A psychiatrist drawn into a murder
In Still of the Night, released in 1982 and directed by Robert Benton, Roy Scheider played Dr Sam Rice, a Manhattan psychiatrist whose quiet, ordered life is upended when one of his patients is murdered. The patient, a man who had been having an affair, is found dead, and the woman at the centre of the affair, Brooke Reynolds, played by Meryl Streep, becomes both a suspect and an object of fascination for Sam. As Sam investigates, partly out of professional duty and partly out of attraction, he discovers that the world of his consulting room, where secrets are spoken in confidence, has collided with a world of real violence. Scheider plays Sam as a decent, intelligent man who is out of his depth, and that decency makes the thriller work.
The film is a deliberate homage to Alfred Hitchcock, with its New York locations, its wrong-man suspense, and its use of an ordinary professional drawn into a mystery. Benton, who had directed Kramer vs. Kramer, wanted a thriller that was also a character study, and Scheider was ideal for it. Sam Rice is not a detective. He is a listener. He is trained to interpret dreams, not to follow suspects, and Scheider’s performance captures the awkwardness of a man applying the tools of therapy to a murder investigation. He asks questions, he watches faces, and he makes mistakes, because he is used to believing what people tell him.
Sam and Brooke
The heart of the film is the relationship between Sam and Brooke. Streep, at the height of her early fame, plays Brooke as a woman who is both vulnerable and unknowable, a person who may be a victim, a liar, or both. Scheider plays Sam’s attraction to her with a restraint that is both professional and human. He knows he should not get involved. He knows his interest compromises his judgement. He gets involved anyway, and the film is honest about why: loneliness, curiosity, and the dangerous feeling that he can understand someone who does not want to be understood.
Their scenes together, in apartments, in restaurants, and in Sam’s office, are charged with the tension of two people testing each other. Scheider, who had played opposite strong women throughout his career, gives Streep room to be mysterious while keeping Sam grounded. He does not play Sam as a fool, but as a man whose intelligence is precisely what makes him vulnerable: he thinks he can read Brooke, and the film keeps suggesting he may be reading her wrong. That ambiguity is the thriller’s engine, and Scheider sustains it without ever tipping his hand.
New York as a character
Benton films New York with a lover’s eye, from the Upper West Side streets where Sam lives to the auction houses and museums where Brooke works. The city in Still of the Night is elegant and slightly menacing, a place of beautiful rooms with something wrong behind them. Scheider’s Sam moves through it like a man who knows the city socially but not dangerously. He is comfortable in a restaurant, less comfortable in a dark street, and the film uses that contrast to build suspense. The famous sequence in which Sam follows Brooke through the city, and later finds himself followed, works because Scheider makes Sam’s fear believable. He is not an action hero. He is a man who has never been chased before.
The film was not a major commercial success, and it is less well known than Scheider’s blockbusters, but it has gained admirers for its literate script, its performances, and its Hitchcockian craftsmanship. It also shows a different side of Scheider: softer, more introspective, and more romantic than the policemen and pilots he usually played. Sam Rice is a man of words, not of action, and Scheider’s command of language, honed on the stage, serves him well. He delivers Benton’s dialogue with a natural, conversational ease that makes Sam feel like a real New Yorker, not a movie psychiatrist.
Why Sam endures
Dr Sam Rice endures because he represents a rarer kind of thriller hero: the professional whose expertise is also his blind spot. Scheider understood that Sam’s training as a psychiatrist makes him both insightful and naive, and he plays both qualities at once. The result is a performance that is quietly suspenseful, in which the most frightening moments are not chases or murders, but the realisation that Sam may have trusted the wrong person.
Watch Still of the Night for its Hitchcockian pleasures, but watch it for Scheider’s portrait of a decent man in over his head. It is a reminder that Roy Scheider could do more than play tough professionals. He could play thoughtful, vulnerable men, and make their vulnerability the most compelling thing on screen.
A quieter kind of suspense
What distinguishes Still of the Night from other thrillers of its period is its patience. Benton allows scenes to play out in real time, lets conversations wander, and trusts the audience to notice small inconsistencies in what Brooke says and how she behaves. Scheider is central to that patience. He does not rush his reactions, and he does not signal to the audience whether Sam is right or wrong. In one telling stretch, Sam replays a conversation in his mind, testing each version of events, and Scheider plays the uncertainty as a professional habit turning into a personal obsession. That slow accumulation of doubt is more unsettling than a sudden shock, and it is why the film rewards a second viewing, when the viewer can watch Sam’s blind spots forming in plain sight.