The Vast of Night

Andrew Patterson's The Vast of Night is a pretty good feature debut, though perhaps not the eye popping masterpiece some have hailed. A Close Encounters... type Sci-Fi film set in a New Mexico town, The Vast of Night functions best as a portrait of small town insularity in the 1950s. Issues still pertinent today such as racism, sexism and the creep of technology burble under the surface of this film. Patterson juxtaposes lengthy tracking shots of his main characters scurrying to and fro  investigating mysterious sights and sounds with still moments in which his characters are able to breathe and indulge in long, explicatory monologues.

Sierra McCormick plays Fay, a high school student with a single mom and a night gig as a switchboard operator. Her companion exploring the mysterious trail of extraterrestrials is Everett, a young DJ who yearns for the big time. Patterson emphasizes how both feel hemmed in by their small town existence. Fay wants to go to college, but knows she cannot afford it. A budding romance between the two is hinted at, but Patterson wisely keeps their relationship chaste as they join in their mutual quest.

One of the film's monologue's is quite terrific: Gail Cronauer as Mabel Blanche, a woman describing her young son being abducted by an alien force. She regards the aliens as malevolent powers pulling the strings behind the scenes and egging on man's baser and more violent instincts. However, Patterson never follows through on this intriguing portrait of Cold War paranoia. The film peters out into a rehash of Close Encounters... anemic ending.

A clue to Patterson's ambitions and his inability to bring the film to a satisfactory conclusion is the film's debt to Orson Welles. Everett's last name is Sloan, a shout out to Everett Sloane, the great actor who played Mr. Bernstein in Citizen Kane and was a member of Welles' Mercury Players. The film is also replete with references to Welles' Touch of Evil: the border town setting, the long tracking shots and the prominent role of a tape recorder in the proceedings. Patterson's film only ends up looking small compared to Welles' meditation on malevolence. As Andrew Sarris noted, in his piece on Paul Wendkos in The American Cinema:

  Perhaps Welles is a dangerous influence on any young director. Welles can get away with a 
  lot more than can his most devote disciples because the power of Welles' personality
  holds the varied forms in some meaningful context.           

Patterson bit off more than he could chew and it is no disgrace to say that The Vast of Night does not reach the level of Citizen Kane or Touch of Evil. The Vast of Night suffers from technical defects that plague most directorial debuts filmed on a small budget: the sound recording is often fuzzy and there is poor lighting in some of the exterior shots. The callowness of his leads is not always due to their characters' youth and naiveté. However, Patterson has an eye, a sense of place and more ideas than he knows what to do with. The Vast of Night is not a completely satisfying movie, but it is a very promising one.