THE last time anyone tried to do homage to Alfred Hitchcock it resulted in Richard Gere making a complete embarrassment of himself and everyone else in Intersection. Gere did likewise with Kim Basinger and Uma Thurman in Final Analysis.
Still Of The Night (World, 9.35pm), made in 1982, was another attempt to do Hitchcock. The problem is not that it fails, but that everyone takes themselves so damn seriously. The film has everything, except any trace of humanity.
It has a plot, and one that bears a passing resemblance to Final Analysis. There's a psychiatrist (Roy Scheider), a dead patient (a short part for Josef Sommer - he falls from a building before the first reel is half way through) and a woman patient (Meryl Streep) who turns out to be the dead patient's ex-lover and who admits to her shrink in a moment of candour that she once killed a man. Throw in a slightly batty wife (Jessica Tandy), the obligatory web of psychological terror and intrigue, and what you have is a film that takes you on an enjoyable enough journey, but one you have made a thousand times before.
Director Robert Benton, who also wrote the screenplay, manages to keep the identity of the killer fairly well concealed. All the evidence, of course, points to Streep. Benton's failing is that in fighting to keep his killer hidden for so long, he lets the plot fall into a muddle at his feet.
ALL the usual action ingredients are mixed in Sniper (Pearl, 9.30pm). Tom Berenger is an experienced marine sent to the jungles of Colombia - why not somewhere else for a change? - to assassinate a drug baron. Billy Zane is the novice who goes with him and has to endure a rite of passage along with some uncomfortable nights in a tent. Luis Llosa directs with an expert's touch. It's tense, it's sharp, but ultimately it's unsatisfying.
A SIGNIFICANT moment in history is rendered mundane in Fat Man And Little Boy (Pearl, 1.15am), a film also known as Shadow Makers. Roland Joffe directed, but not with the vision he demonstrated in The Killing Fields and The Mission.
