Even though it has a compelling title, The Night the City Screamed (1980) doesn’t really belong in this series. I watched it because it was about a blackout and I thought it’d have a little bit of a disaster movie vibe to it. The closest it comes is a handful of people trapped in an elevator with no immediate threat other than for the poor man who’s claustrophobic and suffers a mini-meltdown.
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Nope, it’s pure drama, and if I had trusted IMDb’s category assignment, I would have known that. But IMDb doesn’t even list a synopsis, so I went with Letterboxd and their synopsis showed as much promise as the title:
A massive blackout plunges a major American city into a night of terror.
Ooooh… “massive blackout” and “night of terror!” Sounds good. For those descriptors, it’s not. But for a straight drama, it’s… OK. Its main focus is race relations on the “south side” of whatever city this is that suffers a blackout when not one, but two power stations are struck by lightning.
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That’s interesting in and of itself because when the “lower” station goes offline, it hides the fact that the “upper” station has as well. Other than the engineers at “Metro Power Control Center” being perplexed about the outage, they’re pretty good about delivering on their promise to restore power before long. That doesn’t happen in a disaster movie. The characters would face unexpected challenges and lives would be at stake.
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The biggest challenge here is when Brenda Farrell (Linda Purl) has to walk through the bad part of town to reach her father’s television repair shop. Aspects of the racial tension may sound timely, but the “television repair shop” dates the film. As the father, Morris Brustein, Vic Tayback may have the most screen time. (He’s at the bottom of the cast list, though, because it’s delivered in alphabetical order.)
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Morris learns a valuable lesson by the time the lights come back on: black people can have dreams and want to go to college like anyone else! That’s because one of his employees, Douglas King (Stuart K. Robinson), helps protect the store. However, Morris first has to ask him why he isn’t tearing it apart like everyone else. It’s as if he’s never taken a moment to get to know the guy, even though he worked for him.
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The Night the City Screamed sympathizes with the looters by taking the stance that they are “poor and have nowhere to go.” And when Morris says that he can’t understand why they’d destroy their own neighborhood, Douglas explains that it’s the only way they could get the things they were stealing.
For one crazy night, they just wanted in.
You also know the movie is out of date when city councilman Frank McGuire (Robert Culp) wants to run for mayor against the incumbent, “Mayor” (Raymond Burr), but neither speaks badly about him nor throws him under the bus for his inaction during the crisis. I can’t remember; did politicians every treat each other with respect?
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Through it all you have two young cops trying to navigate a dangerous area by themselves. One is played by David Cassidy, and I apologize, I don’t know that name of the actor that played his partner.
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Yeah, I almost scrapped posting this review, but one thing made me do it anyway. A young Jonathan Frakes plays Richard Hawkins, the suave man who woos Brenda because her husband, Ron (Gary Frank) is too busy to go to show openings with her.
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If any of this appeals to you, The Night the City Screamed is not a bad movie. Just don’t be disappointed when the drama outweighs the adventure.
Visit the TV Terror Guide: 70's TV Movies playlist at ClassicHorrors.Club TV on YouTube to watch The Night the City Screamed and other great movies from this series.
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