Still of the Night (1982)

Still of the Night is a 1982 American psychological thriller film directed by Robert Benton and starring Roy Scheider, Meryl Streep, Joe Grifasi, and Jessica Tandy. It was written by Benton and David Newman. Scheider plays a psychiatrist who falls in love with a woman (Streep) who may be the psychopathic killer of one of his patients.

The film seems overtly an homage to Hitchcock, emulating scenes from many Hitchcock movies—a bird attacks one character, a scene takes place in an auction, someone falls from a height, stuffed birds occupy a room, and an important plot point is the interpretation of a dream. Meryl Streep's hair is styled much like Eva Marie Saint's was in North by Northwest, and the town of Glen Cove features in both films. The screenplay "makes inescapable references to such Hitchcock classics as Vertigo, Rear Window, North by Northwest and Spellbound," wrote Vincent Canby of the New York Times in his Nov. 19, 1982 review.

Synopsis

Manhattan psychiatrist Dr. Sam Rice (Roy Scheider) is visited by glamorous, enigmatic Brooke Reynolds (Meryl Streep), who works at Crispin's—a fictitious New York auction house modeled after Christie's. Brooke was having an affair with one of Rice's patients, George Bynum (Josef Sommer), who has just been murdered. Brooke asks the doctor to return a watch to Bynum's wife and not reveal the affair.

Actors