‘Everybody dreams, Cobb. Architects are supposed to make those dreams real.’ (Stephen Miles [Michael Caine] to his dream space architect protégé Dom Cobb [Leonardo DiCaprio] in Inception, Christopher Nolan 2010)
‘Linking Narrative’, directed by Basil Dearden, is considered to be loosely based on a 1912 short story by E.F. Benson entitled ‘The Room in the Tower’. While the source story’s repeating dream motif defined the film’s framing mechanism, its theme of vampirism failed to make it onto the screen, although it might just explain the presence of a looming, fang-baring vampire bat in Dead of Night’s most well-known poster artwork painted by Leslie Hurry, a monster that is entirely absent in the film.3 Nevertheless, the link story that charts Walter Craig’s tortuous passage through Pilgrim’s Farm, the scene of his perpetual progressions from the bewildered architect invited down for a weekend in the country to the cold-blooded killer seeking refuge in the maddening spiral of the other house guests’ stories, presents a monstrous circumstance that, gradually and horrifyingly, is altogether more frightening than any manifestation of a monster could ever be. Peter Hutchings, when assessing Dead of Night in his book Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film regards it as ‘a horror film without a recognisable monster, or rather a film where the monster turns out to be the film itself’ (Hutchings 1993: 36).
Dearden’s connective sequences are the firm foundation for the film’s deserved reputation, and the seamless ellipse that they constitute has earned Dead of Night a unique place in cinema history. As a result of an evening spent enjoying the film at one of their local cinemas in Cambridge, the leading cosmologists Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold were inspired to formalise their ideas which would lead to the publication in 1948 of their proposal of the Steady State Theory, that now-discarded pre-Big Bang model that attempted to explain the origins of the Universe. ‘My God! It’s a cosmology. Maybe there’s something in this cyclical cosmology’, wrote Hoyle in his diary after seeing the film, and so was born a theory explaining life, the Universe and everything all based on a horror film about one man’s never-ending nightmare.4
When approaching ‘Linking Narrative’ it is interesting to reflect on the relevance of the house at Pilgrim’s Farm with regard to the structure of the whole film, and also the importance of establishing the pivotal character Walter Craig as an architect from the outset. Dead of Night is a film that is shaped and defined by its points of entry and departure and by the many thresholds in between. For a film that is all about the relative illogic and seemingly unpredictable convolutions of dreams it is an immaculately and meticulously conceived structure, characterised by the passage between and through the succession of story ‘chambers’ constructed by its four different directors. The individual sections planned and built by Cavalcanti, Crichton, Dearden and Hamer were buttressed and cemented together by Dearden’s link story which, unlike the equivalent framing devices found in the overwhelming majority of the film’s many imitators, is equal if not superior in quality to the stories that it surrounds.
‘Linking Narrative’ succeeds in propelling the viewer through the experience of watching Dead of Night by providing passageways that steadily enrich our understanding of Walter Craig’s predicament. By the ‘end’ of his story we will be faced with a dilemma ourselves; is Craig an unwitting hostage to fate and thereby driven to commit a murderous act by forces supernatural, or is the act premeditated and his elaborate déjà vu narrative unreliable? Each iteration of the framing device gradually develops his story further and in doing so draws us deeper into the fabric of the film. At some point during each of the five separate tales that the link story envelops we bear witness to a crossing point between realms; in ‘Hearse Driver’ it is the daylight vista beyond Hugh Grainger’s hospital bedroom window, in ‘Christmas Party’ it is the upper reaches of the country house that Sally O’Hara ascends through in order to arrive at Francis Kent’s attic bedroom, in ‘Haunted Mirror’ it is the other room that Peter Cortland can see when he looks into the mirror, in ‘Golfing Story’ it is the lake that Larry Potter walks into when committing suicide and in ‘Ventriloquist’s Dummy’ it is the backstage route that Sylvester Kee takes in order to discuss business with Maxwell Frere. In each case they/we pass through into, or at very least catch a glimpse of, a different reality that harbours some supernatural manifestation.
