Leslie Norman (1955)
At a dinner party in Hong Kong, Commander Lindsay (Michael Hordern), a naval officer, describes a dream he had the night before. In the dream, one of the other guests, Air Marshal Hardie (Michael Redgrave), whom Lindsay already knows, is among the passengers on a Dakota plane that flies through atrocious weather before crashing onto a rocky shore. It so happens that next morning Hardie, along with a couple of the others at the dinner party, really will be taking to the air. He’s just learned that the plane really will be a Dakota. Still nothing to worry about: the total number of people on Lindsay’s plane doesn’t tally with the number expected on Hardie’s flight, and they won’t include the VIP and the attractive young woman who featured in Lindsay’s dream. Then Hardie takes an unexpected phone call from a peer of the realm (Ralph Truman). He needs to fly to Tokyo without delay and is bringing along a secretary (Sheila Sim).
Leslie Norman and R C Sherriff, who wrote the screenplay for this Ealing production, spend plenty of time dutifully if clunkily assembling the pre-ordained personnel for the Dakota flight. The journey is divided into two parts, with an overnight stop in Okinawa. By that stage, it’s already been a bumpy ride and the passengers can breathe a sigh of relief that two soldiers (Alfie Bass and Bill Kerr) won’t be continuing on to Tokyo, the dream total of eight passengers thereby reduced by two. By the time the flight resumes, the soldiers, needless to say, have been replaced by another duo. In spite of regular bits of conversation about Lindsay’s dream, it’s soon clear that The Night My Number Came Up has little interest in character or in delineating the different kinds of unease felt by the travellers. Owen Robertson (Alexander Knox), for example, (a) has never flown before and (b) repeatedly pooh-poohs the belief of ‘Chinamen’ in precognitive dreams but Norman increasingly blurs any distinction between Robertson’s understandable first flight nerves and foreboding that Lindsay’s dream will be realised. On the soundtrack, Malcolm Arnold’s music overrules scepticism with repeated unequivocal reminders that something confounding and scary is afoot.
Wikipedia defines the film as ‘supernatural drama’ but once the Dakota gets into trouble, Norman virtually jettisons the clairvoyant material in order to concentrate on the suspense of the pilot (Nigel Stock)’s attempts to land on the Japanese island of Sado. These climactic sequences are competently done but focus almost entirely on the cockpit, to which Hardie keeps returning: we see less and less of the other people on board. The last shot of the plane is immediately after its landing, nose deep in snow. Nothing is shown of the reaction of the crew or passengers, let alone heard of what Hardie, Robertson et al now think of Lindsay’s dream. We simply learn, through the second of the two conversations between Lindsay and a vaguely pompous wing commander (Hugh Moxey) that bookend the narrative, that all on board (they also include, among others, Denholm Elliott and Victor Maddern) have survived unscathed.
The opening credits announce that The Night My Number Came Up is based on a story by Victor Goddard. Although the credit doesn’t specify a true story, one feels increasingly sure it must be: otherwise, the film-makers’ decision to give the plot a paranormal underpinning before abandoning it for the sake of conventional action would itself defy explanation. Given the details of his military record, Wikipedia may overstate the case in describing Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard (1897-1987) as ‘perhaps best known for his interest in paranormal phenomena’. But the film derives from an incident that Goddard experienced in 1946 (with himself the Michael Redgrave figure) and wrote about in The Saturday Evening Post five years later. Norman’s and Sherriff’s embroidery of the actual incident evidently includes the number of people on board the plane. Goddard was one of only four passengers. The film’s eight plus a crew of five makes for a fateful total of thirteen.
4 June 2019
