing!†Wally calmly insists that
everything will work out, mostly because he wants it to. That only raises Bud’s temperature even
higher. “You’re crazy, you son of a
bitch!†he storms. Against the backdrop of today’s bland movie
landscape populated by blander actors, Brando’s sustained ferocity in the long,
largely improvised sequence is electrifying. Cornfield said that the star changed some of the elements of the script
considerably, such as the relationships between Bud and Vi, and Bud and Pamela
Franklin’s character. Cornfield claimed
that Brando’s changes damaged the picture, but in the actor’s defense, the
final result seems dramatically better than the stuff that went out the window,
based on Cornfield’s synopsis.
In
addition to Cornfield’s track, the Kino Lorber edition also includes a new Tim
Lucas audio commentary that casts a wide net over Brando’s erratic 1960s
career, his longtime relationship with Rita Moreno, a comparison of the screenplay
with Lionel White’s source novel, and other aspects of the film. Other features include the original
theatrical trailer, a “Trailers from Hell†commentary by Joe Dante, and SDH
captions.
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(Fred Blosser is the author of "Sons of Ringo: The Great Spaghetti Western Heroes". Click here to order from Amazon)