These repeated on-screen instances of looking through or passing through apertures of demarcation between worlds are more than mere plot devices, they serve to explicitly immerse the viewer in much the same way that Craig’s link story implicitly carries us through. In a sense the most significant threshold through which viewers of Dead of Night pass is that of the edges of the picture they are watching. One of the film’s finest attributes is its ability to immerse the viewer in its succession of episodes and in so doing blur the perimeter between their immediate surroundings and the environment of the scenes that they are watching. If one were looking to identify an early reason for the film’s successful efforts to frighten its audience, this highly effective and sustained ‘lean-forward moment’ immersion beyond the fringes of the film image would be it.
The creation of film set interiors in the 1940s was heavily influenced by the work of the art director Perry Ferguson who, in tandem with cinematographer Gregg Toland, realised the deeply suggestive sets demanded by Orson Welles for Citizen Kane. The inclusion of many room ceilings in Kane, frequently captured in frame from a low camera perspective, added a dimensionality to the film rarely seen in earlier cinema and kick-started a near-craze among other film-makers of the forties. Rapidly on-screen ceilings were legion and by the time of Dead of Night’s making Ealing’s output was certainly reflecting this. ‘Linking Narrative’ director Basil Dearden began his working relationship with Dead of Night’s art director Michael Relph in 1943 on the film The Bells Go Down which would prove to be the beginning of a collaboration that lasted thirty years. Relph began his career a decade earlier at the age of 17 as assistant art director to Alfred Junge at Gaumont British, then headed by Michael Balcon. Junge developed his expressionist approach to art direction during his time at Berlin’s UFA Studios in the 1920s. This together with his involvement in theatre production design rubbed off on the young Relph, who would himself gain experience in theatre design in the 1930s, a skill which benefited his later collaborations with Dearden. The interiors designed by Relph for the Dearden-directed The Halfway House, featuring carefully lit and shot low timbered ceilings, displayed the designer’s skill at creating spaces capable of instilling confined unease, a quality that was ramped up ten fold for his work on Dead of Night.
The sets that feature, particularly the increasingly claustrophobic interior of Pilgrim’s Farm, are hugely important to the aesthetic success of the film, and much of this is captured beautifully in Relph’s set design drawings, a number of which are reproduced in this book. Much of the mise-en-scène, the sets certainly but also the apparatus of fear from the hearse to the mirror to the dummy, are consistent with the concept of the Uncanny. Freud, in his renowned 1919 essay on the subject, defined the Uncanny as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’ (Freud 2003: 340). The German term ‘unheimlich’, coined originally by the psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 essay ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’, translates literally as ‘unhomely’, an implied association with domestic place that Anthony Vidler picked up on in his 1992 book The Architectural Uncanny: essays in the modern unhomely:
As a concept the Uncanny has, not unnaturally, found its metaphorical home in architecture: first in the house, haunted or not, that pretends to afford the utmost security while opening itself to the secret intrusion of terror, and then in the city, where what was once walled and intimate…has been rendered strange by the spatial incursions of modernity. In both cases of course the uncanny is not a property of the space itself nor can it be provoked by any particular spatial conformation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension, a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming. (Vidler 1992: 11)
In the early decades of cinema’s rise as a creative medium cultural critics were quick to spot the parallels between film and architecture. Walter Benjamin’s highly influential 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ considered the commonalities of aesthetic response between the two; he regarded the dynamism of the moving image, in developing the mass audience as ‘distracted examiners’, as analogous to the tactile nature of the built environment. Film theorist Peter Wollen attempted to draw out Benjamin’s comparison in one of the chapters of his book Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film:
What [Benjamin] wanted to argue was that cinema and architecture both required a kind of kinaesthetic habit formation, the acquisition of a habitual mode of moving through space in order to understand and inhabit it unconsciously. Watching a film, Benjamin believed, was much like moving through a building or a built environment. It required a sense of direction, an attentiveness to signs, an awareness of the purposes for which a place was intended and how it could be most efficiently used. In this sense, architecture and cinema both provide sets of places and spaces which the user must learn how to travel through. (Wollen 2002: 200-201)
The award-winning French architect Jean Nouvel, among other luminaries in his field, has acknowledged the significance of cinema in the formation of his approach to architecture. In an interview quoted in Kester Rattenbury’s essay ‘Echo and Narcissus’ published in a special issue of the journal A.D., Architectural Design, Nouvel said:
Architecture exists, like cinema, in the dimension of time and movement. One conceives and reads a building in terms of sequences. To erect a building is to predict and seek effects of contrast and linkage through which one passes…In the continuous shot/sequence that a building is, the architect works with cuts and edits, framings and openings…I like to work with a depth of field, reading space in terms of its thickness, hence the superimposition of different screens, planes legible from obligatory joints of passage which are to be found in all my buildings…(Rattenbury 1994: 35)
It’s not unusual to find film-makers with a past in architecture; Fritz Lang for example, whose father was an architect and construction company manager, studied civil engineering in Vienna before embarking on his directing career after the First World War, a background that can be seen clearly in his 1927 silent masterpiece, Metropolis. After an abortive stab at law, Dead of Night’s Cavalcanti chose to study architecture in Switzerland, a career path which led him to work in Paris at the age of 18. The move would eventually result in his association with the French avant garde film movement.
