Dead of Night
(1945)
(SPOILERS) The
classic British horror film, made before there really were British horror
films, Dead of Night is something of
an anomaly. It has been hugely influential, both in the legacy of portmanteau
horror that came after and in terms of specific sequences (most notably The Ventriloquist’s Dummy) but it has few
obvious predecessors. It arrived fully formed from a studio that hadn’t before,
and wouldn’t again, make a picture that could be classified as horror (not that
it was at the time). Also curiously, Dead
of Night was released two days after the end of World War II, yet makes no
mention of it at all, even obliquely. Perhaps it is this that ensures it exists
in an unspecified, timeless state, emphasising the nightmarish perpetual loop
of its main protagonist.
Dead of Night’s
genesis appears in part to be a result of the innovation brought in under
Michael Balcon’s stewardship of Ealing, which began some seven years earlier.
It’s Ealing’s comedies that have lived on, but the studio had always dabbled in
different genres. Post-war, the comedies came to define it. Hue and Cry kicked off that cycle in
1947; pre-war and during, comedies were loosely characterised by star vehicles
featuring the likes of George Formby and Will Hay.
The war period saw a variety of Ealing output, much of it of a
straightforward propaganda nature, and occasionally with a visceral charge that
still packs a punch (Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went
the Day Well?) There was also the occasional distinctive storytelling
approach, such as the supernaturally-tinged The
Halfway House, in which a group of strangers contending with different
dilemmas gather at the titular house that isn’t quite what it seems (to that
extent, this is a precursor to Dead of Night, and also directed by Basil
Dearden, but one fundamentally derived from the wartime experience).
Balcon assembled four directors for Dead of Night, the most experienced by far being Cavalcanti, who
had joined the studio in 1940. Prior to this he had worked as a set designer
for avant-garde filmmaker Marcel L’Herbier in France and as a documentary maker
for the General Post Office. Dearden had been working for Ealing for a similar
time, pictures including several for Formby and a couple of Hay’s best (The Black Sheep of Whitehall, The Goose Steps Out). Charles Crichton (later
The Lavender Hill Mob, and exhumed by
John Cleese to call the shots on A Fish
Called Wanda) and Robert Hamer (Kind
Hearts and Coronets, perhaps the
classic British comedy) were just starting out. The results are fairly
seamless. There’s little in the way of overt clash of styles, only really of
tone (the comedy golfing episode), and even this doesn’t actually jar. The screenplay came from John Baines (responsible for the two best stories) and Angus McPhall, although two of the segments were based on existing short stories.
Thespians included Mervyn Johns, who had become an unexpected
star during the war period (he’s probably best recognised today as Bob Cratchit
in the Alistair Sim Scrooge), Googie
Withers (she of the fantastically memorable stage name, Withers also worked
with Hitchcock and Michael Powell) and Michael Redgrave (probably best known
today as the title character in the 1952 The
Importance of Being Earnest). And, of course, Basil Radford and Naunton
Wayne, returning as Charters and Caldicott in all but name for the golfing
story (they had first united on Hitchcock’s The
Lady Vanishes).
Linking Narrative
Directed by Basil Dearden
If many of the devices and tropes of Dead of Night are now familiar, it’s because others have copied
from the master template. Walter Craig (Johns) arrives as a guest at a country
house in a state of some trepidation. He is evidently gripped by foreknowledge,
déjà vu right down to locations of coat hooks and utilities (“There’s central heating and every modern
convenience”). His initial comments (“So
it isn’t a dream this time”) will pay off during the end credits in the
most pointed of manners.
The gathered coterie are hosted Eliot Foley (Ronald Culver).
While there are seven other guests, the ones inspired to tell their own strange
tale are Hugh Granger (Anthony Baird), Sally O’Hara (Sally Anne Knowles), Joan
Cortland (Withers) Eliot, and Dr van Straaten (Frederick Valk).
Dr van Straaten: In fact, there’s no evidence that you ever
dreamed this dream at all, is there?
