Fans of two films that stand near the top of the long list of British supernatural thrillers, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and multi-director shocker Dead Of Night were poorly served on DVD. Although the image quality in both cases was acceptable, the soundtracks had deteriorated dreadfully. Listening to the main title music of either film was an experience to make the teeth itch, and the screechiness the degraded soundtrack inflicted on young Sally Ann Howes’s voice in Dead Of Night was real fingernails-on-blackboard torture.
DEAD OF NIGHT (UK, 1945, b&w, 104 min.) directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, and Robert Hamer and starring Michael Redgrave, Googie Withers, Mervyn Johns, Sally Ann Howes, Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne, Roland Culver, and Frederick Valk. In English with optional English subtitles. A StudioCanal Region B Blu-ray disc.
It wasn’t until a finely restored Blu-ray of Don’t Look Now was released by Optimum in 2011 that viewers were able to see and hear Roeg’s 1973 masterpiece once again in its full, chilling glory. Now, StudioCanal has followed through with an almost equally impressive Blu-ray restoration of Dead Of Night, which has just been released in the UK.
Dead Of Night is an anthology movie with a premise that is still immediately captivating. An architect (Mervyn Johns) drives up to an English country house whose owner has contacted him with a landscaping assignment. As he enters, he is welcomed by the owner’s guests, but is offensively aloof as introductions are made, refusing handshakes and ignoring greetings. He apologises, telling them all that what is happening is actually a recurrent dream of his, of which all of them are merely figments who will vanish when he awakens. His memory of the dream is vague, but he does recall that it has a horrifying conclusion. During the course of the film, as Johns’ claim to be dreaming becomes increasingly convincing, one of the guests, an imperious psychiatrist (Frederick Valk), brushes the strange coincidences off with neat psychological explanations. The others, however, are less sceptical.
At first they are surprised and amused by his remarks, but become intrigued when a few of his very indistinct recollections seem to come true. This inspires each of them to tell of an experience when the supernatural intruded into their own lives. Their stories, very different in style and tone, make up the bulk of the movie.
The effect of these stories, which become longer as the film progresses, is cumulative. In the first, a race car driver recuperating in hospital experiences a seeming hallucination that saves him from a gruesome fate. The story’s compression doesn’t allow director Basil Dearden much room for displaying a signature style, but he does establish an uneasy mood that is developed and deepened in most of the stories that follow.
The second story, in which Sally Ann Howes, then a teenager, encounters a strange little boy in a hidden room of a big country house during a party, is the first of two directed by Alberto Cavalcanti. Again, it is too brief to cast a strong spell, but sets the mood for the next tale, one of the best, in which Googie Withers purchases an antique mirror as a gift for her husband-to-be. He begins seeing strange reflections in the glass, and gradually becomes obsessed with it. The mirror’s evil history and its effects on the living create tension that director Robert Hamer (his first film) develops to high pitch, assisted by excellent acting from Withers and Ralph Michael, as her possessed fiance.
The movie then takes a breather with a story (by H.G. Wells) about two golfers whose rivalry extends beyond the grave. It is a rather silly comedy made entertaining by the performance of funnymen Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne (memorable also as train passengers in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes). Director Charles Crichton obviously knows that the material is weak and gives the two comics room to make the most of the characters’ ridiculous relationship. Peggy Bryan as the girl who throws a spanner into their friendship is another bonus, but the main purpose of this episode is to allow viewers, tense from the strong climax of the haunted mirror story, to relax before clobbering them with the final episode, directed again by Cavalcanti, which stars Michael Redgrave as a schizophrenic ventriloquist who feels himself to be under the power of his sinister dummy.
This is the story anyone who has seen Dead Of Night will mention first. Redgrave gives a phenomenal performance. Watch his facial expressions and listen to the tone of his voice in its final moments and shudder. It has become a classic in its own right and been imitated many times. Commentators usually cite this episode as the highlight of Dead Of Night, but I think, powerful as it is, it takes second place to Dearden’s story. When the nightmare conclusion that Johns half-remembers and dreads finally arrives, the movie goes into high German Expressionist mode, full of shadows and weird angles, and flashes along at high speed to create one of the film’s most convincing nightmares (watch for an image quoted almost literally by Ingmar Bergman in Hour Of The Wolf). The conclusion, the film’s final few moments, is something to ponder and marvel at, even as the closing credits roll.
Bravo to StudioCanal for their careful restoration of this Ealing Studios classic, made right after the wartime ban on horror films had elapsed. The blurriness, scratches, and dust evident on earlier DVDs have been largely cleaned away, and although the sound is not pristine (Georges Auric’s music for the opening titles still sounds coarse and raw), the dialogue is far clearer and easier on the ear than previously. The Blu-ray disc is locked to Region B, so here in Bangkok a multi-region player will probably be needed to view it. I bought my copy online from amazon.co.uk.
