NIGHT GALLERY (1969)
Dirs: Boris Sagal, Barry Shear, Steven Spielberg

The feature-length pilot for the successful NBC television series, this film establishes the show's weekly format of three tales introduced by host Rod Serling, with a representative painting serving as starting point. It's no surprise that the final segment, "Eyes", directed by a young Steven Spielberg, is the standout piece. Joan Crawford (busy reinventing herself as a horror legend after Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Strait-Jacket, I Saw What You Did and Berserk) stars as, in Serling's typically florid words, "an impervious, predatory dowager", blind from birth and secluded from the world in her luxe Park Avenue penthouse. Tom Bosley (four years prior to his most lucrative acting of his career, Happy Days) is a two-bit bookie with massive debt who agrees to give up his eyes so that Crawford may experience 12 hours of sight after experimental transplant surgery. Indeed the wicked millionairess does get to glimpse the world for the first time, but only for a few fleeting seconds; upon removal of the bandages, New York City is plunged into a massive blackout lasting the entire night. Spielberg does an admirable job with an intensely overwrought script, and shows his naive inexperience only through an occasional reliance on artsy, film school effects (this being his first professional gig upon graduation from AFI). He uses the same interior monologue technique so effective in Duel three years later, though "Eyes" is more fanciful and decorative than that gem of realistic horror. Crawford brings a vicious grandness to her role, in a mature performance better than much of her long previous career.

The other two segments are less interesting by far. In the opening tale, straight from the pages of E.C. Comics it seems, Roddy McDowell is a vile, money-grubbing trifler, who murders his uncle in order to obtain his inheritance. Naturally, the old man wreaks havoc from beyond the grave, and with the help of his servant (Ossie Davis) destroys McDowell in a predictable ending (even the additional twist is trite and hackneyed).

Rounding out the film is a story of an ex-nazi refugee in Argentina, haunted by ghosts of the past and seeking an end to painful memories. Unfortunately he is saddled with a drunken prostitute-philosopher of a neighbor in his flophouse, and the scenes involving her ruminations on his past evils are laborious and embarassing. More than the other two stories, this tale is indicative of what the series Night Gallery would become: a venue for often interesting premises weakened by sloppy direction and talkative scripts.