If there’s a symptom of wartime leanings here, it’s that
almost everyone is entirely credulous of the possibility that Walter’s
premonition is real. There is good mortal reason to countenance the beyond and
the unknown. If the war is unmentioned, it is surely no coincidence that the
voice of scepticism comes from Dr van Straaten, a killjoy intent on finding a
rational explanation at every turn (ironically, he delivers the most palpably
haunting story).
Disavowal of the scientific (crediting psychology as a
science, for the sake of argument) is nothing new, although it’s worth noting
that Angus MacPhail, one of the main credit screenplay writers (the other being
John Baines), contributed the pro-cod psychology Spellbound for Hitchcock in the same year (magnificent dream
sequence aside, a bit of a damp squib). Dr van Straaten is not only German, so
his trustworthiness is instantly suspect, but he is also spewing a lot of
nonsense about the inexplicable being rationally explicable. So much so that he
even admits to his own fallible perspective and perhaps surprisingly doesn’t
edit the story to emphasise room for doubt.
The conversation goes back and forth between the stories,
with narrow variants on the theme of each tale being proof of the irrational
and the doctor countering it with a possible solution; “What Doctor van Straaten wants is genuine first hand evidence. The kind
that would satisfy judge and jury and neither of us have been able to provide
that yet”. At one point, Walter
accuses the guests, when the doctor is gaining an audience, of being “ridiculously weak-minded” and it’s
implicit that succumbing to the babble of a “trick-cyclist” makes the individual little better than a fool. When
van Straaten explains crypto-amnesia (following the mirror story) he is asked,
“You wouldn’t like to start again, would
you, very slowly and in words one syllable?” Hamlet is even invoked, as the final word in the doctor’s rationalist
self-delusion.
While certain of Walter’s dream substance comes true (the
breaking of van Straaten’s glasses, fomenting the picture’s most hysterical line;
“And that’s when my dream becomes a
nightmare, a nightmare of horror”), others do not (Walter never does hit
Sally “savagely, viciously”, although
it leads to the amusedly disinterested line from Sally’s mother, “Oh well, I’m sure he can hit someone else
instead”). Walter’s fretting continually leads to a build up of tension,
whereby he wants to leave the house before his dream comes true. This is
diffused periodically, by the pleas of the doctor and by the “bit of nonsense” invented by Eliot.
There’s a sense that, apart from Walter’s nervy state, the
relaxed tone of the gathering is indulged to catch the audience napping. Once
van Straaten has told his ventriloquist’s dummy tale (which he explains as the
“dummy” part of the ventriloquist’s mind dominating the fugal half), Walter
requests to be alone with the doctor. It’s at this point the framing story
takes on the aspect of the dream Walter fears so much.
Dream logic applies, such that mild-mannered Walter – the
last person we would suspect of such a thing – has no self-control, no will of
his own. He is ruled by the dream “compelled
to kill someone”. He strangles the doctor and pitches headlong into a
compendium of the different tales where he now features as a protagonist. It’s a swirling phantasmagoria house of
horror, one that culminates in the already creepy dummy taking on alarming new
dimensions as Hugo (the dummy) comes alive and strangles Walter in a prison
cell that recedes into infinity.
Mrs Craig: That’s just what you need darling. It will
help you get rid of those horrible nightmares.
Walter awaking, the whole experience at the house revealed
as a dream, may well elicit an instant groan from a modern viewer. The ultimate
cop-out. But the picture doesn’t stop there. Walter then receives a call from
Elliot Foley inviting him to a stay in the country and ponders whether to
except.
The last we see, over the end credits, is the opening
sequence of the picture, as Walter pulls up in his car outside Foley’s house in
a state of disquiet. The film reveals itself as a dazzlingly inventive
recursive loop. There is no possibility of Walter escaping. This device has
been used since, many times (Children of
the Stones is one example, In the
Mouth of Madness another), but there’s a particular finesse here. The idea
that concrete reality could be a playful, insidious joke crawls under the skin
as the credits crawl up the screen. It lingers in the mind as effectively as
the more visceral shock of Hugo coming to life.
