Dead of Night

For even the most passionate movie lover, there are aspects of cinema which are capable of striking terror into the heart. Such as (speaking for myself) the title card “based on a true story” or the credit “directed by Michael Bay”.

Or portmanteau films.

Portmanteau films, one the whole, aren’t very good. Pick any of the Amicus crop from the ’70s: average. Or the ill-advised Tarantino/Rodriguez/Anders/Rockwell collaboration ‘Four Rooms’ from 1995: a better framing device than most, but still a heinous waste of talent. Even ‘Three Extremes’, by those masters of the offbeat Fruit Chan, Takeshi Miike and Chanwook Park, worked better when its most accomplished segment, ‘Dumplings’, was expanded to feature length.

It’s almost doing ‘Dead of Night’ a disservice to describe it as the best portmanteau film ever made. That’s akin to saying it’s the least awful of a generally bad lot. But ‘Dead of Night’ deserves more than a backhanded compliment. More than just an excellent portmanteau film or an excellent horror film, it deserves to be freed from genre pigeonholes – it’s a great film, period.

Produced by Ealing Studios in 1945 (and proving, alongside gritty dramas like ‘Went the Day Well?’ and ‘It Always Rains on Sunday’, that they didn’t just make comedies), ‘Dead of Night’ brought together four directors on the cusp of immense commercial success and popularity: Alberto Cavalcanti, Basil Dearden, Charles Crichton and Robert Hamer.

Cavalanti had already directed ‘Went the Day Well?’ and went onto helm ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ and ‘They Made Me a Fugitive’; Dearden had a string of hits over the next two and half decades, including ‘The Blue Lamp’ and ‘Victim’; Crichton called the shots on perennial Ealing faves ‘The Lavender Hill Mob’ and ‘The Titfield Thunderbolt’ and would prove that he’d lost none of his flair for comedy when he made ‘A Fish Called Wanda’ in 1988 (44 years after his directorial debut); and Hamer, whose death from pneumonia in 1963 cut short his career, made one of the best of all Ealing films ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ as well as the ever-popular Terry-Thomas starrer ‘School for Scoundrels’.

‘Dead of Night’ opens with architect Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) arriving at a Suffolk cottage where he’s been invited to spend the weekend with prospective client Eliot Foley (Roland Culver). Threading his way down the country lanes, his first glimpse of the property imbues him with a troubling sense of déjà vu. Inside, the realisation clicks: the cottage has featured in a recurring dream – a nightmare – that’s been plaguing him for weeks.

He’s introduced to Foley’s other guests, including psychiatrist Dr van Straaten (Frederick Valk), and his disorientation worsens. Asked what’s wrong, he haltingly explains that not only does the house feature in his dreams, but all of them play their part. Increasingly agitated, Craig comes to feel that he should leave as soon as possible, otherwise something terrible will occur. Dr van Straaten reasons with him, urging him to stay and thereby overcome his neuroses.

The stage is set for five tales of the supernatural (based on works by H.G. Wells, E.F. Benson, Angus MacPhail and John Baines) as the guests give individual accounts of some brush with the unexplained, some encounter with the ethereal, while Dr van Straaten insists on keeping everything rooted in reality by pursuing a logical, scientific discourse.

Racing driver Hugh Grainger (Anthony Baird) recounts his near-death experience on the track; convalescing afterwards, he hallucinates a hearse outside his hospital window, the driver (Miles Malleson) lugubriously looking up and saying “Room for one more inside.” Discharged shortly afterwards, he encounters the same man, this time in a bus driver’s uniform. “Room for one more inside,” he urges as Grainger hesitates. The briefest story in the anthology, as well as the most obvious in its set-up and denouement, it’s still a decent curtain-raiser and played straight enough to come across as a simple tale of coincidence.

A ghost story in the English tradition follows, and what could be more traditional than a Christmas setting? Teenager Sally O’Hara (Sally Ann Howes) recounts a festive game of hide and seek in a big old house. Escaping the tactile attentions of would-be suitor Jimmy (Michael Allan), who’s been trying to creep her out with a story of filial murder in the upper rooms a hundred years ago, Sally comes upon a long corridor which leads her to another part of the house and the realisation that Jimmy’s story might have a little more truth to it than she imagined.

The past also impinges on the present in the next story. Bride-to-be Joan (Googie Withers) buys an antique mirror for her betrothed, Peter (Ralph Michael), only for its reflection to change whenever he looks in it. Peter finds himself in another room – a room, he’s certain, where something nasty has happened. Or is going to happen. Joan worries for his health (all she sees in the mirror is the reflection of their bland fitted bedroom) and then, when his moods turn ugly, for her safety.

In penultimate place – and the least of the film’s offerings – is the shaggy dog story of rival golfers George Parratt (Basil Radford), Larry Potter (Naunton Wayne) and the woman, Mary (Peggy Bryan), who comes between them. A gentlemen’s wager involving eighteen holes, the hand of the delectable Mary for the winner and the loser to “vanish from the scene”. Unfortunately, the winner cheats and the loser takes his forfeit literally, wading out into the water hazard and drowning himself. So far, so dark and twisted. Things quickly become farcical, though, all pratfalls and “humorous” misunderstandings. First time I saw ‘Dead of Night’ this section annoyed me: the shift in tone seemed awkward; it was the odd one out in a quintet of stories that grew progressively more sinister.

