Horror Anthology Cinema Comes to the Fore in the Chilling Dead of Night

 

                A prime bet as the most influential and accomplished of the early suspense films centered around a multi-story format, 1945’s nail-biting Dead of Night from Britian’s Ealing Studios offers five eerie tales helmed by a top roster of esteemed directors, including Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden and Robert Hamer. A deft, unnerving screenplay by John Baines and Angus MacPhail (based on stories by Baines, MacPhail, E.F. Benson and H.G. Wells), coherently ties all the scenarios together via a truly ingenious linking narrative featuring all the main characters, including the dazed protagonist, meeting at a country house to share their unusual scenarios, leading to a justly famous jarring, unforgettable finale. A foreboding score by Georges Auric and top-flight list of thespian talent partake of their choice sequences with skill and the proper amount of queasiness, particularly Michael Redgrave in one of the most emotionally complex and disturbing performances found in films, allowing an audience to suspense disbelief and become completely caught up in the web of mounting intrigue emanating from the screen. Overall, even with its brief moments of levity, this trendsetting Michael Balcon production accounts for some of the tensest, scariest 103 minutes found in film.

                The Dearden-directed opening and interlocking segments present travails faced by the befuddled architect Walter Craig, who at the outset has a funny feeling regarding a day’s trip to an unfamiliar cottage he senses he’s been to before. Relating his thought to the cottage’s guest allows for each member to relate an unexplainable event from their past. Dearden sets up this premise with simplicity and precision, bringing each identifiable player into the scene with clarity and believable ease. As Walter, Meryvn Johns, a veteran of British films since the 1930s, does an expert job of illustrating this befuddled everyman’s distracted state as he struggles to understand the mystery behind his déjà vu, helping to beautifully set up the closing scenes. After this preliminary meeting of the key characters, the action moves into the recounting of the first story, also directed by Dearden, which aids in a smooth tonal transition from the cottage intro.

                Based on a truly spine-tingling 1906 short story by Benson entitled “The Bus-Conductor,” the updated, revised version related by racecar driver Hugh Grainger (played with proper intensity and apprehension by Anthony Baird) tells of a post-accident hospital stay by Grainger wherein, in the middle of the night, he encounters a hearse driver below (a perfectly cast, cheerfully ominous Miles Malleson), seen in broad daylight beckoning the shocked driver to come inside. Dearden’s colorful emphasis on the story’s creepy elements and Auric’s sinister scoring allows for a maximum sense of dread as the rest of the tale unfolds, serving as an ideal first offering of the macabre, with more off-kilter anecdotes to be unveiled by the other guests. The enduring appeal of Benson’s original story would live on in other iterations, including a memorable 1961 Twilight Zone episode with Barbara Nichols which moved the final “punchline” from bus to airplane, and a terrifying Scholastic Books version (for children!) done circa the 1970s entitled “The Elevator Operator” (aka “Lord Dufferin’s Story”) that, with an illustration of a deformed coffin carrier (subbing for the hearse driver), gave this author nightmares for years to come.

                Following this edgy yarn, “The Christmas Party,“ directed by Cavalcanti, provides a mellower scare quotient, but still offers some haunted house brand of shivers as teenager Sally O’Hara (competently played by young Sally Ann Howes, who is interesting to see a couple decades before her most famous screen appearance as the female lead, Truly Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) recalls a holiday celebration at a manor, wherein a game of hide-and seek leads Sally to an encounter she finds hard to explain or forget post-party. This episode is relayed in a simple, fairly serene manner, but the next, the Hamer-directed effort entitled “The Haunted Mirror,” really puts Auric’s ominous score to its maximum pulsating effect. Googie Withers, on the rise as a top leading lady of English films after starting as a child actor, then toiling in the 1930’s cinema, with a part in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 masterpiece The Lady Vanishes possibly her best effort, before raising her profile just prior to Night with 1942’s One of Our Aircraft is Missing and the following year’s On Approval, portrays the urbane Joan Courtland, who offers up the strange circumstances surrounding the gift of an ornately crafted mirror to her husband Peter (Ralph Michael), and the mysterious effect the new reflection has on Peter. Withers and Michael do a nice job interacting in a nonchalant fashion at the beginning of the piece, before turning to high drama as Haner’s forceful direction and Auric’s tense strains convey the mounting danger at hand for the overwhelmed couple.

