Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Robert Hamer and Basil Dearden
Starring Michael Redgrave, Mervyn Jones, Frederick Valk and Roland Culver
Now this one was a real unexpected bonus. When I picked out the movies to be featured in the Black (And White) Christmas Spectacular, I knew that this one didn't have color, and it was pretty damn respected critically. Lo and behold it's also an anthology film! I friggin' love anthology horror films, to the point where I think one of these should be pretty much mandatory every October. Couple that with the fact that we're dealing with a 1945 release date and almost every character in it compulsively lighting up cigarettes and I knew that this one was right up my alley.
Anthology flicks are really cool to me because you get forced - sometimes jarring - changes of pace at various intervals throughout your running time. In GOOD movies of this nature, the stories are wildly different and give you a chance to get all of the gooey goodness that the horror genre has to offer. I don't think this was ever done better than it was in the Stephen King-George Romero classic Creepshow, but I've seen enough of these things to know what I'm talking about. Maybe. You know, if they made some kind of Horror Movie University, odds are that I probably wouldn't even rank in the upper 50th percentile, so take that for what it's worth. Nobody ever said I was good at selling my credibility when it comes to reading a blog. But based on my somewhat limited knowledge, I can report that Dead of Night is definitely worth your while. Let's get to the specifics.
Most movies of this nature have some kind of framing device, and this time we've got a doozy. Meet Walter Craig (Mervyn Jones), incredulous guy who has been having a recurring dream about...well, pretty much what he's experiencing right now. Namely, being called away to a countryside home to meet a group of strangers, all of whom he has also seen many times before. Introductions are made, accents are established (this movie is very British, to the point that I actually had to turn on subtitles), and characterizations pop. The most interesting characters are Eliot Foley (Roland Culver), the owner and host of the festivities, and Dr. van Straaten (Frederick Valk), psychologist in the vein of Sigmund Freud who goes about debunking all of the stories that are about to go down. Stories, you say?
Well, it seems as if Walter's ravings about seeing all of this before inspires all of the house guests to share their own instances of paranormal phenomena from their past. First up is racecar driver Hugh Grainger's (Anthony Baird) dalliance with premonition. This is the shortest and weakest out of the five, so the less said about it the better. Next up is teenager Sally O'Hara (Sally Ann Howes), who tells of her encounter with a ghost at a Christmas party. Howes is a really good actress, and it's fun to watch her go between playful and frightened at the drop of a hat.
With that, the movie starts going a bit more in depth. The third segment features the gorgeous Joan Cortland (played by the awesomely named Googie Withers) gracing us with the events that took place during her engagement and early-married days. She once bought an antique mirror for her husband, one that only shows one background in its reflection. Once the background of the mirror becomes known, the payoff is pretty predictable, but this is still a pretty effective little segment with some appropriately freaky-deaky music. And Withers is a powerhouse. Next up is a bit of levity courtesy of Eliot Foley himself involving an obsessed golfer who finds himself haunted by the ghost of a fellow golfer. These guys are played by Basil Redford and Naunton Wayne, who portrayed similar characters in the Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes. The act was so popular that they got to do it again in a few more films, this one included. The segment is played for laughs, and it actually works on a few occasions. Love that "I am about to vanish" series of gestures.
Last on the agenda is your classic "Ventriloquist's Dummy" story, and considering the time period that this flick came out, this one ranks up there. Since this is Dr. van Straaten relaying the tale, we know that we're about to see a man go slowly insane, and that's just what we get in the form of ventriloquist Maxwell Frere (Michael Redgrave). I can't help but think that the later British thriller Devil Doll was heavily inspired by this one - hell, it even features a dummy named Hugo. Maxwell believes his dummy is alive, and while we've seen this plot roughly 17,471 times in films since then, the setup, build and payoff is done really well here. Hugo's voice is also a thing of beauty. This leads us up to the finale at the country house and a twist ending that manages to come off as both genuinely surprising and strange. I don't know if "strange" is a good descriptor for something that I enjoyed, but fuck me if I didn't just type it.
According to the ever-accurate Wikipedia, this was one of the very rare horror films released in Britain during the 1940s. They were actually banned while World War II was going on! Historical doodads like this always fascinate me. Coming out of that, I can't imagine a better way for audiences at the time to get their feet wet than this film. It was light, it was fun, you didn't have to think too deeply about it, and best of all, these were British people who didn't need subtitles to understand some of the dialogue. By 1945 standards, no doubt this movie was fantastic.
I'll also be the first person to admit that there are some things that don't quite hold up. There's a couple car crashes in the opening "Hearse Driver" segment that made me laugh out loud due to their extensive fakiness, but those things are always forgivable. The other main complaint is that the movie is very "ghost story" heavy. There is good variety WITHIN the ghost genre, but it would have been nice to see some other types of supernatural horror sprinkled in there. Maybe something in there about psychic power, hellhounds, reincarnation...at least these are the subjects that come to mind for this reporter when thinking about things known to British film-makers in the 1940s. In the end, it doesn't really matter. The acting is fantastic all the way through, and the flick is overall just a damn fun time.
*** 1/2 out of ****. In the realm of anthology films, there are definitely better ones, but it's hard to go wrong with a group of well-acted, atmospheric stories. Give this one a watch.
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