Craig’s first sight of Pilgrim’s Farm from the driver’s seat of his car suggests that he is approaching a substantial but fairly unremarkable dwelling.5 Despite its apparent age the external impression of the building hardly conforms to the Gothic convention of the ‘haunted house’. On the face of it the farmhouse is a perfectly non-threatening rural smallholding set neatly in the gentle folds of the South East English countryside. As witnessed by Craig on that bright, sunlit day – we can assume it’s wintertime from the visibly bare branches of the trees and Craig’s choice of overcoat – there is no obvious reason why he should find the sight of it so puzzlingly full of foreboding. And yet there is enough in Craig’s bewildered reaction to its tranquil normality and pleasant, welcoming aspect to indicate that all is not what it seems. We see only a small number of spaces within the walls of Pilgrim’s Farm; scenes are set almost exclusively in the drawing room, with brief glimpses of the hallway and small anteroom where the prescient Craig knows to hang his hat and coat, and fleeting shots up or from the staircase leading to an upper level of the house that we never see.
‘Linking Narrative’: Pilgrim’s Farm interior, scene of Walter Craig’s unfolding déjà vu
‘Hearse Driver’: Doctor Albury’s office at the nursing home
‘Haunted Mirror’: Mr. Rutherford’s antique shop where Joan Cortland purchases the mirror
‘Haunted Mirror’: interior of Peter Cortland’s bedroom with mirror visible to right
‘Golfing Story’: the golf club bar where the deceased Potter first appears to Parratt
‘Ventriloquist’s Dummy’: Maxwell Frere’s hotel room
‘Ventriloquist’s Dummy’: prison corridor with Frere’s cell door to left
Prison interview room where Dr. Van Straaten first meets Frere
The character of Walter Craig could not be described at the archetypal, perhaps stereotypical, on-screen architect. Although they have appeared reasonably regularly as protagonists, the form and function of architects in films has tended to adhere rigidly to a fairly unadventurous blueprint. Characters have frequently been bestowed with the occupation as a quick means of establishing them as creative yet reliable, establishment figures with the required amount of maverick temperament to propel them through the narrative. The lone visionary that was Howard Roark, played by Gary Cooper and modelled heavily on Frank Lloyd Wright in King Vidor’s 1949 screen version of the Ayn Rand novel The Fountainhead, would likely rank as the most prominent example. Roark had a dream, but unlike Walter Craig’s nightmare of horror, his vision is a reflection of The American Dream. He is the perfect embodiment of the Hero Architect, an idealised and rather anachronistic role recalling history’s ‘master builders’ which, in terms of the modern architect, was defined and disputed by the architectural historian Spiro Kostof as ‘the romantic hero struggling against the unheeding forces of philistine society to fulfil his unique and prophetic destiny’ (Kostof 1977: 331). Roark and Craig may both deal in destiny but there the similarity ends. Roark is as squarely perpendicular and unbending as his modernist constructions. Craig by comparison has an age-worn, almost gnomish aspect in keeping with the eighteenth-century farmhouse he has been hired to work on.
