Maybe it’s supernatural: For some reason not wholly clear to me, the British anthology film Dead of Night, produced by Ealing Studios in 1945, has slipped out of the mainstream, despite its having been a sensation when released and a touchstone for art-house movie lovers for decades afterward. It has only intermittently been available on home media—I own a peculiar two-disc DVD edition that pairs it with another British supernatural-themed film, Thorold Dickinson’s Queen of Spades (1949)—and today is available for download only from a site that specializes in horror films, appropriately named Shudder.
This is odd and more than a little unfair, because Dead of Night isn’t exactly a horror film—though a few of its more hair-raising moments can certainly scare the hell out of you—and it offers a great many pleasures that have nothing whatever to do with scares or horrors. If you come to it in the hope of slavering monsters or hideous gore, you will definitely be in the wrong ballpark. In compensation, you may get some unnerving psychological insights, as well as a handsome panorama of British acting in its period prime. And you never know what unexpected bonuses may arrive: The astronomer Fred Hoyle and his colleagues are said to have evolved their steady-state theory of the universe as a result of seeing this film. I doubt any other movie found at shudder.com can make a claim like that.
Dead of Night’s six segments—a frame story and five inset tales—involved four directors and three credited screenwriters, so it’s virtually impossible to say who constructed the cunningly interlocking narrative that inspired Hoyle and his colleagues. Most probably the two main screenwriters, John Baines and Angus MacPhail (the latter of whom had also scripted another supernatural-themed film, The Halfway House, for the same studio the year before) came up with the initial idea and then built their fiendishly fascinating story out of the materials they had assembled. Their sources were varied: a 1904 ghost story by E.F. Benson, already so often retold by 1945 that it had become a classic anecdote; a comic ghost story by H.G. Wells; a true-crime account from the mid-19th century; an original story that uses a motif familiar from many earlier supernatural tales; and another original that takes advantage of modern institutions. As can easily be seen, Baines and MacPhail did a lot of inventing while stitching these multiple stories into a cohesive sequence that builds to its own dramatic climax, sweeping all of them up into one nightmarish final gesture. MacPhail embroidered materials from the true-crime account, with which, historically, no ghost was associated, into a tale both tender and chilling—as befits a story in which the narrator and focal figure is a 15-year-old girl (played by the young Sally Ann Howes). Baines gave the “haunted mirror” story, a longtime staple of Gothic fiction, a bit of modern dressing, with the troubled wife (Googie Withers) trying to find a medical—or mental—explanation for her husband’s condition.
The very modern notion that our mental problems, rather than the spirit world, are the cause of supernatural phenomena is a sanity index with which the film delightfully toys. One of the country house guests in the framing story is a psychiatrist, Dr. Van Straaten, played with a heavy Germanic accent by the emigre actor Frederick Valk, an admired Shylock and Othello on the London stage but used in British film of the era mainly to play Mitteleuropean refugees or Nazi bureaucrats. Valk was a big, stocky man, and Basil Dearden, who directed the framing story, uses his bulk to suggest his domineering over the others as the supernatural stories pile up and the doctor gets increasingly testy while defending his rationalist viewpoint. (At one moment, fairly early on, he actually suggests that the whole situation is an elaborate conspiracy cooked up by the other house guests to trick him into accepting the supernatural!)
When Dr. Van Straaten finally tells his own supernatural anecdote—for which he of course offers a not very convincing “rational” explanation—we reach the peak of the movie’s sly craftsmanship, and of its artistry. The doctor’s antagonist here is a ventriloquist, Maxwell Frere, played by Michael Redgrave with a degree of histrionic flamboyance, fiercely grounded in neurasthenic detail, that launches the film into the stratosphere of memorable acting. The episode, written by Baines and directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, became the raison d’etre that made the movie a must-see for multiple generations. Radio, television, and film variants on its story have been legion; it even turned up, metamorphed into a super-villain, on the Batman TV series. But none of the innumerable knockoffs has anything like the riveting power of Redgrave’s performance.
