Night Slaves (1970)

Our film opens with a “Man in Crisis” preamble: He's just quit his job as a corporate attorney; his marriage is currently breaking up on the rocks of ennui and the resulting infidelity (-- the wife is having an affair with his ex-business partner); and his brakes have just failed, resulting in a catastrophic car accident; and whose sustained injuries from said accident require part of his fractured skull to be replaced with a steel plate.

While this man recovers, his wife, in a noble but perhaps misguided gesture of loyalty and doing the right thing, postpones their inevitable break-up, not wanting to pile on any more misery until her husband is solidly back on his feet. Thus, our film proper picks-up several months later, with our fraying couple out on the road, still together, looking for a quiet spot to recuperate as per doctor's orders.  

Finding what appears to be the ideal town to do just that, where everything is so serene and laid back most of the locals appear to be literally asleep on their feet. (Odd, since it's well past noon.) Here, our cast is thickened up a bit with the introduction of Henshaw, the town sheriff (Nielsen), Beany, the town idiot (Prine), Fletcher, the local restaurateur (Kellogg), and Mrs. Crawford, the dowdy owner of the local B 'n' B (Vincent). It almost seems too bucolic to be true, but things take a sinister turn when our couple crawls into bed for the night.

Waking up with a start from an obviously recurring nightmare about the accident, our haunted hero, Clay Howard (Franciscus), is drawn to the window by some activity outside. Seems the whole town has turned out, like ants fleeing a colony, as they silently load-up onto the back of several panel-trucks. Puzzled by this, Clay turns to alert the wife, Marjorie (Grant), only to discover she's not in bed -- or even in the room. He then spots her outside, waiting to get onto one of those trucks!

Taking to the streets, he tries to stop her but she is totally non-responsive to his pleas -- as if in a trance. And when he physically tries to stop her, the other somnambulant townsfolk prevent this, knocking him aside. Once the trucks leave, the distraught Clay does a quick search around town, looking for help but finding everyone gone -- save for one girl, who giggles constantly at his plight and escalating agitation. Luring him back to his room, this taunting tormentor then disappears without a trace and the overwhelmed man collapses on the bed and mercifully passes out.

Come the dawn, Clay wakes up with his wife sleeping soundly beside him. Worse yet, when he reveals what he saw the night before, Marjorie has no recollection of any of this -- nor will any of the other townsfolk. Told to write it off as just another in a long line of bad dreams, despite the mounting circumstantial evidence backing him up -- his wife’s pajamas are covered in thistles and cockle-burrs, Clay begins to question his sanity in the face of all this denial -- until night falls and, crazy or not, this mass exodus happens again...

Jerry Sohl was a passable science fiction novelist -- The Transcendent Man, The Odious Ones, who transitioned to a fairly successful Hollywood screen-writer, staying in the same genre, by penning scripts for The Outer Limits (1963-1965) -- Counterweight, The Invisible Enemy, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962) -- Dead Weight, A Secret Life, and, most notably, Star Trek (1966-1969) -- Whom Gods Destroy, This Side of Paradise and The Corbomite Maneuver. He also served as a ghost-writer for Charles Beaumont on a trio of episodes of The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) -- Queen of the Nile, Living Doll and The New Exhibit. And in between all of that, Sohl published another novel in 1965, Night Slaves.

Now, the telefilm based on the book doesn't stray too far from its source, with the Howards also being on the outs in the novel. Marjorie Howard is in love with another man but stays with her husband over a sense of duty while he recovers from that auto accident, which killed the other driver and his passenger. And thus, both physically and emotionally, Clay Howard is, forgive me, a bit of a wreck. And things only get worse when the couple's getaway vacation is crudely interrupted by some preternatural malfeasance.

Five years after it's publication, producer Everett Chambers tagged Night Slaves for adaptation as a Made for TV Movie. I've touched on the history of this genre before on the old blog, but, for those of you just tuning in, the MFTV Movie really cemented itself when Barry Diller set up a specific time-slot for them as part of the ABC network's The Movie of the Week in the fall of 1969; and Night Slaves (1970) would be part of the second wave of productions to find their way into living rooms. Fellow Outer Limits scribe Robert Specht co-wrote the adapted screenplay with Chambers, which, again, stays fairly faithful to the novel with one notable exception that we won't spoil -- yet.