On reflection, though, I think the golfing sequence (from one of H.G. Wells’s lesser short stories) is needed – it’s a cleansing of the palate before the film’s piece de resistance. Introduced by Dr van Straaten as the “one case that really made me wonder”, Michael Redgrave stars in a career-best performance as Maxwell Frere, a ventriloquist controlled by his wheedling, temperamental dummy Hugo. Atmospherically directed by Cavalcanti, the sweltering lights and dingy dressing rooms of the venues Frere and Hugo play are brought evocatively to life. Frere’s nervy descent into paranoia is thrown into sharp relief by the calm rationalism of fellow ventriloquist Sylvester Kee (Hartley Power), whom Frere comes to suspect of having designs on Hugo.

And then there’s Hugo himself. Smiling, goading, waspish, sarcastic Hugo. One of British cinema’s greatest villains, period. Hugo, whom Dr van Straaten thinks he can use to probe Frere’s condition. A mistake on the good doctor’s part, but not as a great a mistake as his insistence that Craig stays in the cottage as each facet of the evening draws together the strands of his nightmare.

The framing narrative climaxes with an act of brutality and a dizzying lurch into surrealism, coda becoming prologue as ‘Dead of Night’ twists itself into an ouroboros.

Hunted

I’ve been leafing through Bogarde’s several volumes of autobiography for a reference to ‘Hunted’, but the great man seems to have had nothing to say about it. Not surprising, really; of the eight autobiographical works he penned, the first (‘A Postillion Struck by Lightning’) only touches on his film career in its closing pages, while a subsequent volume, ‘Great Meadow’ returns to the main concerns of ‘Postillion’ – a nostalgic evocation of Bogarde’s childhood. Other instalments focus on the later, European films under directors like Visconti, Cavani and Fassbinder. Of the decade and a half of British films that made him a star, Bogarde says very little, other than to credit ‘The Blue Lamp’, ‘Victim’ and ‘The Servant’ as milestones in his development as an actor.

John Coldstream, in his biography, calls ‘Hunted’ an “unpretentious drama … notable for its understatement”. True, true. But talk about damning with faint praise! Okay, I’ll admit it: ‘Hunted’ is minor league Bogarde. But it’s still a terrific little movie, with much to enjoy and a memorable ending (advance warning: PLOT SPOILER AHEAD).

Briskly directed by Charles Crichton – the man behind perennial Ealing favourites ‘The Lavender Hill Mob’ and ‘The Titfield Thunderbolt’, and who proved he could still chalk up a mainstream success at the age of 78 with ‘A Fish Called Wanda’ – from a script by Jack Whittingham, ‘Hunted’ opens with a six year old boy, Robbie (Jon Whiteley), running away from his step-parents’ house after accidentally setting fire to the kitchen curtains. He blunders into the cellar of a deserted, bombed-out building (Eric Cross’s cinematography makes excellent, noir-style use of post-war London) where Chris Lloyd (Bogarde) crouches over the body of a local businessman. He’s just made the rashest mistake of his life. Panicking, he grabs the boy, less as a hostage than concerned that he’s a witness, and flees.

The first half of the film charts Lloyd and Robbie’s flight from London – but not before Crichton has staged a tense sequence in which Lloyd, evading a police cordon, breaks into his own apartment to get a stash of money that will sustain the two of them during their exodus. Things sag a little here with the introduction of Lloyd’s slatternly wife Magda (Elizabeth Sellars, giving a hammy, one-note performance), but then Lloyd and Robbie are back on the run and things pick up no end.

The further they travel, the deeper the relationship between fugitive and child. A perfectly timed scene has them fetch up at a B&B en route to Lloyd’s brother’s house in a small Scottish fishing village. Robbie begs Lloyd to tell him a bedtime story; Lloyd obliges, making up a tall tale about a giant. Part way through, the story segues into a confession as Lloyd helplessly recounts his wife’s infidelity with her affluent boss and his subsequent actions. Unlikeable at first, Lloyd emerges as all-too-human.

Betrayed by his wife, turned away on arrival at his brother’s, Robbie is by now Lloyd’s only friend in the world. And vice versa. Lloyd has found out about Robbie’s maltreatment at the hands of his step-family. Taking the boy with him, Lloyd makes a last gamble for freedom, stealing a fishing boat and setting out for Europe. Then Robbie falls ill. Bogarde’s acting here is spot on – the sense of frustration is palpable. He berates the lad (“You can’t be ill! Not now!”); he storms back above decks to take the wheel again; an internal battle plays out on his face; his knuckles whiten around the wheel. Finally, he wrenches the vessel around and sails back to port. A mob of angry townsfolk line the jetty, waiting for him. The police arrive just as he walks slowly and heavily up the harbour steps, Robbie feverish and barely conscious in his arms.

It’s a moralistic ending, certainly – Lloyd ‘doing the right thing’ even though it means his arrest – and more or less obligatory in British cinema of that era (villains, even sympathetic ones, weren’t allowed to get away with it; other examples: Alec Guinness going quietly at the end of ‘The Lavender Hill Mob’, Jack Hawkins and co. bundled into the police van in the closing frames of ‘The League of Gentlemen’). But it works. And it works because Bogarde is so convincing.