‘We’ve got several other guests so I’ve put you in the barn’ announces Eliot Foley as he brings Craig into the farmhouse. It’s a domestic arrangement with an under-taste of class or cultural division, not one based on his status as an architect – moments later Foley acknowledges Craig’s ‘trained professional eye’ – but more likely associated with Craig’s ethnic origins. English literature and culture, including cinema, has a long and sorry history of painting the Welsh as a race of stereotypically superstitious, rusticated, peculiar, mystical individuals, defined by a dark archaism and a not altogether healthy supernatural sensitivity. While not quite fully into the realms of ‘Noble Savage’ or ‘Magical Negro’ – if anything those two antiquated and decidedly suspect cultural concepts carry a weak positive charge by comparison – Welsh characters supplied a reliable ‘other’ to the English orthodoxy. Walter Craig is a comparatively nuanced creation; it’s crucial that we warm to his plight from the beginning in order for us to be successfully carried through the film’s cloistered structure and extra-chilled when the final act of his repeating nightmare plays out.
Despite its evident inspirational role in the advancing of a once popular theory explaining the origins and working of the Cosmos, the film itself is defined more by its concern with time rather than space. Thematically and tonally, and not a little sociologically, the premise of ‘Linking Narrative’ at least is reminiscent of J.B. Priestley’s ‘Time Plays’, a series of theatrical works written by the playwright between the early 1930s and the mid-1940s that are linked by their exploration of different temporal phenomena. The first of these, Dangerous Corner (1932), concerns a party at a country house during which a chance remark triggers a series of revelations. This disclosure of the various characters’ dark secrets is erased when the play ends by returning to its opening scene, identical save for the chance remark which this time goes unsaid, resulting in the ‘dangerous corner’ being avoided. The more celebrated Time and the Conways (1937), in its telling of the fate of a family in the two decades after the First World War, has a similar rerun of its beginning at its end. Another of the plays, I Have Been Here Before (1937), as the title suggests, deals with the implications of déjà vu.
The preoccupation with gatherings in remote, rural settings – inns, hotels and country houses abound – mixed with the temporal loops and resets suggests Priestley’s plays from this period were a significant influence on Dead of Night. Their legacy was perhaps even more apparent when one considers Ealing’s earlier foray into the supernatural, The Halfway House; Dearden’s film was a precursor to Dead of Night in terms of theme, tone and both technical and acting personnel, but its Welsh country inn setting and narrative step back in time liken it greatly to the playwright’s work from this period. Priestley may not have worked directly on Dead of Night but the high regard in which he was held at the time together with his existing ties with Ealing can only have made him a major influence on the film. Michael Balcon had produced the film version of Priestley’s first novel The Good Companions for Gaumont British Pictures in 1933, and director Dearden would collaborate with Priestley on the Ealing screen adaptation of the playwright’s They Came to a City in 1944, in which Priestley himself had a small on-screen part. That film, predating Dead of Night by little more than twelve months, displayed Priestley’s idealistic utopian polemic, which is the ingredient that separates his work from Dead of Night. Its optimism was a world away from the dark post-war recesses of national uncertainty that characterise the Ealing film.
This uncertainty is a theme that will be picked up later in relation to the house guests’ stories, but as applied to ‘Linking Narrative’ we might consider Craig, an architect at the brink of a period of national reconstruction, and recognise his deep personal uncertainty and palpable fear of the near future as a reflection of the nation doubting its ability to rebuild. Depicting a coalescence of family and community for the national good was the underlying aim of many wartime films, and Craig’s arrival at Pilgrim’s Farm seems to suggest that a further illustration of a ‘hearth and home’ gathering of individuals will play out. But Craig’s furrowed bewilderment upon first catching sight of the building should signal to us that we are not about to observe a patriotic convergence. As Peter Hutchings asserts, the gathering at the farmhouse ‘seems to function as a community in the process of disintegration, caught up as its members are in essentially private fears and memories’ (Hutchings 1993: 29).
What we actually observe in ‘Linking Narrative’ is a fabricated ‘family’ gathering that begins in the hope of daylight but gradually descends into a darkening, fragmentary state with fear as the only binding force. As night falls and the fate that Craig has been predicting and awaiting becomes a reality the surface tension that has held the party together in the drawing room is ruptured leading to disintegration. In the nightmare whirl that follows the room that has contained the film’s protagonists effectively falls away, as though the integrity of the bricks and mortar of Pilgrim’s Farm has been compromised. As the house guests’ stories collapse around Craig, so do the four walls, floor and ceiling that have contained him.