To translate that script to screen, Chambers brought in veteran TV director, Ted Post. Starting with The Armstrong Circle Theater back in 1952, Post was fairly prolific on the small screen over the next three decades, sliding from genre to genre with ease, but was also no stranger to motion pictures. He directed Clint Eastwood in Hang 'Em High (1968), and would do so again in Magnum Force (1970). And Post had just wrapped Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), which also starred Franciscus, before tackling Night Slaves. And like it's source novel, this telefilm uses sci-fi trappings as a framing device to show the death throes of a marriage and one man's existential mid-life crisis and mental breakdown prodded along by extraterrestrial forces. Allegedly.

“It’s mysterious and scary and handled in such a way that it’s a long time before you know whether you’re watching a science fiction tale or the mental breakdown of a man with a metal plate in his skull as the result of a car crash” promised the telefilm’s press materials. But can it maintain this mystery and sense of dread? Well, yes and no. But mostly no.

See, after the second morning produces the same vehement denials from his wife and the others, and then a third, Night Slaves quickly ventures into It Came from Outer Space (1953) territory when Clay finally wises up and plays along the next night, obediently following the others onto the trucks, which take them to a nearby factory where they all unload and set to work on ... something.

Poking around further, Clay finally gets to the bottom of it all. Seems a gaggle of shipwrecked aliens are using these people -- as benevolently brain-washed as extra-terrestrially possible -- as forced labor to repair their ship.

Turns out Clay was immune to their 'psycho-kinetic' brain-waves due to that steel plate in his head. But now that he knows the truth, it does little to add credibility to his story. Branded a kook by the locals, the film tries to muddy-up these familiar plot contrivances by throwing in a couple of missing people into the mix -- namely Fletcher's wife and daughter. And when the former turns up dead along the road to the factory and the other turns out to be the giggling girl, who only Clay has seen these past three nights, everyone soon suspects this stranger of a double-homicide.

And if all of that weren't dire enough, things get even a bit more twisted when Clay and the girl (Sterling) spend some time together on these lonely overnights and eventually fall head over heels in love with each other in perhaps the fastest and most lackluster whirlwind romance ever committed to film.

See, the girl has been possessed by a lowly alien technician named Naillil, and they're both ready to tune-in and drop-out of their equivalent rat-races and decide to do so together. Alas, insta-soulmates or not, their inter-stellar romance is strictly verboten (-- it'll never work, says I. He's carbon based, she's a non-corporeal blob of neurons). And so, commander Noel (Prine again) orders Clay be placed in 'protective custody' in the city jail until the repairs are completed in two more days. Will t'woo wuv win out in the end? Or will a daytime lynch mob derail this romance permanently?

Well, the answer to both questions is yes. Well, sort of. But not really. See, as we barrel toward the climax, the televised version of Night Slaves finally ditches Night Slaves the novel. In Sohl's version, Clay Howard truly was insane, and this whole scenario was a paranoid delusion -- all part of his cognitive breakdown over the guilt of killing the other two motorists; a father and his daughter. And in this delusion, he concocts this plight where he decides to run away with Naillil to outer space. To accomplish this, he commits suicide by slitting his wrists. Again, this was all in his head and he died for nothing. Allegedly.

Now, a lot of these same elements that proved Clay's insanity leaked into the movie. Naillil and Noel are Lillian and Leon spelled backwards, the names of the other victims involved in that accident. And so, in a sense, novel Clay has fallen in love with the woman he killed to compensate for his guilt, which leads to his own self-destruction. I find this weird and a little disconcerting. And when one considers a lot of the other cynical, downbeat, and straight-up mind-f@ck endings the 1970s spawned on the boob-tube -- A Cold Night's Death (1973) and Satan's Triangle (1975) immediately spring to mind, they really could've had another bona fide head-walloper here. But, no. Here, we get a happy ending instead. Sort of. But not really. Sensing a pattern here...

Anyhoo, Clay is saved firstly when that lynch mob waits too long as night falls and they are diverted from the jail and back to the factory. (To wrap up those loose ends, turns out that missing woman died of a heart attack while in-transport and fell off the truck, which, of course, no one remembers.) Left alone in the jail, Naillil lets him out and tells Clay to meet her in a meadow where the ship will launch when the sun comes up. But Clay thinks they should just skip trying to smuggle him on board the starship, jump in his car, and skedaddle. This they try, but the zombified townsfolk swarm the car, blocking their escape. (The film's most effective scene.)

