Desert Noir: After ‘Charlie’s Angels’, Jaclyn Smith Makes a ‘Nightkill’ with Robert Mitchum

A naked woman, her elbows discreetly covering her breasts, stands frightened behind the door of a shower while a man’s shadow looms over her and blood drips down the glass to confirm the title,
Nightkill.

This is the exploitive and highly misleading image used to promote the movie on its old VHS packaging, reproduced now on Blu-ray, in the wake of the early ’80s slasher cycle. Anyone who falls for that ballyhoo is likely to be disappointed by what they get, but they might have been warned by the most jarring detail in that context. The list of actors announces Jaclyn Smith, Mike Connors, James Franciscus and Robert Mitchum — three big TV stars and an old Hollywood icon.

Is it a TV movie then? It’s directed by Ted Post, whose career is primarily on TV with a few features. The film was, in fact, dumped onto network TV without a US theatrical release, so it counts as a TV film by default, and it’s restrained enough to have required only minor network trimming at best.

A slight clue of the movie’s true nature is heard in the trailer, which promises “a diabolical thriller”. Those who know film history will connect the dots to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s French classic
Diabolique (1955) and its bathtub climax, which has a greater bearing on these proceedings than the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), although that was influenced by Clouzot, as well.

Here’s the set-up: Katherine Atwell (Smith) lives in a beautiful mansion on a hill in Scottsdale, Arizona, where she occupies her time with social work while chafing at her marriage to a loud, boorish, J.R. Ewing-caricature of a millionaire (Connors in a ten-gallon hat) who spouts offensively at everyone he meets. They’re going to divorce when he finishes a certain deal, and they have an agreement that she can have a discreet boyfriend.

In the opening scene, she’s been frolicking with said boyfriend in the bedroom and shower; we hear their voices as they’re recorded on reel-to-reel tape from hidden bugging devices. We haven’t yet seen the boyfriend, but it’s no chore to guess he must be the husband’s employee Steve (Fulton), an ex-CIA guy turned corporate “hatchet man”.

The back of Kino’s box echoes the Wikipedia entry in completely misdescribing the situation, for both of them claim that Smith’s character plots to kill her husband. We wouldn’t be surprised, but that’s not true. When he abruptly dies to get the plot going, she’s totally flummoxed by this development, which to her comes out of the blue, and which reveals that Katherine might be in the process of trading one imperious amoral louse for another. In her shock, Steve bamboozles her into some crazy plot about stashing the body while he masquerades as the husband. Even a moment’s thought should make this come apart, but from that moment the film mostly follows Katherine’s increasingly nightmarish subjectivity as she improvises while things spin out of control.

Mitchum quickly appears in a Panama hat as a local cop investigating the husband’s disappearance and adding a sense of boxing Katherine in. She’s also harassed by a lecherous lawyer (Fritz Weaver) trying to step out on his wife (Sybil Danning), who is also Katherine’s friend. Because we know something the heroine doesn’t — the detail of the bugging — we might be ahead of her in anticipating some of where this is going, but Joan Andre’s script succeeds in keeping us so off-balance in its swift developments that most viewers (including this one) will be genuinely puzzled about exactly what’s going on. In that sense, this is a very old-fashioned type of thriller, and also a very cruel and noir-ish one.

It spends equal time in the sun-drenched Arizona outdoors and in nightscapes, as well as in the elegantly claustrophobic house with its Doberman and its pet monkeys. In a bonus interview, Smith mentions that she was happy to be working with Anthony Richmond, the excellent British photographer who shot Nicolas Roeg’s
Don’t Look Now (1973); she doesn’t happen to mention that she went on to marry him and he directed her in the nettlesome reincarnation thriller Deja Vu, which Kino Lorber issued several months ago.

The commentary or conversation by Howard S. Berger and Nathaniel Thompson concentrates on the career of Ted Post. Thompson offers details on how this West German production, using an international mishmash of a crew, wound up shooting in Arizona and how US distributor Avco Embassy dumped it to TV, to the disappointment of those involved. Berger especially seems to like the movie a little more than such a modest achievement deserves, but that balances the fact that viewers shopping for slashers are liable to dislike it more than it deserves.

Berger asserts that as a director, Ted Post’s goal was “normalcy”, defined as a basic, economical, un-foregrounded TV-ish style that allowed the disturbing and perverse elements, when they arrive, to pop. This movie certainly has two or three such pops, handled with queasy effectiveness in a story more mysterious than convincing.

Post’s most financially successful films were
Hang ’em High (1968), Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) and Magnum Force, two of those showing an association with Clint Eastwood that began on TV. His most critically successful film is the Burt Lancaster Vietnam war movie Go Tell the Spartans (1978), which found a particular champion in Gene Siskel. His most admired delicacy among cultists is the wacko horror known as The Baby (1973), which can be seen as a very dark comedy on the American family.

The bulk of his career lies in hundreds of TV productions and therefore presents a history uncollected, incoherent and sometimes lost to us, from over 20 episodes each of the live anthologies
Armstrong Circle Theatre, Schlitz Playhouse of Stars and Ford Television Theatre to dozens of Waterfront, Gunsmoke and Rawhide, plus 170 episodes of Peyton Place, random examples of high-profile shows like Perry Mason, The Twilight Zone and Route 66, and a string of well-remembered early ’70s TV movies like Dr. Cook’s Garden and Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate (both 1971). The year after Nightkill, he did the pilot for Cagney and Lacey.

Indeed, Post had his finger in more pies than we can shake a stick at. That’s why this film shows a level of craft that keeps it engaging. If we compare it with a similar release of the same year, Brian De Palma’s
Dressed to Kill, we can see the difference between a gourmet meal and the blue plate special, but that doesn’t mean the blue plate isn’t professionally prepared. To continue our metaphor, that’s also no reason to package it like junk food. Saddled with a bad title, misleading poster art, and false plot summaries, it’s a wonder anyone ever tracks it down. Those who do won’t find a masterpiece, yet they may appreciate its arid atmosphere of downbeat nightmare.