A Cold Night’s Death Beat The Thing to the Punch by a Decade

From 1969 to 1975, ABC put out weekly films. They functioned as TV pilots, testing grounds for up-and-coming filmmakers, and places for new and old stars to shine. Every month, Chloe Walker revisits one of these movies. This is Movie of the Week (of the Month).

John Carpenter’s The Thing taught the world that nothing good could come of paranoid men trapped together in a snow-surrounded research laboratory—but a modest ABC Movie of the Week, A Cold Night’s Death, had quietly beaten Carpenter’s classic to the punch almost a full decade earlier.

After their colleague has been out of radio communication for several days, two scientists are sent to an animal research center, high atop a frozen mountain, to investigate what’s happened to him. Jones (Robert Culp) and Enari (Eli Wallach) arrive at the center and find it ravaged: Furniture strewn, papers littered and—most troublingly, considering the arctic conditions outside—doors and windows left wide open. After a frantic search, the men discover the corpse of their colleague, frozen to death. So the two continue his work, which involves testing monkeys on their endurance in stressful situations—depriving them of food, isolating them, subjecting them to cold conditions—in order to study how humans might fare in space.

As the men settle into their new routine, strange things start to happen. A window is left open, though both deny doing it. A monkey is let out of its cage to cause carnage; again, neither Jones or Enari admit culpability, but they both presume the other is lying. Soon, they’re locked in a life and death battle against each other, their own wits and a mysterious force that seems to be leading them towards the same fate as their frozen colleague.

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We’ve talked previously about how the ABC MOTWs were always at their best when they embraced the constraints of the form, and A Cold Night’s Death proves another prime example. Two men, some monkeys and a bunch of nearly-bare rooms. There’s nothing extraneous in the teleplay, no subplots or flowery dialogue. Everything we see and hear is essential, and that sparseness hits like a blast of arctic air to the face.

Another common feature of the series proves a boon, although a less intentional one. A Cold Night’s Death has never been granted a restoration. Your best bet for watching it is YouTube, where the extant copy is so muddy and worn, it looks like it’s been excavated from beneath a decade-old pile of snow. Which, of course, only adds to the movie’s already abundant atmosphere.

And what atmosphere! While Jerrold Freedman has little else on his CV that would suggest such prowess, his direction throughout is smart and evocative, but unobtrusive. There’s a fluidity to the lensing that does an unnervingly good job at suggesting there’s… something inhabiting this isolated station with these rapidly unraveling men; eerie overhead shots and a camera that periodically rushes as if possessed, or is running from something itself. Then you’ve got the howl of the wind, and the hypnotic bleeps and bloops of Gil Mellé’s electronic score—all the elements tumble together into something with an almost tangible physical presence.

There’s a fascinating dynamic between Jones and Enari, who start the movie neither as the best of friends nor as sworn enemies. Via a table-setting voiceover from their boss in the form of a memo, as they take their helicopter towards the station, we learn that they’re a professional team, at the top of their field. And there’s a bone-deep familiarity in the way they work. Their relationship most closely hues to that of a “traditional” marriage with the concomitant gender roles; Enari is the mom, cooking and cleaning and calming, while Jones does the “manly” work of gathering snow to melt for their water supply. Initially, even their fights feel marital—after an early row, Enari gathers up his bedding from their shared bedroom to go sleep on the lab’s equivalent of a couch.

But if the relationship between the two is akin to a marriage, it’s one where the real affection has departed years ago. Even in the few moments of A Cold Night’s Death when they aren’t under intense stress, there’s little bonhomie on show; despite their professional affinity, it’s hard to imagine a time when they might have actually enjoyed one another’s company. And that just adds to the terrifying isolation that faces them both; as they each start imagining the other as their enemy, they feel completely on their own.

Indeed, after the pilot who brings them to the station leaves (before the film’s 20-minute mark), Culp and Wallach are the only two people on screen for the remaining duration, and A Cold Night’s Death owes much of its immense tension to their textured, compelling performances.

Wallach delivers a turn as strong as you’d expect from a seasoned veteran of so many Hollywood classics, but it’s his co-star that steals the picture. Culp was the everyman of the ABC MOTW regular players. Whereas peers like Lloyd Bridges were redolent with intensity, Culp was cooler; Bridges was a boiler, Culp more of a simmerer. That would only give movies that revolved around his fraying mental state—the desperate, fumbling criminal of See the Man Run, the righteously vengeful neighbor of Outrage—more of a tangible, impactful core. He lets you see his journey to those tormented mental places.

This film’s single scariest scene hangs on Culp’s complete command of his physicality. The action is at a peak, and he has found himself trapped outside the station in sub-subzero conditions; if he can’t get back inside within minutes, he’s a dead man. He finds his miraculous entryway, and uses all the energy he has left to haul himself through. His face is quite literally frozen, which makes the heaving sounds of his hyperventilation all the more unnerving. You can feel him shiver right through to the bone. Somehow he manages to heft himself up, and start taking step after tortured step towards the man who’s both his sole chance of survival…and might just as easily be the one to kill him. Either way, Jones is so palpably close to death, and Culp so convincing in his utter ruin, that it’s difficult to look at him.

And it’s that texture to both the performances and Christopher Knopf’s screenplay, that all-important attention to detail at every level, that makes A Cold Night’s Death sing. Watching an ABC MOTW for its deftness and artistry is often (okay, perhaps even usually!) a fool’s errand, but A Cold Night’s Death proves that the series was more than capable of producing something, in its own humble way, truly spectacular.

Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.

The Spectacular A Cold Night’s Death Beat The Thing to the Punch by a Decade