Come the dawn, Clay smiles and nods and gives everyone the answers they all want to hear until he's released from jail. Then, he quickly ditches the wife and leads a merry chase to that meadow, where he is reunited with his alien lover. They run off into the weeds together. When the sheriff and Marjorie arrive, they find them sprawled on the ground. Clay is dead -- well, not ‘dead-dead’ but 'psycho-kinetically' extracted to join Naillil on the ship (-- you'd think that steel plate would have prevented this, too, but, eh, forget it, the movie's almost over), but the girl, Annie Fletcher, is still alive but remembers nothing about these last few days, leaving those our protagonist left behind to contemplate on what really happened and whether he was crazy or not.

Despite these changes, Sohl was apparently happy with the adaptation. To me, as crazy as I made it out to be, Night Slaves is a little too tepid and way too repetitive in its plot structure to be truly effective. (I was totally with it until it got bogged down with the romantic subplot.) 

It also lacks the true whackadoodlery of George McCowan's The Love War (1970) -- a wild and wacky tale of feuding alien races fighting a clandestine war on earth in the form of Lloyd Bridges and Angie Dickinson, which debuted the same year, and not played straight enough to reach the supernatural contemporaneity alchemy of John Llewellyn Moxey's The Night Stalker (1972) -- where a vampire stalks the streets of Las Vegas.

Post does a workmanlike job behind the camera, but aside from that final attack on the car nothing else really sticks out. We've all seen him be better than this. And weirder -- go see The Baby (1973). Now! The incidental music is credited to Bernardo Segall, but one could easily mistake it's hiccuping, clavichord heavy muzak for something Vic Mizzy would’ve cooked up. Whoever wrote it, it doesn't really fit the surroundings all that well. 

Overcompensating for these deficiencies and lack of deliriousness, we have James Franciscus and Lee Grant adding a lot of gravitas to these proceedings -- and more than it probably deserved. 

The film just smolders when these two share the screen. Not with hate, but a sense of familiar contempt two people with nothing left to give or say to each other accrue until it finally boils over.

The film works so well when these two shred what's left of their marriage, burn the remnants, and salt the ashes. Kudos to Grant especially; it was a genuine pleasure to watch her on such a slow burn, here, when everything else I've seen her in can be easily identified by the teeth marks she left in the majority of the scenery-- thinking of you, Airport '77 (1977) and The Swarm (1978).

My Bro'Crush on Franciscus has already been well documented, and, omigod, Tisha Sterling is so adorable I can't even even. According to an article in the Wichita Beacon (September, 1970), in preparation for the role of Clay Howard, Franciscus did a lot of research into mysterious mass disappearances throughout history, citing an incident in 1819, when the entire population of the Russian town of Ebelyahk disappeared -- over 5,000 people; or how an entire Polish regiment vanished during the Napoleonic Wars; and how the Mary Celeste never came back with all hands presumed lost; and then, of course, there’s the lost continent of Atlantis. 

Are we sure it sunk, asked the actor? Or did it fly up? “That’s the trigger of the whole plot [of Night Slaves],” said Franciscus. “That is what makes the film so interesting -- and baffling at first.” As to what really happened to all those people, well, the star felt it all made for a long night of “good beer and pretzel arguments. But, you never really know -- do you.”

James Franciscus, Leslie Nielsen, Ted Post.

Night Slaves debuted on September 29, 1970. I first saw it many moons ago on TBS, back when the SuperStations did not suck. It's good, but not THAT good. It's weird, but not quite weird enough. Is it worth seeing? Absolutely. It barely breaks an hour and there are worse things you could waste an hour on. And despite it's short-comings, Night Slaves definitely proves, once again, that the 1970s truly were a glorious time for Network-TV. An era of Made for TV movies, with amazing casts plugged into plots you wouldn't believe even if I drew you a picture, that we will sadly never see again.

Originally posted on April 1, 2014, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.

Night Slaves (1970) Bing Crosby Productions :: American Broadcasting Company (ABC) / P: Everett Chambers / D: Ted Post / W: Everett Chambers, Robert Specht, Jerry Sohl (novel) / C: Robert B. Hauser / E: Michael Kahn / M: Bernardo Segall / S: James Franciscus, Lee Grant, Andrew Prine, Tisha Sterling, Leslie Nielsen, John Kellogg, Virginia Vincent