This is so, of course, because Redgrave found a personal meaning in the part as well. Frere is a hugely successful ventriloquist whose dummy, Hugo, a dapper, tuxedo-clad little fellow, follows the traditional pattern: making wisecracks, shooting double-entendres at attractive women in the audience, and heaping contempt on his ventriloquist master. That contempt, however, has clearly been on the upswing, making Frere increasingly jittery, so when a rival ventriloquist, Sylvester Kee (Hartley Power), drops into a Paris nightclub to catch Frere’s act, Hugo openly announces that he intends to leave Frere and work with Kee. This would all be funny, if a little weirdly neurotic, except that troubling things begin to happen, making Frere increasingly unhinged as Hugo seems to become more and more independent, asserting himself with increasing hostility towards Frere.
Remember that this is 1945. Homosexuality is not yet a subject treated openly on the English-speaking screen, except in the context of fleeting camp jokes. And, of course, this story is not “about” homosexuality, but about a ventriloquist whose dummy has begun to display a troubling independence. Whether you view the story as sexual or supernatural, maybe the ventriloquist himself is the problem, making the dummy say and do things he would think twice about saying or doing himself. Or maybe the rival ventriloquist is lying when he insists that he is entirely innocent of any wrongdoing. While the ghost story sits queasily atop its sexual interpretation, these multiple possible explanations bleed through one another, creating the equivalent of a Cubist painting of a ghost story. As compared to the other stories, with their simple either-or challenges to rational analysis, this one is truly modern. It puts the world that lies beyond rationality not outside us but within our own minds.
Whoever chose Redgrave to play Maxwell Frere may or may not have known about the complicated sex life that drove the actor to such deep inner torments. (He was bisexual, and promiscuous with both sexes, though deeply tormented and consistently secretive about it. Late in life, he revealed the matter in conversations with his son, Corin, whose memoir, published after Redgrave’s death, made the matter public.) Certainly Redgrave himself knew where he stood and knew what the role was implying when he took it on. Perhaps it was a clandestine way of signaling, in the fashion of that era, what he never made fully explicit in his lifetime. Whatever impelled the meeting of actor and role, the results, fervid and at moments truly frightening, have an extraordinary power. For all the glory his three children—Vanessa, Lynn, and Corin—attained onstage or in film, they did nothing that quite equals this highly public display of a man’s nerve ends fraying, as it were, before our eyes. The terror in his mind—impossible to tell if it’s the character’s or the actor’s—is jaw-droppingly readable, however inexplicable its source.
And locating the inexplicable there, in the mind, brings the film back to the framing story, with its startling conclusion and climactic melee. It’s hard to know which director to credit for that final visionary scene, a delirium in which characters from all the previous stories reappear: Dearden is credited with filming the frame story, to which the sequence strictly belongs, but the setting seems to come from the end of the ventriloquist story, directed by Cavalcanti, and its surreal style evokes his avant-garde French films of the late 1920s. Nearly a generation older than his three colleagues—Charles Crichton, and Robert Hamer each directed one episode—Cavalcanti had had the most wide-ranging career, studying architecture before turning to film in the early 1920s as a disciple to the prominent French avant-gardist Marcel L’Herbier. He had worked in documentary and in a poetic-expressionist experimental vein before turning to feature films, and it isn’t hard to imagine him acting as an unofficial mentor to his three younger colleagues, pushing them each a little further towards the eerie, experimental edges of this most unusual project. (Hamer had in fact already worked under Cavalcanti in his pre-Ealing job, producing public-service documentaries for the GPO Film Unit, and moved over to Ealing with Cavalcanti. The brilliant Douglas Slocombe, one of the film’s two cinematographers, was also one of Cavalcanti’s mentees.)
It was indeed unusual for its time and place. England had generally discouraged the production or distribution of horror films during World War II, and the nation was just beginning to pull itself out of the upheaval caused by the war. Such matters are never mentioned explicitly in Dead of Night, but the general tone of anxiety that pervades the film must surely have taken its cue from the surrounding environment. Childhood memory probably also played a certain part: While Cavalcanti had been born in the more peaceable time of 1897 (and in far-off Brazil), his younger colleagues had all lived through World War I in England as small children. (Crichton was born in 1910, Dearden and Hamer in 1911.)