Kim Newman has suggested the final sequence represents a
break with the dream state since, unlike the rest of the film, the shot of
Elliot calling Walter is not from Walter’s point of view. It’s an intriguing
possibility, that this time he will
commit the murder for real (and perhaps hit Sally violently?) Others have
alleged the credit roll came at a late stage and wasn’t initially planned. It
certainly elevates the framing narrative into five star territory, any memory
of the slightly samey between tales exchanges expunged.
The Hearse Driver
(from a short story by E.F. Benson)
Directed by Basil Dearden
The first two stories are so brief as to be almost
anecdotes. The Hearse Driver is an
apocryphal tale of death foretold and avoided, in which Hugh recounts a dream
in which he arises from his hospital bed, pulls back the curtains and sees a
funeral hearse outside. The driver (Ealing regular Miles Malleson) beckons,
announcing “Just room for one inside, sir”.
Out in the real world, Hugh is about to climb aboard a bus
when he recognises the conductor as the driver from his dream, uttering the
exact same phrase. Hugh opts out, and the bus promptly dives off the road in a
terrible accident (rendered by a rather obvious model shot).
It’s a fairly standard, recognisable premonitory tale – and
is reinforced by the reveal of the framing device – but The Hearse Driver is convincingly told, and there’s a nerve
jangling moment when Hugh gets up (apparently from reading a book) at 4.15am.
The pulled curtains before him present the ominous unknown. There’s something
behind them, but what? The actual reveal is no hideous monster, but broad
daylight, the sort of thing that obeys the unfettered rules of the dreamscape.
The Christmas Party
Directed by Albert Cavalcanti
The second tale, featuring Sally, is also of familiar
design. In this case, however, all that really sets it apart is that it
announces itself as based on an actual murder case. Constance Kent confessed to
murdering her stepbrother Frances in 1860 (she died the year before Dead of Night was released).
Sally recounts how, at a Christmas party, the gathered
children attempted to scare each other with ghost stories. She is informed that
the house they are in is haunted. When she hears crying, she enters a room and to
find a boy sat by a fire. He tells her his sister would like to kill him.
Called back to the party, she mentions her encounter and is told this was the
murdered boy, who haunts the house. “I’m
not frightened, I’m not frightened,” repeats Sally.
There’s little really to make this one stand out, although
it would doubtless have an added frisson if one were aware (as audiences
probably were) of the Kent case.
The Haunted Mirror
Directed by Robert Hamer
Hamer directs an effective, creepy full-blown episode,
second only to the dummy tale. It’s pretty much a two-hander between Joan and
he husband Peter (Ralph Michael), barring the exposition-friendly intervention
of an antiques dealer.
Mirrors have always held active potential as a means of eliciting
fear. That ‘something’ glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, or the notion
that they represent a portal to a disturbing or unknown realm (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Dust Devil). Peter is afflicted by
visions of another room reflected in this mirror; “it becomes the real room, and my own bedroom becomes imaginary”. There’s
potent dread when Peter announces “And I
know there’s something waiting for me on the other side of the mirror.
Something evil, monstrous evil”.
This episode consciously plays with the psychological
explanations thrown about in the framing narrative (“The trouble’s not in the mirror, it’s in my mind. It must be”) and
simple material values (“A mirror’s just
wood and glass”). Gradually, the “mind” of the mirror takes hold of Peter,
simultaneously that Joan (luckily!) is given an explanation of how its previous
owner (a century earlier, as with the Christmas party story), jealously
obsessed, strangled his wife and then sat down and cut his own throat (“What a horrible story!”)
When Joan returns to tell Peter, he is having none of it (“There’s nothing wrong with the mirror. I
look in it often”) and attempts to strangle her. In a classic moment,
mid-strangulation, she sees the other room reflected just as he has, and
smashes it, breaking the spell (Peter subsequently has no memory of his afflicted
state).
One are that stands out about this tale is the role
reversals. The husband is a weak, malleable figure. Googie being Googie is plucky
and commanding, able to rescue her husband. Michael’s performance emphasises
this, his manner on the fey side (this may be overacting, so as to add weight
to his possessed male aggression, but it serves to underline the gender
switch).
