

On the eve of his 78th birthday, ailing, alcoholic writer Clive Langham spends a painful and sleepless night mentally composing and recomposing scenes for a novel in which characters based on his own family are shaped by his fantasies and memories, alongside his caustic commentary on their behaviour.
Acting
Gielgud's monstrous, magnificent self-loathing.
Direction
Resnais collapses past, present, and fiction into one fevered night.
Writing
Mercer’s script: vicious, poetic, unsparing.

Director
Alain Resnais
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Resnais called this his 'first Anglo-Saxon film'—a deliberate pivot toward British theatrical naturalism after French New Wave formalism.
The fictional scenes were shot on grainy color stock, 'reality' in crisp black-and-white—Resnais's visual joke about which felt more 'real.'