Dead of Night was also not the kind of film that British moviegoers expected from Ealing Studios, then or later. Under executive producer Michael Balcon, Ealing had turned out a great many pieces of loose-jointed foolery, starring beloved theater and music-hall comedians like Gracie Fields, George Formby, Stanley Holloway, Tommy Trinder, and Will Hay. It had produced a line of documentaries to support the war effort, several of them directed by Cavalcanti. And on the occasions when its feature films took on a serious tone, it had shown, intermittently, a surprising willingness to dare the edge of its subjects. Cavalcanti’s first feature for the studio had been one of its creepier productions, Went the Day Well? (1942), based on a Graham Greene short story in which a placid English country town is taken over by “English” soldiers who turn out to be carefully trained Nazi paratroopers in disguise. Their contact man in the village is revealed to be the local squire, played by the suave leading man Leslie Banks, whose double-dealing leaves the villagers cut off from rescue by British troops as they vainly struggle to get messages past their occupiers’ watchful eyes. The situation is ultimately saved, but at considerable cost of human life.
In the postwar years, Ealing found a very different specialty, with which its name has become synonymous: light-toned satirical comedy with a sardonic edge and a deep affection for British eccentricity and local custom. Passport to Pimlico (1949), Whisky Galore (1949, released in the United States as Tight Little Island), The Man in the White Suit (1951), and The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) are among the films, now celebrated as classics, that made the phrase “Ealing comedy” the definition of a genre.
You can see the genre beginning to bud in Dead of Night’s glimmerings of comedy, just as you can see the somber factuality of Went the Day Well? and Ealing’s wartime documentaries begin to take on a looser, more contemporary flavor. One of its five inner episodes, a tale of two rival golfers based on an H.G. Wells story, is openly farcical. Narrated by the house party’s host, Elliott Foley (Roland Culver), the story tells of two rival golf champions who are best friends when off the green, until they also become romantic rivals for the same fetching young woman (Peggy Bryan). Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, who play the two golfers, had been a popular comedy team, portraying a pair of classically stuffy English clubmen, in secondary roles of varying size, since they were first matched in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938). An Ealing screenwriter who specialized in comedy, T.E.B. Clarke, wrote the script for this segment of Dead of Night, the duo’s sixth film outing together. (He is credited with “additional dialogue.”) Four more such appearances were to follow—including another Ealing film, also scripted by Clarke, Passport to Pimlico—before the partnership was ended by Radford’s untimely death in 1952.
The golf story’s breach in the film’s tone is so extreme—Foley actually apologizes to his guests after telling it—that it has often been a source of irritation to viewers. The film’s first American distributors in fact cut the segment, thinking its golf-club humor would prove remote from Americans, to whom places like Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster had not yet become familiar phenomena. (An additional reason for the cut may have been the potential discomfort of its wedding-night scene. Ghost or no ghost, putting the groom’s best friend in the newlyweds’ bedroom probably raised American censors’ eyebrows.) Apart from badly altering the film’s balance, the deletion produced additional confusion, since figures from the story reappear in the concluding melee.
Something similar happened, in early U.S. release prints, to sections of the ventriloquist story: the presence of beloved Elisabeth Welch, as a Paris nightclub hostess, was deemed by American distributors to make southern moviegoers uncomfortable, since showing a Black woman on civilized and sociable terms with white people was a no-no in that time of de jure segregation. Welch, who had introduced Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale” on Broadway in 1930, found it much easier to make a career in Britain, coming back here only in her late years. These days, her appearance onscreen is one of the many small pleasures for which Dead of Night is cherished. We even get to watch her sing most of a song in her inimitable style. Granted, the song is rather stereotypical (and her character’s name is Beulah), but this was 1945, and you can’t have everything. Welch’s charm, poise, and elegant straightforwardness—which were still in evidence when I spent a memorable afternoon interviewing her for a Village Voice feature decades later—come through clearly.
As does the youthful emotional directness of the 15-year-old Sally Ann Howes, still today a welcome presence in our midst. Howes, the scion of a theatrical family, was already an experienced performer. (Her later credits would include appearing with her father, the musical-comedy star Bobby Howes, in the 1953 West End production of Lerner and Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon, going on in 1958 to replace Julie Andrews on Broadway in a little trifle of theirs called My Fair Lady.)