Despite his attempts to hide within the spaces of the others’ stories, Craig’s murderous act leads to a mob-driven imprisonment within a cell and a swift ‘execution’, but he has been trapped within his dream the whole time, and the drawing room of Pilgrim’s Farm has served as his place of confinement practically from the outset. Many shots are suggestive of prison bars, from the white picket fence outside Pilgrim’s Farm to the shadow cast by the spindles of the chair Craig sits in to the single shot through the balusters of the staircase banister. The book cases, leaded windows and exposed beams of the drawing room only increase the sense of incarceration. Craig attempts an escape of sorts in the aftermath of the ‘Haunted Mirror’ story, but his companions (captors?) manage to keep him within the holding cell that is the farmhouse. Even when the dream breaks, as the final cell into which he has been thrown dwindles to a small aperture in the centre of the screen, we see Craig back in his bed at home wearing striped pyjamas reminiscent of a prisoner’s uniform, intimating that Craig’s apparent waking is still no escape.
The many rooms and spaces seen in the stories that ‘Linking Narrative’ encapsulates are intended as temporary chambers of respite; their contents aren’t exactly delivered in the hope of alleviating Craig’s fears, if anything they reinforce them, but they do at least distract him from his immediate dread. Ultimately, though, they serve to keep him rooted in the environment of his dream and thereby help to ensure his fateful predictions come to pass. Ironically Craig’s best hope of being sprung from the trap is Dr. Van Straaten and his efforts to explain the various supernatural events that are related. One almost feels that if his reason were to win the battle of wits the circle of madness and murder might be broken. We actually see Van Straaten in the role of attempted liberator during his own story, when he calls for a jailer to open Maxwell Frere’s cell door in order to intervene in the ventriloquist’s attack on his own dummy. In the final part of ‘Linking Narrative’ Van Straaten accepts Craig’s dream, and in that moment he seals his own fate.
Director Dearden and his crew deserve credit for keeping the link scenes engrossing, no mean task considering how dispersed the Pilgrim’s Farm sections are throughout the film. They also succeed in delivering a dizzying pay-off that concertinas the previous 100 minutes of the film into just three minutes, presenting an end-piece that contains striking resolutions to some of the featured stories, skewed by the murderer Craig’s hectic attempt to evade punishment for his crime. When he loosens his neck tie in order to strangle Van Straaten his grip on sanity also loosens, and his panicked efforts to hide illustrate perfectly the fully insane state that he now inhabits.
That final section of the nightmare contains some of the film’s most inventive camerawork and lighting. After a short debate following the telling of Van Straaten’s ventriloquist’s dummy tale the doctor drops and breaks his spectacles when reaching for a drink. The moment coincides with the farm’s power plant expiring, plunging the drawing room into semi-darkness, the flames of the open fire providing the only illumination. ‘Blimey, George is dying on us’ exclaims Foley, ‘George’ being the name bestowed on the generator. The breaking of the spectacles, the lights going out and the ‘death of a man I’ve never heard of’ (‘George’) were events that Craig predicted over an hour earlier during the link sequence between ‘Hearse Driver’ and ‘Christmas Party’, marking the moment when his dream would become a nightmare.
‘It’s started’ mutters Craig, and he insists on being left alone with Van Straaten. His embrace of the dark madness of his fate begins with a slow, low reverse tracking shot in which initially Craig seems to break the fourth wall by looking at the camera/us when rising from his chair. As the camera retreats, however, and the seated back view of Van Straaten enters the frame we see Craig slowly wheel round behind the seated psychiatrist, remove his neck tie and commit the strangulation that his repeating dream has been building up to. Two brief shots follow, one showing Craig’s face pulled into a saucer-eyed mask and under-lit by the flames of the open fire, the other his point of view of Van Straaten in the final seconds of his life, the doctor’s face upside down and creased with the violent struggle of his final breaths.
