Still of the Night (1982)

This is a movie I'd never heard about before searching cable for '80s fare - Still of the Night (1982) with Roy Scheider and Meryl Streep. Confession: I dislike Meryl Streep. I can never accept her in any role, I always sense that she is Acting with a capital A. But I like Roy Scheider a lot, so I gave it a shot. Also, I am contractually bound to watch it according to the terms of the blog. 

Sadly, it's not very good. After psychologist Sam Rice (Scheider) loses a patient to a brutal murder, he encounters the patient's mistress (Streep) who he is incredibly intrigued by and starts to fall for. Meanwhile, he reviews his case notes and starts investigating on his own. 

His investigation quickly goes off the rails and gets murdery. He gets mugged, mugger takes his coat (!?) and then mugger is immediately misidentified as Scheider and is murdered. Uh oh! 

There is one tense scene that caught my attention where Scheider visits Streep as she's getting a massage. His leering gaze and her subtle manipulation thereof are very well done, and you're left with a complex atmosphere of reversed sexual tension, where he is powerless but to observe and she uses it to her advantage. 

But otherwise, the movie is pretty dull. I have to say that the print MGM ran on their channel was amazingly good. Crystal clear, all the colors intact, not grainy, no artifacts ... just in great shape. When the best thing you can say about a movie is that the print is good, that's a bad sign.

I tried to watch this twice, and just couldn't get into it. And it seems I'm vindicated, since when Meryl Streep was asked "what's one bad movie you acted in?" she immediately answered with this one.

It was directed by Robert Benton, who is best known for Kramer vs. Kramer and Places in the Heart. Maybe also Billy Bathgate and Nobody's Fool with Paul Newman. It cost $10,000,000 to make and only grossed a total of about $3,000,000 - so a major failure. However, it clearly didn't slow Streep down, since her next movie was Sophie's Choice which won her her first Oscar. Roy Scheider's career, however, rapidly wound down. 

Avoid, which will be easy since you've also probably never heard of this and it only came on TV because MGM is dumping their film library onto their cable channel.