The “Christmas party” segment of Dead of Night, in which her character encounters the ghost of a murdered child, was woven by MacPhail out of the notorious true-crime story of Constance Kent, a 16-year-old who murdered her much younger half-brother in 1860. The actual crime was a subject of great controversy at the time and has been much written about since, but apparently nobody except MacPhail, and Cavalcanti, who directed the episode, has ever derived a ghost story from it. Full of sharp contrasts in lighting and camera angles, between the noisy Christmas party going on downstairs and the quietude of the shadowy warren of bedrooms and passageways upstairs, where the encounter takes place, the sequence has an unnerving sweetness about it that contrasts delicately with the brasher and more violent tales that flank it on either side. The story’s subtle essence comes in the moment, after the encounter, when Howes’s character realizes what she has just experienced. The variety of emotions that chase one another across her face make the moment a capstone of her tender performance. The segment also underscores how carefully the creative team built the work’s variety. Where the other supernatural experiences are premonitory or menacing, this one gives the living human the option to allay a troubled spirit from the past.
Another small but intriguing casting note is the appearance of Miles Malleson in two small roles, one each in the first and the last of the five tales inside the frame story: He’s the driver of the vehicle that haunts the nightmares of the injured racing-car driver (Antony Baird) in the first story, and the jailer who makes a brief, largely silent appearance in the ventriloquist story. His casting seems to have been more a matter of utility than an attempt at a symbolic or structural gesture of any kind. Malleson, better known in his own time as a playwright and translator (particularly of Moliere) than as an actor, was a generally useful “character man,” his sharp-nosed face familiar today from the dozens of small parts he played in countless British films of every sort. (He’s probably best known now as Canon Chasuble in the 1952 film of The Importance of Being Earnest, with Redgrave and Edith Evans.)
That opening episode, scripted by MacPhail and directed by Dearden, is the slightest of the five tales. Even ghost-story aficionados often don’t realize that it has a literary source, because it has the quality of a two-line anecdote told (as it probably has been many times) to scare people sitting around a fireside on a chilly night: A man had a recurring nightmare that such-and-such would happen, and so was saved by his fright at the moment when something quite like it actually did happen. The story holds an ironic position in Dead of Night as a mirror image of the frame story, in which the architect Walter Craig finds himself not being saved—or is he?—from the recurring nightmare that the film shows happening to him.
Mervyn Johns’s quietly fraught performance as Craig contrasts neatly with Antony Baird’s as the racing-car driver who is the hero of the first episode, a dashing, devil-may-care leading-man type, as befits his character’s occupation. Within the story, Dearden cunningly allows for contrasting moments when the hero has his premonitory dream and when he suddenly faces its reality. At these moments the jaunty, wisecracking heroic fellow we see in the rest of the episode quite disappears, replaced by a silent figure numb with fright. Dearden dresses up the story with eerie silent passages: The soundtrack goes dead during the dream sequence, and Baird’s almost somnambulistic walk to the window of the hospital room (where he is recuperating from a race-track accident), interspersed with closeups of the room’s clock showing an inexplicably wrong time, make it deliberately hard to tell whether he is sleeping or waking. (The long silent scenes are also a relief because Georges Auric’s score, one of the film’s few shortcomings, generally tends to call noisy attention to itself—surprising in a composer of Auric’s skill and discretion: His other movie scores, including Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast as well as several of the Ealing comedies, are noted for their subtlety. Perhaps he, like Ealing, was working by trial and error through inexperience with the genre; in his case the experiment turned out less well.)
Interestingly, Craig is also spared at least one small aspect of his premonitory dream. Predicting what he has dreamed is going to happen (most of which indeed does happen), he tells the other house guests that a moment is approaching when he will feel compelled to strike young Sally O’Hara (Howes) savagely. This doesn’t occur, because Sally’s mother (Barbara Leake) unexpectedly arrives at the house party to hustle her daughter home for dinner. In a moment of what was to become a typically Ealing brand of understated humor, Sally explains to her mother that she can’t leave because Mr. Craig is about to hit her savagely. “Oh, well,” Mrs. O’Hara shoots back, “I’m sure he can hit somebody else instead. Come along, dear,” and hustles Sally out of the house. Like the earlier moment when Dr. Van Straaten, the film’s spokesman for science and rationality, allows himself to indulge in a paranoid conspiracy theory, Sally’s moment with her mother is embedded in the framing story’s overall tone of discreet understatement, pitched low so as to pass without comment unless one is paying close attention. One of the many appealing qualities of Dead of Night is that it presents such matters without signaling or underlining. Yet another such moment is set up in the first episode, when the hospitalized racing-car driver banters with his nurse (Judy Kelly) about getting married. When his wife unexpectedly turns up at the house party—an event predicted in Craig’s dream—we see that he and his nurse have indeed married, but the only direct reference to this event is a line of hers beginning, “When I was a nurse…”. With its extreme events inlaid like precious stones into a bedrock of middle-class English good sense and understatement, the film displays a remarkably iridescent texture.