Craig’s view of the dying Van Straaten is a fleeting nod to the numerous other point-of-view shots that can be found elsewhere in the film; we have a quick one early on, showing Craig’s view of the outside of Pilgrim’s Farm from the driving seat of his car. A simple, classic establishing shot of course, but it’s a moment of first-person perspective that helps to cement Craig as ‘our’ set of eyes and lead us to take his side in the ensuing logic-versus-superstition battle of wits – we want to believe his eyes, which makes his/our point-of-view at the moment of murder all the more chilling. Several times during the encapsulated stories we are encouraged to see through the eyes of a character and believe what they are seeing; consider Hugh Grainger’s view outside of his bedroom window in ‘Hearse Driver’, Sally O’Hara’s glance around the country house attic room in ‘Christmas Party’, Peter Cortland’s glimpse of the other room in ‘Haunted Mirror’ and Sylvester Kee’s spinning, consciousness-loss point of view when he is shot and wounded by Maxwell Frere in ‘Ventriloquist’s Dummy’. There is a final Craig point-of-view shot, a revolving pan when he is surrounded by the cackling mob of guests at Chez Beulah just before they carry him aloft to meet his ultimate fate.
Craig the architect’s ‘trained professional eye’ is able to detect from the very first moments that the world of his dream is decidedly out of true, and when the dream becomes a nightmare and Craig attempts to escape into the world of the house guests’ stories, the built environment dissolves into a helter-skelter of spatial impossibilities within which the other inhabitants are determined to find and punish Craig the murderer. He pops up first in the Christmas Party country house mid-way through a game of hide-and-seek at the foot of the staircase. ‘Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop!’ chant the children, the last line from the popular singing game ‘Oranges and Lemons’, a rhyme that recalls the fate of Newgate Prison’s death row prisoners and the tolling of the church bells associated with executions. The final decapitation actions of the game are traditionally preceded by the lines ‘Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!’. Exaggerated Dutch angles sloping down severely right to left are used to show the now distorted spaces within the country house, suggesting that Craig has a steep uphill task if he is to escape successfully and that in all probability he will slip back into the clutches of his pursuers.6 To draw a line along the near 45 degrees of those Dutch angle gradients would be to define a ‘bend sinister’ forward-slash division, a tilted split-line of demarcation that is hinted at subtly at other points in the film. It is there in the shot through the diagonal of the banister at Pilgrim’s Farm. Look also at the two shots of Grainger’s bedside clock in ‘Hearse Driver’; the hands of the clock at a quarter to ten are reflected as a quarter past four if we think of one as a slanting mirror image of the other. When Peter Cortland unwraps his haunted mirror present he props it on a sofa which gives us a reflected view of Peter and Joan at a similar skewed angle. The pattern on Peter’s tie is a diagonal stripe, downwards right to left, from which even in reflection there is no escape; a continuity error (we have to suppose) missed when creating the effect of seeing Peter reflected meant that his mirror-image is the same as our non-reflected view of Peter – the stripes on his tie aren’t reversed and also fall right to left.
Craig makes for the upper reaches of the house but halfway up the stairs he breaks off into a room where, in the scramble of story elements, he finds Peter Cortland standing in front of his mirror. The Dutch angle abates temporarily, to be replaced by a visual shimmer, giving the impression that Craig has crossed over and is standing next to Cortland in the strange fluid of ‘the other room’. Cortland appears to be dressed in nineteenth-century attire and has a demeanour that implies he has been consumed by the spirit of Francis Etherington. ‘Something gone wrong with your plans?’ asks Cortland/Etherington, one murderer to another. The liquid shimmer clears and a rapid camera pass ‘through’ the mirror comes to rest on the fresh and inescapable corpse of Dr. Van Straaten. We cut back to the Dutch angles of the country house environment and the final stages of the children’s hide-and-seek count. Sally races upstairs, only to be stopped part-way by Craig who pulls her further up the stairs and into the room that Jimmy Watson led her into during ‘Christmas Party’. ‘Here he is, up in the lumber room!’7 cries Sally, only to be knocked unconscious by Craig – he predicted he would hit her ‘savagely, viciously’ earlier during the link sequence after Sally’s story. In the blink of an eye Craig is transported to the audience tables at the Chez Beulah night club and finds himself sitting across from Sylvester Kee and Hugo the dummy. ‘My, my, Hugo, we’ve never played to a murderer before, have we?’ asks Kee, prompting Craig to dart for the centre of the dance floor where he is picked out by a spotlight and quickly surrounded by the members of the night club audience. A series of quick cuts sees Craig lifted off his feet by the audience and carried stage left to the incongruity of a prison cell, not unlike the cell where Frere ‘asphyxiated’ and mashed Hugo to a pulp in Van Straaten’s story. The cell is tended by an all-too-familiar jailer, the hearse driver/bus conductor from Grainger’s story who, with a grin and a wink, declares ‘just room for one more inside, sir!’ Upon being unceremoniously thrown into the cell, Craig meets his end at the hands of a fully reconstituted and independently articulated Hugo, the ‘one more inside’, and with an exaggerated reverse tracking shot his nightmare of horror shrinks before our eyes.