There’s a strong undercurrent of male sexual insecurity
throughout. It is Joan who gives Peter the mirror, to whom it becomes the
symbol of unease over a physically fulfilled relationship. He attempts to back
out (“Let’s get the wedding over and then
we can start making divorce arrangements afterwards”) before succumbing to
his own possessive, destructive nature. Only when Joan reassures him, banishing
his fears, is he safe (he stops seeing the vision in the mirror when she takes
his hand). Later, when he she leaves him alone, his feelings flood back. Joan is
required to take decisive measures (destroying the mirror, and his abating his performance
anxiety) to convince him he is the only one.
All three tales thus far have emphasised the conviction of
the beholder. It is this one where the doctor accuses Joan of experiencing crypto-amnesia,
with the transmission of Peter’s illusion to her. As depicted, however, the
silly German gets it backwards. It is Joan who pulls Peter back from the
precipice.
The Golfing Story
(from a short story by H.G. Wells)
Directed by Charles Crichton
The light-hearted interlude, and the overtly made-up
account, this one is “Totally incredible
and decidedly improper”. George Parratt (Radford) and Larry Potter (Wayne;
had JK Rowling seen this?) are competitive golfers and best pals who fall for
the same gal (Peggy Bryan). They opt to resolve their dispute on the course; winner
takes Mary Lee. George wins, but he does so by cheating. Larry, who has drowned
himself in abject defeat, returns from the grave to haunt him.
It’s all very jolly, though. Larry ruins George’s game, and
then gives his demands if he is to leave George in peace. He must promise to
break it off with Mary Lee, and never venture forth with a golf club again. This
goes awry when George pleads with Larry to show his better nature, but Larry
finds he’s forgotten the means to return to the other side.
Compelled to remain within six feet of George, he is the
unwanted companion in their forthcoming nuptials. Come the wedding night, he’s
still there, but at the crucial moment it is George, rather than Larry who gets
the sequence correct and disappears. Larry is left with the bride.
George Parratt: Because a chap becomes a ghost, it surely
doesn’t mean he ceases to be a gentleman.
Quite what he’s going to do with her, as a ghost, is unclear
(“Do I make passes? Or do I make passes?”),
but the whole thing is rather risqué. As such, the undercurrent of performance
crisis carries over from The Haunted
Mirror. Larry and George’s bromance prioritises life on the course over the
marital bed. While George is vilified as a cheat and a liar, Larry’s morals are
also suspect. He’s willing to play for her in the first place, then quite ready
to (somehow) take the place of his chum in bedding the bride.
The Golfing Story
is an amiable, but ever-so-slight piece. There are the usual ghost gags (a golf
ball doing tricks of its own free will, a golf club that resists being swung,
George ordering two large whiskys; “A
quadruple?” responds the mystified barman), but the most lingering moment is
the one comes when Larry walks into the lake, leaving only a hat floating on
the surface where he has submerged.
The Ventriloquist’s
Dummy
Directed by Albert Cavalcanti
Dr van Staaten: Well, there was one occasion in my
professional career that made me wonder, made me wonder quite a lot.
If one wishes to run with the theme of sexual unease, the
final sequence provides ripe fruit as two rival ventriloquists’ attraction
toward each other is expressed through the object of a wooden dummy. Dr van
Staaten would have lapped up such a reading, but the resonance of this tale is
more elemental; the threat of the
loss of one’s mind, or its possession.
The Ventriloquist’s
Dummy has its own framing device, as we learn ventriloquist Maxwell Frere
(Redgrave) has been charged with the attempted murder of another of his
profession, Sylvester Kee (Hartley Power).
Again, the threat of wrong-thinking psychologists is voiced (“A brain specialist?”; Max considers he
will be dissected like a pig), and the account comes via van Staaten’s own
encounter with Max and the witness statement of Kee.
