Last night and for the first time in 40 years, I watched Robert Benton‘s Still of the Night (’82). Which isn’t very good. A cautious, understated Hitchcockian homage without much of a raison d’etre of its own. Awkward, under-written dialogue. It has a certain interesting tension at first, then it loses that. Not awful and sometimes almost “there”, but never gripping.
Roy Scheider, Meryl Streep, Jessica Tandy, Joe Grifasi, Sara Botsford and Josef Sommer costar.
I read Pauline Kael’s mini-review after it ended. There’s a passage that’s fairly amusing in a mean-girl sort of way, and it hit me a second later that in this era of #MeToo solidarity female critics aren’t really allowed to make snide observations about actresses. Certainly nothing that cuts too close to the bone.
“Meryl Streep plays the icy hot woman suspected of murder,” Kael wrote, “and her performance is all about her hair. It’s platinum-white, it hangs bone straight like a curtain, and part of her face is hidden behind it; from time to time she peers up and shakes it back a little.
“This femme fatale is meant to be guileful and slinky — a woman with neurotic wiles. But Streep’s high-strung emotionality isn’t fun in the way that Faye Dunaway‘s has often been. She seems pale and gaunt, and more zombified than anything else.”
Consider Judith Crist‘s putdown of Elizabeth Taylor‘s performance in Cleopatra, and imagine what would happen if a female critic today were to describe certain aspects of, say, Lady Gaga‘s vocal delivery in House of Gucci as “fishwifey”:
