Brilliant and touching

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Patricia Neal always brings two attributes to her film performances: honesty and integrity--both of which work wonders for this derivative, somewhat moldy tale of a spinster, living under the thumb of her half-blind adoptive mother, who blossoms in love and independence with a 20-year-old handyman in rural England. The film, sort of a character study-cum-suspense melodrama, isn't an attractive showcase for Neal, yet she gives the scenario a hearty touch and her unmistakable stamp of dry wit. Neal's then-husband Roald Dahl adapted his screenplay from Joy Cowley's novel "Nest in a Falling Tree", pushing some of the kinkier aspects of the plot a bit far for a blue-haired thriller. Nevertheless, a visually perceptive and intriguing little movie that almost stays the course until the final act, which comes completely apart. Released under two different titles (also "The Road Builder"), though barely seen by anybody until the advent of cable movie channels. ** from ****

As others have said, this movie was written by British poet/author Roald Dahl as a vehicle for his wife, American actress Patricia Neal. (I thought of it recently after seeing a similar American movie "Happy Mother's Day, Love George" that featured Neal and the couple's real-life daughter Tess Dahl). The basic story is pretty good. Neal plays a lonely spinster whose domineering mother rents a room to a traveling road worker (Nicholas Clay), and Neal's character finds herself drawn to the handsome, younger man, unaware that he might be a serial killer who has buried a string of female victims along the road he is building. . .This definitely works as a vehicle for Neal, who is probably most famous for the Paul Newman movie "Hud" (even though her character in that was supposed to have been African-American, but such a thing would have simply been too incendiary in the early 1960's). She is very good in this. Unfortunately, she doesn't get a lot of help. Nicholas Clay would later play Lancelot in "Excalibur" and appear with an all-star cast in Agatha Christie's "Evil Under the Sun", but he was just too inexperienced here. For whatever reason, there was a plethora of handsome but psychotic young men in British movies at this time, and this role might have been better played by another "handsome young psycho" actor like Shane Bryant or Hywell Bennett (although neither of them might have been very convincing as a roughneck construction worker). If it have been made a decade or so earlier though, it would have been a PERFECT role for a young Oliver Reed.The directing is also a little flat generally, but the first murder (following a motorcycle ride) is pretty inspired. The Bernard Hermann score is not one of his best, but it does add SOMETHING to the proceedings. This isn't great, but it certainly deserves to be more widely seen.

Many people will say that this film was a botch up job of Joy Cowley's novel, but they would be wrong. While I have to admit that the type of filming they used in the 70's is not among my favourite, it worked well for this film because it gave you insight into how each character saw things. Patricia Niel was perfect as the spinster who was stuck caring for her blind and horrid adoptive mother, and who slowly but surely becomes sexually aware of the young drifter, played by Nicholas Clay. Some parts of the film are vaguely confusing, but one comes to grasp them after rolling the idea around in ones mind for a while. This film was very well done for an era that produced some awful movies that completely butchered famous books, and used skin instead of actual acting to portray a film. The Night Digger aka Road Runner is a very watchable film, that sneaks up on you rather than attacks you head on like some psychological thrillers do.

Patricia Neal+Bernard Herrmann + Neal's husband Dahl.Plus Pamela Brown and Nicholas Clay.It does make a decent film,it does not make the classic thriller we could have expected .Neala nd her mother ("you could have got married when you were YOUNG" said Clay to an infuriated Neal).A spinster who lives with her over possessive mother ,Neal's character recalls Nell's past in Shirley Jackson's "the haunting" (masterfully transferred to the screen by Robert Wise,then butchered some years ago).A good thing in the last minutes :the director does not show ,he lets us imagine what terrible thing happened .Today such a quality has become rare.But if you have read Dahl's wonderful short stories ,you may be disappointed by his script,including pointless characters such as the minister and his wife who want to become a woman and a man respectively. Besides the two women's story and Nicholas Clay's do not hang very well.