DEAD OF NIGHT Movie Review
When a nervous architect arrives at a British country estate, he and the others present begin describing their recent nightmares, with shocking results. Four directors collaborated to create this five-part 1945 British horror classic, which unfolds seamlessly enough to be the work of a single, impressively twisted mind. Dead of Night is the grand-daddy of all multi-part horror films, though many who've seen it remember only the sequence starring Michael Redgrave as the frantic, paranoid ventriloquist who's certain that his dummy, Hugo, is out to kill him. There are two reasons our memories are fuzzy on the rest of the picture: one is that two stories were cut from the original American release prints (to pick up the picture's pace and to get one extra showing per day in at theatres). The second and most important reason is that the Redgrave sequence is quite simply one of the most perfectly terrifying and genuinely nightmarish little horror films ever made. I first encountered it on TV when I was five (don't ask why my parents allowed it) and when I next saw it—more than two decades later—it was exactly as I had remembered it, and just as scary. I had forgotten the other stories completely, but now that Dead of Night has been restored to its original, five-story 102 minutes, it's somehow even scarier; you can see the circular logic that has the true flavor of an inescapable night terror. And oh, that Hugo. The directors are Alberto Cavalcanti, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer, and Charles Crichton (The Lavender Hill Mob). The screenplay is by John Baines, Angus MacPhail, and T.E.B. Clarke, with an ominous, dissonant score by Jean Cocteau's favorite composer, Georges Auric (Orpheus).
NEXT STOP … The Night My Number Came Up, The Great Gabbo, Devil Doll (1964), The Glass Eye (TV episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents)
1945 102m/B GB Michael Redgrave, Mervyn Johns, Sally Ann Howes, Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne, Roland Culver, Googie Withers, Frederick Valk, Antony Baird, Judy Kelly, Miles Malleson, Ralph Michael, Mary Merrall, Renee Gadd, Michael Allan, Robert Wyndham, Esme Percy, Peggy Bryan, Hartley Power, Elizabeth Welch, Magda Kun, Carry Marsh; D: Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer; W: T.E.B. Clarke, John Baines, Angus MacPhail; C: Stanley Pavey, Douglas Slocombe; M: Georges Auric. VHS NO