Review: Brando Mesmerizes and Captivates in 'The Night Of The Following Day'

Marlon Brando is the ONLY reason to sit through the tepid, messy and dull crime thriller, "The Night of the Following Day." Everything about the film, including the title, seems like a bamboozling deflection. The creatives so desperately and pretentiously want us to believe we're watching a clever and beguiling suspense drama, when, in actuality, it's narrative is rather facile and poorly constructed.

The film is based on "The Snatchers," a novel by Lionel White. Stanley Kubrick bought the rights in the early '50s hoping to make his Hollywood debut, but at the time kidnapping films were verboten. Hubert Cornfield snatched up the rights and over a decade later, changed the title and shot the film (in 1969), making one major change. The original kidnapping victim was a child. In the film, she's an older teen.

Cornfield was a Turkish refugee who drew quite a bit of attention with a short film in the early '40s called, "The Color is Red." The six films he would make in the next two decades are all rather negligible. "The Night of the Following Day" would prove to be his penultimate film and his most prominent because of the casting of a slim and fit Brando (apparently, he had started putting on those pounds in the mid-60s but lost it for this).

And Brando does look fantastic. With blond locks and often undone pants, he is in shape and sexy as hell. Almost 20 years after "A Streetcar Named Desire" he still smolders and has charisma to spare. Alas, not enough to save the film from imploding.

The narrative is seemingly simple. A quartet of criminals abduct a teenage girl from a Paris airport so they can extort money from her wealthy dad. They hold her prisoner at a beach house and begin their absurdly elaborate plan to get the money.

Of course, you can see the betrayal coming so early thanks to a ridiculously overdone turn by Richard Boone. Rita Moreno (who had a tempestuous 8-year affair with Brando, according to her own account) is on board to look terrified or nervous or crazy (depending on the moment) and serve as Brando's punching bag. Pamela Franklin (so good in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" that same year) is completely wasted as the heiress.

It's only in Brando's work that we get some psychological complexity. We're never certain what he's going to do, which is refreshing here. So much of his credits in '60s cinema are dismissed and while many of the films he made in that decade are uneven ("The Fugitive Kind," "The Chase," "Reflections in a Golden Eye") his performances are rich and nuanced.

Cornfield is the kind of director who thinks he can create significant tension by showing a lot of cars in motion and people getting in and out of them.

Howard Thompson writing for the New York Times, began his review this way:
"It's high time that Marlon Brando landed himself a good picture, but "The Night of the Following Day" is emphatically not the one. This is a dull, stilted and pointless little kidnapping melodrama." Unfortunately, I must agree.

Only the final moments prove truly fascinating when we realize things might not be exactly as we have witnessed. But at that point, I no longer cared.

Kino Lorber has done a fine job with the visual and audio transfer for the Blu-ray. The film looks and sounds better than it has any right to.

The disc features a difficult-to-listen-to but informative Audio Commentary by Cornfield as well as a terrific new Audio Commentary by Film Historian Tim Lucas. The theatrical trailer is also included as well as Trailers from Hell with Joe Dante.

"The Night of the Following Day" is more a curiosity than anything else but worth the sit to watch one of our finest screen actors, Marlon Brando, mesmerize and captivate with so little to work with.

"The Night of the Following Day" is available on Blu-ray on May 24, 2021.