GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

philosopherjack Laslo Benedek's The Night Visitor is quite effective on its own chilly terms, ingeniously reconciling two contradictory premises: we've seen Max von Sydow's Salem running in his underwear through the nighttime snow, presumably the cause of the two dead bodies that show up in the film's first twenty minutes; and yet it's entirely clear that he's locked inside his cell, inside an Alcatraz-like asylum (if Alcatraz was on land). The physical demands made on von Sydow in bridging these competing realities are considerable - I've seldom seen an actor appear to be so authentically freezing his ass off. The plot turns on various propositions of madness, investigated by a police detective played by Trevor Howard: whether von Sydow was correctly judged insane in the past, whether his detested brother-in-law might be insane in the present - the filmmakers surely meant such heavy themes, enacted within Scandinavian landscapes with the presence of both von Sydow (a chess player here again) and Liv Ullmann to evoke the spirit of Bergman (in 1971 about as mighty a spirit as there was). But for the most part it's all much too enjoyably literal-minded and briskly calculated for that to be meaningful. Among the more Bergman-like elements are the displaced conception of the setting (the Volkswagens and phones indicate it's set in the present, but that aside it might almost be taking place at a time of beaten-down workers toiling in the shadow of a towering castle) and the troubling stoicism with which the film's people seem to adjust to the arrival of death, no matter how unforeseen or savage. But ultimately, whereas (say) the title of Bergman's The Silence denoted a definitional existential conflict, the Night Visitor really is just a man with an ingenious revenge plan, too occupied with its logistics to bear much thematic or symbolic weight, and that's without considering the contribution of the parrot.

Martin Bradley "The Night Visitor" has to be seen to be believed...and even then. This Laszlo Benedek film was long considered to be lost and it's easy to see why it disappeared. The Night Visitor of the title is Max von Sydow who moves in and out of the local asylum (don't ask) where he has been incarcerated so he take his revenge on those responsible for putting him there. These include Liv Ullmann and Per Oscarsson while Trevor Howard, looking like he would rather be anywhere else, runs around as the sceptical police investigator investigating all the killings. Watching this, two words kept coming to mind - balderdash and cods-wallop. The sooner this gets lost again the better.

duluman This is what they call a sleeper but actually Von Sydow is an insomniac ! Very close to the Bergmanesque feelings of despair and anguish, with his actors, Max Vob Sydow and Liv Ulmann and a Colombo/esquire inspector by Trevor Howard. Closer to Bergman in any respect than it is to Hitchcock. It's in color but it feels like black and white, has a literary quality, some clumsiness (especially with the weird accents and the whole atmosphere of countryside way backwards in time and development) and a twist ending like the old Twilight Zone or Ray Bradbury mystery stories. Shot in the blazing winter in Sweden and Denmark, featuring a bravura physical performance from Sydow it's a rare and weird team up from director Benedek (veteran of The Wild One and a lot of TV), with a producing Mel Ferrer (!) and a haunting scary score who works a sound design by Henry Mancini (Mancini and Ferrer worked together on Wait Until Dark before, another creepy classic). Saw this almost 20 years ago on TV by chance, made an incredible impression that stayed with me, couldn't get hold of it but now I saw it again and was struck again. Creepy as hell and you can feel the freezing cold ! A gem waiting to be rediscovered and i have a feeling somehow that someone will mess with this in a shitty remake.

FieCrier A man is running away from a large brick building surrounded by a high wall. He's running across rocks and snow in his underwear and boots. He sneaks into a farmhouse and steals some odd items, and sneaks into another house where he kills a woman. It's not the last person he'll kill either; he's trying to frame someone, but why - and how is he getting away from the place that establishes his alibi?This is a very good movie. As a horror movie, it doesn't have a very high body count, or much gore, and there's no on screen violence - it cuts away from that. Some horror movies benefit from that, some don't; this one doesn't need it. The locations: isolated locations surrounded by snowy fields are very nice to look at. Acting is very good, as is the musical score by Mancini.Definitely deserves to be better-known. I'm surprised some critics didn't like it. Some didn't like that the movie gives some things away early on that could have been withheld. I don't agree; not every movie that has secrets needs to save them for a big reveal at the end. Others felt that the characters' motivations weren't established. I can only suppose they weren't listening to the dialog, because that was fully discussed.