Allan Fish Bonanza: Dead of Night (1945)

Note: This fourth Halloween entry in the classic Allan Fish Bonanza Encore series is the twenty-fifth in the series overall to post over the past weeks at WitD.

by Allan Fish

(UK 1945 105m) DVD1/2

Just room for one more inside, sir…

p  Sidney Cole, John Croydon  d  Alberto Cavalcanti, Robert Hamer, Basil Dearden, Charles Crichton w  John Baines, Angus MacPhail  stories  Angus MacPhail, John Baines, H.G.Wells, E.F.Benson  ph  Douglas Slocombe, Stan Pavey  ed  Charles Hasse  m  Georges Auric  art  Michael Relph

Mervyn Johns (Walter Craig), Roland Culver (Eliot Foley), Judy Kelly (Joyce Grainger), Mary Merrall (Mrs Foley), Anthony Baird (Hugh Grainger), Sally Ann Howes (Sally O’Hara), Frederick Valk (Dr Van Straaten), Ralph Michael (Mr Courtland), Googie Withers (Joan Courtland), Esmé Percy (antique dealer), Renee Gadd (Mrs Craig), Basil Radford (George Parratt), Naunton Wayne (Larry Potter), Michael Redgrave (Maxwell Frere), Miles Malleson (hearse/bus driver), Elisabeth Welch (Beulah), Hartley Power (Sylvester Kee), Peggy Bryan (Mary Lee), Michael Allan (Jimmy Watson),

Considering their incredible reputation as a producer of classic British comedies, it would be easy to forget that Ealing also produced various classic dramas, among them Went the Day Well?, The Next of Kin, The Captive Heart, It Always Rains on Sunday, Mandy and The Cruel Sea.  But it is this truly disquieting ghost story compendium that remains their non-comic masterpiece.  Considering that it has been parodied and pilfered in numerous other films and TV plays, it’s quite surprising how fresh it still remains after sixty years.  Even the use of several directors doesn’t harm it, adding a different style to each of the individual stories that adds to the dreamlike texture.

Architect Walter Craig drives out to spend the weekend with a potential customer, Eliot Foley, who wants extra bedrooms added to his country house in Kent, Pilgrim’s Farm.  Once he arrives he acts strangely around everyone who is there, until he admits to the other guests that he has seen them all in his nightmarish dreams and that each one plays a part in his dream.  Only the visiting psychologist, Dr Van Straaten, refuses to believe this psychological phenomenon, but when each of the guests relates a spooky tale of their own, everyone’s preconceptions are eradicated.

Night truly is a film to cherish, full of memorable almost iconic performances, occasionally arresting monochrome photography and lighting and a truly layered script which its actors seize on with relish.  Though not all the sequences work quite as well as they might (Hamer’s Haunted Mirror and Cavalcanti’s Ventriloquist’s Dummy being the definite highlights), all of them somehow click into place.  Even the disposable sequence of the inimitable Radford and Wayne as feuding golfers fits in at that particular point in the narrative, and the sequence of Craig’s premonition of death gives the film its most memorable line, spoken by the inimitable Miles Malleson (“just room for one more inside, sir“).  Just to think of the truly eerie haunted mirror with its Victorian reflection and raging fire, or of the truly awe-inspiring ventriloquist story leading to the finale, with its truly hallucinogenic persecutory montage and circular ending, is enough to make you lick your lips. “I feel I’m in the grip of a force that’s driving me towards something unspeakably evil“, Johns admits, and you follow him towards the inevitable but still surprising conclusion.

The effect of this, as mentioned before, would have been greatly dissipated had it not been for the superb playing of its ensemble.  Culver’s Foley, the perfect English host, Withers an elegant stylish wife to haunted Michael, Howes a perfect representation of the old ‘jolly hockey sticks’ teenage girl and Valk wonderfully reprising his analytical doctor from Thunder Rock.  And topping them all the eternally underrated Mervyn Johns as the haunted protagonist and, immortally, Redgrave as the schizophrenic ventriloquist Frere, truly dripping madness through every sinew.  Here was surely the most underrated actor in British cinema, capable of The Lady Vanishes, The Stars Look Down, Kipps, Thunder Rock, The Way to the Stars and The Captive Heart all before turning forty, but surely never better than here.  Take a trip to Pilgrim’s Farm.  Though you may shake your head like Johns does on a loop, like him you’ll always be drawn back there.