Director – Peter Masterson, Screenplay – Spencer Eastman & Anthony Palmer, Story – Spencer Eastman, Producer – George Litto, Photography – Fred Murphy, Music – Pino Donaggio, Music Conductor – Natale Massara, Special Effects Supervisor – Steven Purcell, Production Design – Neil Spisak. Production Company – Epic Productions.
Cast
Roy Scheider (Mike Seaver), Karen Young (Roxy Bennett), Richard Bradford (Chief Ronnie Nelson), Carlin Glynn (Alma), Paul Gleason (Carl Broussard), Lane Smith (Lamar Witty), Kevin Cooney (Bill Essicks), Anthony Palmer (Oscar Mendoza), Matt Carlson (Bibbee), Rex Winn (Floyd Epps), Alex Morris (Gries), Alex Garcia (Silvio Barretto), Michelle Cochran (Cindy Barretto), Tony Frank (Alex Lynch), Sarah Chattin (Eva Lyons), Lisa Hart Carroll (Loretta Akers), Renee O’Connor (Lorraine Beasly), Dee Hennigan (Beverly)
Plot
Mike Seaver, a detective with the Galveston, Texas police force, announces his engagement to the much younger Roxy Bennett. At the same time, Mike is assigned to the trail of a serial killer. The killer always slits the throats of blondes and afterwards leaves a note saying ‘Best Wishes’ or some equivalent. Caught between inter-agency rivalry and the media, Mike is under great pressure to come up with some breaks in the case. He then finds a connection between the killings and the local baseball team’s winning nights.
Night Game is a minor thriller that ventures into Psycho Film territory. It is a film that was hardly released when it came out and has failed to gain much more of a reputation since then. Which could well be due to its title, which is so generic that it is easily missed amid a host of other titles with nearly the same name.
Night Game is one of several variants on the Police Procedural. In these films, the central character is an investigating detective unravelling the trail of clues that lead to a serial killer, where the killer of the show features as a shadowy nemesis who is never explored much. As is fairly much standard with these films, the bulk of the plot of Night Game is focused on Roy Scheider’s often lone efforts to find the killer, although there are a number of scenes where the film cuts back to the killer stalking his victims.
The main problem with Night Game is its lack of real tension as a thriller. Far too much of the plot is given over to the non-thriller elements – the interdepartmental politics within the police department and Roy Scheider’s private life, in particular his engagement to the much younger Karen Young. Only rarely does this coalesce into a film that is interesting in anything more than a passing way. There are a couple of routinely competent stalkings – one of two girls being pursued through a carnival funhouse and another of a girl along a pier and beach.
Roy Scheider as police detective Mike Seaver
It wasn’t until the arrival of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) a couple of years later that these police procedurals began to explore the notion of serial killer motivation and patterns of behaviour whereupon the genre evolved into the Serial Killer Thrillers. Before this most of the reasons offered up for the killer’s behaviour tended to be rather cod psychology. Here the killer acts out of bitterness at his failure to become the star baseball pitcher and kills on the dates of the big home game wins, motivation that most forensic behaviourists would throw out as improbable psychology.
Roy Scheider was one of the great undervalued actors of the late 1970s and early 80s. Here he gives a performance that doggedly pushes through, treating the material with eminent professionalism. He is aided considerably by the hard-headed performance from Richard Bradford playing his police chief. Among the cast one can spot Before They Were Famous names such as Renee O’Connor, later Gabrielle of tv’s Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001), playing one of the victims in a carnival funhouse.
Director Peter Masterson started out as an actor with roles in films such as In the Heat of the Night (1967), The Exorcist (1973), Man on a Swing (1974) and The Stepford Wives (1975), among others. He enjoyed some success with the screenplay for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982), which led to his directorial debut with the acclaimed and award-winning The Trip to Bountiful (1985). Masterson went on to make eleven films as director, mostly dramas and thrillers, although Night Game is the only one that concerns us here.
