Nothing But the Night
(1973)
(SPOILERS) A non-Hammer pairing of Peter Cushing and
Christopher Lee, Nothing But the Night’s
neglected status is a fair reflection that it is, mostly, a quite dull affair.
Peter Sasdy’s film has been compared to same year’s The Wicker Man, with its mysterious goings-on on a remote Scottish island
and particularly for its shocking sacrificial climax, but really it’s only that
shocking (and wholly bizarre) climax that marks it out for attention at all (probably spoiled if you watched it under the alternative title The Resurrection Syndicate, but at least not confounding expectations they way The Caste of the Living Dead would).
Indeed, for the most part Nothing But the Night is studiously procedural in tone, as if
following the banal minutiae of the investigation of Colonel Charles Bingham
(Lee), a semi-retired plod, and pathologist Sir Mark Ashley (Cushing) will
somehow make the last ten minutes easier to swallow when it comes. I’d have
gladly sacrificed such presumed reverence for a bit more action and drama.
After a coach driver seems to have set himself alight,
resulting in an accident that leaves the children of an orphanage run by The Van
Traylen Fellowship unscathed, Bingham is keen to get to the bottom of matters.
Three trustees of the Van Traylen Trust have died in the previous six months,
making the trust £5m richer. Dr Haynes (Keith Barron) attempts to get answers
through hypnosis from Mary Valley (Gwyneth Strong, who ignominiously, went on
to play Cassandra in Only Fools and
Horses; she’s pretty good here), one of the children closest to the
accident. Mary keeps talking about a consuming fire, “a nightmare where she feels she is being burned alive”.
On top of this, Mary’s mum Anna Harb (Diana Dors), a former
prostitute who has just done ten years in Broadmoor for a triple killing, wants
her daughter back, and journalist Joan Foster (Georgia Brown) is keen to stir
things up in the name of a good story.
There are more than enough distinctive elements here to
provide a hook then, and it isn’t clear just what is going on at any point; are
the trustees up to no good? Is Anna, an occultist given to splenetic
pronouncements such as “If you’re lying to
me, if this is some kind of trick, I’ll kill you!” responsible? Or is
something else going on? If it weren’t for the leftfield ending, you’d swear
this was a tale of reincarnation. Although, it does turn out to be a (kind of) case
of metempsychosis, just not in any expected manner.
Unfortunately, Sasdy, mostly a TV director who was also
responsible for Hammers Taste the Blood
of Dracula and Countess Dracula,
the big screen Doomwatch adaptation
and the rather good BBC Nigel Kneale The
Stone Tape diligently fails to inject any life into the proceedings.
There’s the occasional moment (the murder of Keith Barron’s
doctor isn’t exactly a Vera Miles in Psycho
shock, but we’re pretty sure by this point he’s the young lead who will guide
us through the picture), but endless scenes of Lee and Cushing debating the
next move, or of Diana Dors wandering through scrubland as probably the most
laborious red herring ever, has a good go at inducing a soporific response.
The ending, though. Dors has been set up so blatantly that
few will believe she’s actually up to
no good, but anyone expecting the Bingham trustees to be responsible is simultaneously
undercut and validated as Mary revels herself to be one of their number. As
Cushing explains, “They have used their
power and their wealth to try and achieve immortality”, by “transplanting the nucleus of their adult
knowledge, experience and personality into the minds of those children”.
How? Well, employ a first class biochemist and a brain surgeon and it can only
be a matter of time before bob’s your uncle.
As explanations go, it’s risible, but the sight of Mary
exclaiming to Bingham “You could have
been one of us, you silly man. Now you’ll burn” is quite chilling in Legend of Hell House possession by way
of Village of the Damned kind of way.
This after the reveal she put her not-so-dear mama on the bonfire. Any
possibility that Lee will make amends for his indulgence of pagan rites in The Wicker Man is staved off, as Joan
gets set alight by the convenient gust of Ashley’s incoming helicopter. The
obliging remaining kids then go and jump off a cliff, which ties up any loose
ends.
At one point a couple of drunks discover a ritually murdered
child’s body, and it’s curious the number of British pictures around this time
presenting an environment where children are no longer safe; this, The Wicker Man (even merely as a lure
for Edward Woodward), The Offence.
Perhaps they’re tapping into a post-Moors Murders mood, one more recently
further embedded with the Red Riding
Trilogy and post-Savile ongoing revelations.
I’d be very surprised if Ben Wheatley hadn’t seen Nothing But the Night, as it feels like
the kind of fare he’d lap up. Brian Hayles, a frequent contributor to Doctor Who who also wrote for Doomwatch and gave us the screenplay for
the seminal Warlords of Atlantis,
adapted the screenplay from John Blackburn’s novel of the same name.
Cushing and Lee are reliable but don’t really have anything
to dig their teeth into. Ironically, perhaps, as Lee conceived this as the first
of a Bingham trilogy (he optioned two other Blackburn novels); his role in The Wicker Man, the same year,
represents just the kind of anti-typecasting part you’d expect him to be aiming
for, but I guess anything non-Dracula was a win at that point in his career.
Aside from Strong, it’s Brown who really impresses as the
cynical journo in search of a story. Also featured are Fulton Mackay, a
young(ish) Michael Gambon and Kathleen Byron (best known as loony Sister Ruth
in Black Narcissus). Nothing But the Night really needs the
viewer to endure 75 minutes of near nodding off to the ‘70s scenery for its
ending to have full effect, but I couldn’t really blame anyone skipping through
it on YouTube for the (actual) fireworks.
Comments
Post a Comment