Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer (1945)

This famous portmanteau horror film is a great favourite of mine.  Watching it again yesterday, I wondered (again) what it would amount to without the fifth and last of the supernatural stories that are threaded into the main narrative.  Once you’ve seen Dead and Night, the knowledge that the tale of the schizoid ventriloquist Maxwell Frere and his dummy Hugo Fitch is coming lends tension to everything that precedes it.  Michael Redgrave’s empathetic, fearless portrait of Frere is a great piece of screen acting:  he creates an unforgettable dynamic between the ventriloquist and the puppet who’s the one in charge of their relationship.  Alberto Cavalcanti ensures there’s danger in the air from the moment we first hear Hugo speak in a Paris night club, where Frere and he are performing.  The club hostess, played by Elisabeth Welch, sings an easy, lilting number (‘The Hullalooba’) while the seeds of the plot are sown in Frere’s dressing room conversation with the rival ventriloquist Sylvester Kee (Hartley Power), whom Frere is paranoiacally convinced is trying to steal Hugo.  The final sequence of the story – in a prison cell, where Frere has set about his alter ego so violently that the dummy’s face is reduced to sawdust but Hugo’s voice emerges from Frere’s throat loud and clear – must have inspired the ending of Psycho.

I was scared stiff by Dead of Night when I first saw it as a child – I’d guess I was nine or ten.  I think I was scared on two levels:  first, by Hugo the dummy’s coming to life and growing closer to lifesize in the climax to Walter Craig’s nightmare; second, by the film’s closing moments, when Craig (Mervyn Johns) wakes from his recurring dream only for it to start up again in what seems to be real life.   I always manage to forget between viewings (I must have seen the film half a dozen times now) that the architect Craig’s dream is so salient in the narrative, that shortly after he arrives at Pilgrim’s Farm in the Kent countryside, he informs Eliot Foley (Roland Culver), the man who invited him there, that he knows the house, Foley, his mother (Mary Merrall) and the guests sitting with them in the parlour – and what will happen later on.   Those guests include the emphatically Teutonic Dr van Straaten (Frederick Valk), who’s required to give rational, psychoanalytical explanations for the startling stories recounted by Hugh Grainger (Anthony Baird), Sally O’Hara (Sally Ann Howes), Joan Cortland (Googie Withers) and Foley himself.   The ventriloquist’s dummy story is Dr van Straaten’s own contribution.    Things I notice now about Dead of Night that I obviously didn’t as a child include how the brisk, emotionally constricted playing of most of the Pilgrim’s Farm company is disorienting in itself.  Their posh matter-of-factness actually throws into relief the unsettling nature of the tales they tell.

Those tales are of highly variable quality.  The opening hearse story told by Grainger is directed, like the linking narrative, by Basil Dearden, with a sure touch and deft tempo.  The invasion of horror into a real life of reassuring familiarity is powerful  – epitomised by the presence of Miles Malleson as the hearse driver/bus conductor who cheerfully tells Grainger there’s ‘Room for one more inside’ the vehicles in question.   The second story, and the first of the two Cavalcanti episodes, takes place at a children’s Christmas party.  It’s atmospherically strong but dramatically stilted – and oddly uses the real murder of Francis Kent (now well known to a new generation, thanks to Kate Summerscale’s 2008 book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher) in an otherwise fictional setting.  The surreality of the Christmas party is achieved largely (and, I assume, uinintentionally) by the fact that the children at the party all look about twenty-three, including Sally Ann Howes, who was only fifteen at the time.   (Michael Allan, who plays her friend Jimmy, was five years older.)  The haunted mirror story, which comes next, is strong:  tightly directed by Robert Hamer, it allows Googie Withers to go beyond her ladylike sophistication in the Pilgrim’s Farm gathering.  Her character is a young newlywed whose husband (Ralph Michael), when he looks in the mirror that she bought him, sees reflected in it a room in which, it transpires, a jealous husband once killed his wife.  The supposedly comical golfing story, reuniting Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne and directed by Charles Crichton, is by far the weakest episode, with its leaden jokes and tedious trick photography of a possessed golf ball.  But it’s well placed in the sequence – its flaccidness leaves you relatively unprepared for the tremendous Redgrave and Cavalcanti show that follows.    The writers, some of them uncredited, included John Baines, E F Benson, T E B Clarke, Angus MacPahil and H G Wells (who was responsible for the golfing segment, according to IMDB!)   The highly effective score is by Georges Auric.

26 December 2011