                The penultimate tale, “The Golfer’s Story,” based on a Wells short story and directed by Crichton, warming up for the comic flavor he would bring helming The Lavender Hill Mob and The Titfield Thunderbolt, takes a whimsical approach not seen in the other offerings. Cottage host Eliot Foley (played by British screen mainstay Roland Culver) presents to his guests an account concerning two buddies vying for the hand of a lovely maiden via a winner-take-all golf game, the consequences of which leads to ghostly apparitions and some dire-yet-amusing actions. The light manner maintained as the story unfolds allows a viewer to relax a bit after some of the pronounced suspense on display during the film’s first hour or so. As the combative slicers, Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne perform with a deft comic chemistry carefully honed in several pre-Night entries, starting with their initial pairing in Lady Vanishes, the team’s most famous work this side of Night. Crichton, keeping Radford and Wayne front-and-center, manages to keep a frivolous style generating through the romp, resulting in a pleasant diversion in the middle of the film, if one out-of-sorts with the more intense aspects surrounding the humorous venture.

The breezy tone of the fourth piece gives way to the most disturbing and frightening recollection, “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy,” directed by Cavalcanti with a superbly spinetingling touch.  Michael Redgrave, going about as far into a role as possible, is shatteringly effective in depicting the tortured mindset of Maxwell Frere, an expert ventriloquist sure his dummy, Hugo, is controlling the act and his master. Redgrave holds nothing back dramatically as he plunges the depths of despair to enact Maxwell’s tortuous, terror-ridden mindset, making a viewer uneasy with the naked emotionalism Redgrave utilizes in his brilliant illustration of a soul unhinged. With Cavalcanti’s uncompromisingly stark direction and Redgrave’s masterful performance, this justifiably renowned look at the how edgy the ventriloquist/dummy dynamic can be depicted on the screen is impossible to put out of mind, with visions of Frere’s increasingly paranoic state as his hold on sanity erodes, mixed with shots of the singularly sinister Hugo by his side, lingering in a viewer’s memory and serving as a basis of more than one Twilight Zone episode, as well as Magic, the 1978 Anthony Hopkins/Ann-Margret starred take on a similar theme, which may not cause the same trepidation as the Cavalcanti/Redgrave version, except for a trailer for the film that raised the hackles of many television viewers (“Abracadabra I sit on his knee. . .”) including a young, impressionable author that did not see the film for many years, even when old enough to do so, for fear of encountering “Fats,” an odious cousin to Hugo, for sure (only my love for Ann-Margret, who gives a lovely performance, finally made me succumb to a Magic watch). Following this ultra-fearsome episode, the film reaches an equally blood-curling climax as the panicked Walter comes face-to-face with his worst nightmares, followed by an unforgettable spooky twist to close an exceptionally engrossing cinematic look at several facets of the dark side. 

With its London release in September of 1945, Dead of Night created significant buzz as one of the strangest and most nerve-wracking films ever released, a stir which was replicated once the film made its way to American cinemas, even though for the initial U.S. release, “The Christmas Party” and “The Golfer’s Story” portions were omitted from prints, a situation rectified by physical media releases, including a current Kino Lorber Blu-Ray featuring the uncut film, an audio commentary and a documentary. The legacy of this spellbinding classic extends to the aforementioned Twilight Zone episodes and, specifically, other excursions into horror anthology such as Black Sabbath, Tales from the Crypt, Creepshow and beyond. However, few movies of the genre can match the lasting power to cause shivers aplenty than Dead of Night nearly 80 years after it first premiered. Even the staunchest of horror fans may want to invite a friend over and leave the lights on to keep their wits while viewing the indelible outing into the surreal, suspenseful world that encompasses Dead of Night.