It becomes clear that Max’s dummy, Hugo, has a mind of its
own. Hugo considers himself the star of the act, and fancies leaving Max for
Sylvester. Max, increasingly unhinged and drinking heavily, discovers Hugo in
Sylvester’s hotel room (he’s having an affair with another man!) and in a rage
shoots Sylvester repeatedly.
Often a reading with this kind of story is that it is all in
the mind, which is how van Staaten sees it. In such terms, it becomes a tale of
Max’s passion for Sylvester (even if that isn’t the doctor’s interpretation). Sylvester’s
statement protests against this. When Sylvester visits Max in his hotel room,
prior to the shooting, Max puts his hand over Hugo’s mouth and pulls it away in
pain. There are bite marks, and blood has been drawn.
We might say Sylvester,
in his agitated state, imagined this, or that Max could have bitten himself and
concealed it, but it seems clear the makers aren’t angling for the
psychological interpretation. It goes against the tenor of Dead of Night as a whole, as is underlined by the subsequent scene
in prison and the persistence of the framing device in which, whatever Walter
does, he cannot escape the untameable beyond.
Van Staaten allows Max to be reunited with Hugo, who warns him
against proclaiming the dummy made him do it (“They’ll put you in the madhouse”). Enraged, Max suffocates the
dummy with a pillow before stamping its face into a powder. The doctor rushes
in, wholly forgetting this is “just” a conversation a man is having with
himself. Clearly the doctor’s analysis cannot be trusted because, when it comes
down to it, he is as uncritical in the moment as anyone else.
The final scene is particularly disturbing. The fellow
ventriloquist visits Max in his cell. Max’s face is rictus, his eyes wide and
staring. “Hello Sylvester, I’ve been
waiting for you,” he announces, in the tone of Hugo, his mouth out of synch
with his words. Hitchcock would deliver a similar staged send-off to Norman
Bates 15 years later; introduced through the bafflegab of a psychologist,
sitting in a cell, the personality of another having taken over his mind.
There isn’t a duff moment in this one (although you wonder
for a minute if we’re going to see Elizabeth Welch’s Beulah perform her whole
song routine), and Redgrave’s performance is grippingly unhinged. The opening show
in Paris, as Hugo interrupts the usual act by trying to make inroads with
Sylvester, is riveting; we slowly become aware that this isn’t a bit of fun and
malarkey. When Max pleads, “You don’t
know what he is capable of!” we believe him.
Hugo is an enormously sinister, malevolent, little beast (quite why Max has a frame photo of him is anyone's guess, but it's an appealingly twisted little touch),
and Cavalcanti achieves economically what Richard Attenborough would more
laboriously take 107 minutes over in Magic
(for a more recent, very funny take on the puppet possession see The Puppet Show, the standout episode in
the otherwise so-so first season of Buffy
the Vampire Slayer).
I first saw Dead of
Night in 1990, as part of the third season of BBC2’s Moviedrome (still at its best then, when idiosyncratic Alex Cox was
presenting). Cox commented that, despite its age, “if you’re young, or sensitive, and watching the film for the first
time, prepare to be genuinely frightened”. Kim Newman also observed that,
watching the film in a cinema with an audience, it continued to work in all the
right places. That’s a testament to its classic status and enduring appeal,
where the majority of anthologies are remembered for a section here or there
rather than as a whole. Ineptly, the US release excised The Golfing Story and The
Christmas Party, so Walter’s final head spin became plain confusing (It has been suggested the former section might have been excised due to its risqué content).
If Dead of Night probably
influenced Rod Serling’s The Twilight
Zone (four of the stories have a similar premise in Twilight Zone episodes, although that might be argued as a simple
fact of this kind of tale), it most definitely caught Fred Hoyle’s imagination.
He developed his since largely dismissed (in favour of The Big Bang) Steady
State model of the circular, continuously created nature of the universe from Dead of Night’s wrap around device. But
who knows, perhaps he will come back round again? While Dead of Night isn’t perfect in its pieces, its framing device
ensures it is more than the sum of its parts, a resounding masterpiece that
continues to exert an creepy hold 70 years later.
Overall
