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Dead Of Night
DOWSE Guide to the
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by Tony Lee editor of
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Dead Of Night
102 minutes 1945
Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer, Charles Crichton
Cast: Mervyn Johns, Roland Culver, Googie Withers, Michael Redgrave
review by Roger Keen
This untypical product of Ealing Studios - makers of The Blue Lamp and The
Ladykillers - has become over the years a conoisseur classic of weird and
supernatural suspense cinema. It is not the usual fright-a-minute horror fare, but a
more subtle study in metaphysical terror of the where-does-dream-end-and-reality-begin?
kind. When an architect (Mervyn Johns) visits a country house for the weekend, he
becomes convinced that the other guests are characters in a recurring nightmare he's
been having. From here the story opens out into a forum on the weird and the
supernatural, with each guest relating a personal weird experience, each of which is
dramatised as a separate tale, using different directors. They range from a
straightforward ghost story to one of precognition, where an injured racing driver
receives a warning of impending doom from a Victorian hearse driver (dir. Dearden),
to the more interestingly eerie tale of an antique mirror which reflects a different
room to the one it is in, and which gradually comes to possess its new owner (dir.
Hamer). But by far the best and most remembered is the tale of ventriloquist Maxwell
Frere, whose dummy Hugo comes to assume a life of its own (dir. Cavalcanti). This
episode is psychological horror at its best, and Michael Redgrave is chillingly
convincing as the hapless Frere. The scene at the end with him lying in a hospital
bed, talking in the dummy's voice, is truly flesh-crawling, and the surreal climax,
where all the stories colalese, is superbly nightmarish. This film explores just
about every avenue of the weird and the supernatural in a very effective and
intelligent way. The sense of the 'normal' is preserved by the characters' healthy
scepticism and attempts to rationalise whatever comes up. The psychiatrist guest (the
narrator of the dummy tale) puts down the architect's sense of being in a nightmare
as guilt, and so on. In its own way it has been very influential. The dummy episode
was the model for Richard Attenborough's far inferior Magic, and pointed the
way to the Child's Play movies. And the jokey episode, where a dead golfer
comes back to haunt his cheating partner, has a lot of the knockabout, spoofing
quality of films like Ghostbusters. The portmanteau structure has been tried
subsequently in horror movies, but never so effectively, and this film remains a
one-off masterpiece, undimmed by its antiquity.
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