‘One thing is very vivid and very horrible – I hit Sally savagely, viciously.’
The dream is over and the architectural certainties of Craig’s/our world are restored. Those final cell walls have been replaced by the reassuring four walls of Craig’s bedroom back in his London home. The reassertion of normality is cemented by the sight of the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral through the bedroom window. The continuity of the dome had inspired the nation during the Blitz in the dying days of 1940, and on VE Day, the 8th of May 1945, during the making of Dead of Night, 30,000 people had flocked to the cathedral to give thanks for the end of hostilities in Europe. Perhaps the perpetual loop of the dome’s circumference had infiltrated and inspired Craig’s dream, the dream that finds no end. The bedside telephone rings, Eliot Foley requests the pleasure of Craig’s company at Pilgrim’s Farm for the weekend and off we and Craig go again.
The very short scene in Craig’s bedroom, before the return to the start of the dream/film and the repeat shots of Craig’s arrival at Pilgrim’s Farm, is worthy of a little scrutiny, not least because, depending on your interpretation of the scene, it represents the only moment of ’reality’ in the entire film. Within just ninety seconds it manages to contain several components of the dream that has just been dreamt and is about to be dreamt again. It is slightly reminiscent of the brief scene at the end of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming 1939), when Dorothy wakes surrounded by the real people upon whom she based the elaborated characters that she met during her Oz dreamtime. Take, for example, the shot of Craig’s wife, played by Renee Gadd, sitting on his bed; it is close to a mirror image of Sally sitting singing her lullaby next to Francis Kent’s bed in ‘Christmas Party’. When his wife opens the bedroom curtains it is a remarkably similar moment to Joyce the nurse’s actions at the curtains and window of Hugh Grainger’s hospital room in ‘Hearse Driver’. Both windows have very similar radiators below them and the turban-style manner in which Craig’s wife’s wears her headscarf is an echo of Joyce’s nurse’s cap. Eliot Foley’s disembodied and deliberate spelling of his surname – ‘F-O-L-E-Y’ – over the telephone looks and sounds a little like the stock-in ventriloquial trick of reciting the alphabet while drinking a glass of water. When Craig rises from his bed you’ll even find an antique mirror hanging on the bedroom wall behind him.
Once risen, Craig elects to toss a coin in order to decide whether or not he should accept the Pilgrim’s Farm reconstruction job and spend a weekend in the country. ‘Heads, I go’ – the decision is taken. We may wish to ponder that, if Craig’s bedroom scene is truly a moment of awakened reality, perhaps one time, maybe next time, the coin will come down tails, the journey to Pilgrim’s Farm will not take place and the dream will finally be broken. If on the other hand we choose to regard Craig’s apparent waking as false and therefore still a part of his continuing unending dream, we must expect the coin to come down heads every time. Whichever it is, we are seconds away from witnessing the lap dissolve that signals the point at which Craig’s seemingly perpetual circuit begins again. After calling heads and deciding to spend a weekend in the country he lights a cigarette; It’ll help you get rid of those horrible nightmares’ says his wife of the invitation, and behind the curls of cigarette smoke Craig’s face displays the first signs of unease that we will see once more when he pulls up outside Pilgrim’s Farm. The smoking shot is slowed optically and is a little blurred thanks to the dissolve compositing process. Just to accentuate the point at which the end and the beginning of Craig’s dream are spliced together the peal of the twelve bells of St. Paul’s strikes up and blends into a concluding musical flourish accompanying the end credits laid over the repeating Pilgrim’s Farm approach footage. The auditory bridge of that ‘Oranges and Lemons’ knell from St. Paul’s is the cue for Craig the unreliable architect to reacquaint himself with the tour around his personal dream rotunda, an imprisoning structure that he has designed and built, within which exits and entrances are interchangeable and escape forever hinges on the toss of a coin.
