Bad Road

CAUTION: Contains “spoilers.”

Writer/producer Brian Clemens re-assembled members of his TV hit “The Avengers” to create And Soon the Darkness (1970) a thriller set in rural France detailing the fate of a pair of London nurses, Jane and Cathy (Pamela Franklin and Michele Dotrice) on a biking tour. Franklin is all-business while Dotrice is all-pleasure and before long the friends quarrel and part. But when Franklin regrets her hastiness and goes back to make-up with Dotrice her friend is gone–vanished without a trace. Yes, this notion has gotten a workout, but Clemens, co-writer Terry Nation and direct Robert Fuest got there first.

There’s slow but steady build-up of tension as Franklin, only imperfectly able to communicate with the locals she encounters gradually discovers that the route she and her friend chose has a reputation as “a bad road”–isolated, and the scene of at least one unsolved murder of a young female tourist. An encounter with an unnamed English schoolteacher (Clare Kelly) gives her a chance to fill in the blanks. When the older woman offers Franklin a place to stay for the night, I thought something would be made of it, but Clemens and company are cleverer than that. A semi-hysterical bar-owner gives Franklin a key clue, but we, like she, fail to get the drift. Meanwhile, there’s Sandor Eles playing Paul Salmon, the reddest red herring you’ve ever seen as a guy with a motor scooter who claims he’s Surete detective on vacation but can’t help doing suspicious things like “accidentally” overexposing a roll of film that had his image on it. (Dotrice was making eyes at him from the moment she first saw him at sitting at a table at a roadside restaurant and he noticed that she surreptitiously photographed him.) When the nurses leave, Eles follows them.

When the truth is revealed, it’s still a bit shocking as a stolid French gendarme (John Nettleton), the only law on this particular stretch of bad road turns out to be–yes–the rapist/murderer of foreign tourists. His transformation from dull functionary to wild-eyed, drooling molester of Franklin who has finally learned what happened to her vanished friend is as effective as it is unsettling.