Still image from the 1982 film Still of the Night.

Still of the Night

Directed by Robert Benton

A psychiatrist falls for the chief suspect in a patient's murder.

1982 1h 31m Suspense/Mystery TV-14

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CAST
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Robert Benton, Director
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Robert Benton
Director

1

Roy Scheider,
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Roy Scheider

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Meryl Streep,
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Meryl Streep

3

Jessica Tandy,
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Jessica Tandy

4

Joe Grifasi,
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Joe Grifasi

5

Joseph Priestly,
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Joseph Priestly

FULL SYNOPSIS

After Brooke Reynolds' married boyfriend is murdered, she gives his watch to his psychiatrist Dr. Sam Rice and asks that he return it to the man's wife. Sam is fascinated by the beautiful Brooke, who he has heard all about during his late patient's therapy sessions. After learning that Brooke's father died mysteriously, and deciding that she looks like a woman who has been stalking him, Sam comes to believe that she murdered his patient, but refuses to compromise his professional ethics by giving information to the police. And although he desires Brooke, he has nightmares of becoming her next murder victim.


VIDEOS
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ARTICLES
Writer-director Robert Benton went for a Hitchcock feel in Still of the Night (1982), a psychological thriller about a shrink (Roy Scheider) who falls for a possible psychopathic killer (Meryl Streep) after one of his clients is murdered. The plot of Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) immediately comes to mind, but there are many other echoes from the suspense master's work, especially Streep's icy, inscrutable blonde. Cinematographer Nestor Almendros said he and Benton deliberately took their inspiration not only from Hitchcock but from other thrillers of the 1940s and 50s, especially the films of Fritz Lang. In his book A Man with a Camera (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1986), Almendros said that because the thriller is a quintessentially American genre, the art of cinema itself inspired the look of Still of the Night. Initially he and Benton considered shooting the movie in black and white, but when that seemed too problematic, they decided to film in color but with a predominantly black and white visual scheme. Almendros asked for greater collaboration than usual on set and costume design to get the proper color tones, such as the black, white, and gray fabric of the wardrobe. He also continued the experiments in lighting he began on Francois Truffaut's The Last Metro (1980): courser lighting, shadows projected onto walls, and what he called "troubling chiaroscuro," deep shadow-and-light contrasts to create nervous anticipation about what is not seen or only half seen. Th...

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