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
Dirk Bogarde
Claude Langham
David Warner
Kevin Woodford
Ellen Burstyn
Sonia Langham
Cyril Luckham
Dr. Mark Eddington
John Gielgud
Clive Langham
Tanya Lopert
Miss Lister
Elaine Stritch
Helen Wiener
Denis Lawson
Dave Woodford
Kathryn Leigh Scott
Miss Boon
Milo Sperber
Jenner
Peter Arne
Nils
Anna Wing
Karen
Samson Fainsilber
Old Man
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.'
CH
GB