For Dead of Night’s four directors, the film proved a remarkable watershed: Although they achieved many fine things individually, they never achieved anything that had quite the tautness or the degree of resonance of this curious venture, so unlike everything else in their filmographies. The film is, in essence, a tribute to what can be achieved when working by committee. Ealing tried the formula again four years later, with Train of Events (1949), a four-episode film about travelers on a train that gets derailed. Crichton and Dearden were among its three directors; MacPhail and Clarke contributed to its screenplay. But the result was met with considerably less enthusiasm than Dead of Night, and today is rarely referred to, affirming once again the old saw about sequels usually proving less successful.
Dead of Night’s four directors very much went their separate ways afterward. Cavalcanti made only one more film for Ealing—an adaptation of Dickens’s Nicholas Nickelby (1947), with Cedric Hardwicke as Ralph Nickleby and Stanley Holloway as Crummles—before leaving the studio in what apparently was a salary dispute. He made three more films in England as a freelance, and then returned to his native Brazil, departing again in the mid-1950s when the country’s politics took a rightward turn that made his Marxist beliefs unwelcome. After that he worked all over Europe and in Israel before returning to Brazil again, where he died at the ripe age of 85.
Charles Crichton’s equally long life was marked by many more cinematic high spots: He stayed at Ealing for another decade, putting his stamp particularly on the kind of comedy that became associated with its name, most notably in The Lavender Hill Mob (1951). After some further forays in British film as a freelance, he moved to television, directing episodes particularly of comedy series. As a result of one such series, he formed a friendship with the young comedian John Cleese, and thus Crichton found himself returning to film directing at the age of 77, so that his career ended in a blaze of glory with the success of A Fish Called Wanda (1988).
Neither Dearden nor Hamer lived such a gratifyingly long life. Hamer, a troubled soul, turned out two widely praised serious features for Ealing (both centered on his “haunted mirror” star, Googie Withers), and then scored a gigantic success in the studio’s comic vein with Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). But his increasing alcoholism prompted his dismissal from Ealing, and his work became more and more erratic. On his last feature, School for Scoundrels (1960), he had to be replaced, and he died three years later, at the tragically young age of 52.
The stronger-minded Dearden fared better on the whole, directing a series of well-regarded serious films (often crime films) for Ealing before setting out on his own. He and producer Michael Relph, who had been Michael Balcon’s right-hand man at Ealing, formed their own company, Allied Films, in the late 1950s; among its striking productions were murder mysteries with contemporary settings and social issues at their core, like Sapphire (1959), which dealt with racism, and the epoch-making Victim (1961), notable as the first English-speaking film in which the word “homosexual” was spoken aloud. Dearden would undoubtedly have had a longer career, but his life was tragically cut short in 1971, when he died, aged only 60, as the result of injuries suffered in a highway accident.
Anthology films of various kinds continued to crop up in the late 1940s and early ’50s. In addition to Train of Events, already mentioned, the British contributed three film collections based on short stories by Somerset Maugham, Quartet (1948), Trio (1950), and Encore (1951), while the United States countered with O. Henry’s Full House (1952). Europe adopted the concept in the late 1960s, when its products included a three-segment film based on Edgar Allan Poe stories, the Fellini-Roger Vadim-Louis Malle Spirits of the Dead (1968). But most such films have been forgotten, while Dead of Night continues to resonate, to perturb audiences, and to influence successor generations of film artists tempted by the supernatural. Its peculiar fascination, like its distinctive blend of the banal everyday world with the inexplicable that lies beyond it, has often been aimed for but never fully achieved anywhere else. It sits placidly alone, like the country house to which Walter Craig keeps finding himself so inexplicably invited. Maybe there is something supernatural about it.
