If you haven’t seen “Dead of Night” (1945), you’re in for a great time as David Lehman tells us in his latest “Talking Pictures”
column for The American Scholar.
Here’s how the post begins:
Dead of Night (1945), an anthology movie with segments directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden and Robert Hamer, is one of the glories of British black-and-white filmmaking. The movie includes déjà vu, premonitions, a historical time slip, a sinister mirror, and a ventriloquist’s dummy with a voice of his own. Next to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Dead of Night may be the greatest cinematic tribute to the uncanny, a category Freud analyzed at length in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche: “The uncanny,” he wrote, “is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar.”
The five episodes in Dead of Night are linked by the venerable storytelling device Bocaccio used in The Decameron: as in a parlor game, everyone in an assembled group agrees to tell a scary story. The film begins when architect Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns), summoned for a possible commission, arrives at a vast country mansion, where a tea party seems to be in progress—and immediately feels he has been there before, has met the owner and his guests, and can anticipate what will happen next.
The set-up: The party consists of seemingly normal, law-abiding citizens, yet most of them have endured a personal experience that defies reasonable explanation. When Dr. Van Straaten (Frederick Valk), a determinedly rational psychiatrist with a Middle European accent, tries to disabuse the group of their superstitions, the other guests take turns telling their stories in a good-natured effort to refute him.
The first episode, “The Bus-Conductor” (directed by Basil Dearden), is based on E. F. Benson’s 1905 story of the same name, and it is almost poetic in its premonitions. Hugh Grainger (Anthony Baird) is a racecar driver who, while in the hospital recovering from injuries sustained in a crash, continually flirts with his nurse. In bed one evening, shortly before he is due to be released, he reads a book and listens to a crooner on the radio. Then the music abruptly stops, and the clock shows an early morning time, even though a second before, it was only nine p.m. The curtain in the open window flutters. Hugh investigates, and there below he sees a hearse, whose liveried driver (Miles Malleson) looks up and says, “Just room for one inside, sir.” The patient shudders, goes back to bed. Was it a vision or a waking dream? The clock and the radio pick up where they left off before the interruption.
Shortly after, Hugh, fully recovered, is released from the hospital. He crosses the street to a bus stop. The liveried driver in the dream now wears a bus conductor’s uniform. When the driver says, “Just room for one inside, sir,” Hugh decides not to board the bus—and it’s a good thing, too, because he sees it crash and turn over, presumably killing all onboard. Hugh goes on to marry the nurse who treated him in the hospital.
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