Teresa Reviews “Endless Night” (1972)

Fidelity to text: 4 poison bottles

Claudia and her murder disappear, names and occupations shift, annoying relatives show up more often. What was a veiled reference to sex gets fleshed out as does the last murder. Otherwise, it’s spot-on.

Quality of movie on its own: 4 poison bottles

Haunting, elegiac, wistful, creepy, underrated; watch it and you’ll understand why Ellie fell head-over-heels for louche ne’er-do-well Mike Rogers.

Endless Night is one of Agatha’s best novels. However, it can only be read once. The second time around, it’s a very different book. The same is true of the movie versions. There are two, this one and the wrong one with Miss Marple shoehorned in. Yes, you read that right. Miss Marple involved herself with Mike and Ellie Rogers. Watch that movie if you must for completeness. Watch this one to see the novel made flesh.

There’s a fair amount of flesh in the movie, much more so than in the text. The novel’s flesh is implied because Agatha wasn’t that kind of a writer. Still, when Mike comes home to Gypsy’s Acre to meet his true love, he describes it as being like a sailor coming home from the sea. Well. I was in the Navy. I know what sailors do as soon as they get home to their lover and close the door. The movie spells it out for you in a way the text does not.

The movie also gives you a much more dramatic final murder than the text does, including still more naked flesh. But it worked, with the added, strange edge of being trapped in a supervillain’s lair and a callback to the past. I can understand why Agatha was taken aback. It must have been jarring to watch what some hack screenwriter did to her beautifully written prose. But words are words and films are films and film is a visual medium. Mood and emotion are conveyed differently.

There’s a lot more hormones crashing about, hormones implied in the text and made flesh on film. Watch Mike meet Ellie, then meet her again and again. Each time you can see the waves of sex radiating off the two of them. He wants her, she wants him, and they both get what they want. When Mike’s mother finds out, she’s worried. When Ellie’s family finds out, they’re livid. They are concerned for very different reasons than Mike’s mother, but their concerns are equally well-founded.

I’ll say upfront this is an uneven movie. There are some jarring artistic choices. As an example, I’ve no idea why the film opens with crashing waves unless it’s to imply the inevitability of what follows. Try stemming the tide and you’ll understand what I mean. Watch Mike, looking very sharp, bidding on a gorgeous Renoir at Christie’s Auction. He loses the bid and you think “how sad”. He wanted that painting. He loves beauty. Then you discover that he couldn’t have afforded that painting despite owning a Rolls-Royce. He’s a hired chauffer, that’s not his car, and he’s virtually penniless. More scenes with Mike demonstrate how much he appreciates, wants, craves what he can’t afford, what he can’t have.

The house he drives clients to inspect in Italy is a good example. Mike meets the architect, Santonix, and they’re kindred souls. Mike understands what Santonix can build in a way the crass clients never will. Could Santonix build Mike his dream house on his dream land? Sure, if he can come up with a few million dollars.

07Then he meets Ellie on Gypsy’s Acre, dancing across the meadow with the sea behind her like an elfin princess. He’s smitten. He has no idea she’s a fabulously wealthy heiress so he treats her like a normal girl, which she loves. But as they meet and meet again, there are … hints of oddness. Of strangeness. But they elope to Wales and then it’s too late for Ellie’s family to do anything about her marrying some working-class bloke with delusions of grandeur.

Ellie buys Gypsy’s Acre despite the eerie warnings from resident crazy lady, Miss Townsend. Ellie pays Santonix to build them their fabulous house despite more weird warnings and strange things happening.

They love the dream house. Personally, I think the house was a nightmare. That reverse roofline in England’s climate? I guarantee the roof leaked within one week. It’s a bizarrely automated house operated by remote-control, with magical windows, walls that rearrange themselves, retracting roofs, and a retracting floor with a pool underneath. Pay attention to the pool; you’ll see it again when Mike’s buried past rears up. The movie is worth watching just for the scenes of Santonix’s interior design. If you think the 70’s were all dirty hippies and muddy tie-dye, you’re wrong. It was also a time for building houses suitable for a supervillain’s lair.

Ellie provides Mike with everything he ever wanted, including his own, fully-subsidized antiques business where he’s surrounded by beautiful things. They’re happy until Greta, Ellie’s hot blonde companion shows up. Ellie’s relatives — at last! — discover they have something in common with Mike. They all loathe managing, bossy, controlling Greta. Ellie relies completely on Greta to a worrisome degree, something everyone disapproves of.

Then Ellie dies in a tragic riding accident, exactly as foretold by the crazy gypsy lady, Miss Townsend. Mike is bereft and sleepwalks through the days and nights after her death. He really loved Ellie. He also loses Santonix, visiting the architect in the hospital as he dies. Santonix revives enough to ask Mike why he didn’t “go the other way.” It’s a reminder that Santonix, like Mike’s mother, knows him for what he truly is under his charming exterior.

Mike Rogers goes slowly crazy. He sees Ellie after her death but she doesn’t see him. He realizes what he lost. He begins to understand the tragedy he voluntarily set in motion because he wanted what he wanted and didn’t care what he had to do to get it.

The ending comes on inexorably as one lie after another is unveiled, as true motivations are revealed, as lovers discover they don’t want the same thing at all. Their goals are diametrically opposed, so one of them has to die. It’s at the ending that you discover, as the reader discovers in the last two chapters of the novel, that what you thought you knew was wrong. All those red herrings, the ominous warnings about tragedy, the foreboding atmosphere; they concealed something else. A secret meeting is unearthed and a meticulously planned crime is revealed.

Endless Night is a tragedy, an elegy for what might have been, a wistful remembrance of wrong choices leading to a dreadful outcome. But the ending was inevitable because of Mike Rogers’ character. Like Ellie was born to sweet delight, he was born to endless night.

This is a sadly undervalued movie. Watch it, then watch it again for a radically different experience. Like the tide, it not the same twice.