Unfortunately Mr. Jones’ ghost can only be seen by true believers. If you are not a true believer bid with caution, for you may be unable to see him. I will not be giving refunds so bid with caution as this is something impossible to authenticate and verify. (Taken from the eBay item description for a glass jar purported to contain the ghost of golf legend Bobby Jones)
‘Golfing Story’ directed by Charles Crichton is universally considered to be the weakest of Dead of Night’s stories, to the point that its inclusion has been regarded as detrimental to the whole film. It’s quite clear from reading various critics’ discussions of Dead of Night that some, even the most ardent admirers of the film, would cheerfully drop it for the sake of consistency of tone and quality. This chapter, however, will fight its corner, asserting that not only is the sequence necessary in terms of pace and structure, but that it contains and explores, albeit in précis, many of the themes examined in the rest of the film. What it also does is set the stage for the final, chilling, sequence and the consequent nightmarish coda which ends the framing narrative. The love triangle at the heart of ‘Golfing Story’ establishes the notion ahead of the implied homosexual polyamory to be found in ‘Ventriloquist’s Dummy’ and in doing so it also echoes the implicit triangle in ‘Haunted Mirror’.
It’s a shaggy dog story to be sure, a bar room anecdote barely worth ascribing the title of urban myth. As a piece it sails awkwardly alone from the other tales told, adrift in its tone and intent. Unlike the preceding stories, Van Straaten feels no need to even dignify it with an explanation or rebuttal after its telling. That said, he might have something to say about how Eliot Foley uses it to manipulate Walter Craig into staying at the gathering, given his own failure to persuade Craig to stay at this point in the film. Craig acknowledges it for what it is: a successful attempt by his genial host to keep him in the farmhouse after he has expressed his intention to leave, to break the cycle of events before they have a chance to happen. Given the conclusion of the film this admission is particularly chilling; Craig decides to stay despite his own increasing certainty that the consequences of not leaving will be dire. In itself this is consistent with the theme of duty explored throughout the film; consideration of one’s host and his kindness was considered a definite virtue in a deferential era, and Craig’s lower social status established early on enforces this sense of obligation. As a result, Craig’s chance to break the cycle of terror is lost to little more than good manners.
The first and most obvious idea worth examining is whether or not the film really would be better and more effective without this sequence. It was excluded from the film’s initial release in the United States (along with ‘Christmas Party’) possibly for simple expedient reasons of running time, and there is no doubt that tonally it is out of sorts with the other tales contained in the film. By the time this story is recounted we have been subjected to mounting dread and a rising sense of incipient evil and ever more explicit violence. The story’s narrative lightening of tone before the horror of the final house-guest’s story and the merciless conclusion of a recurring nightmare allows us a pause, giving both tales which frame ‘Golfing Story’ time to breathe. To proceed directly from the actual and metaphorical strangulations of ‘Haunted Mirror’ straight into the macabre psychological implications of ‘Ventriloquist Dummy’, from one particularly admired and acclaimed story to another, would risk weakening each.
Of course it requires more than the assertion of a necessary change of pace in order to defend ‘Golfing Story’. It needs to be thematically compatible with the other tales, even if tonally awry, and more than just a breathing space if it is to deserve and reward our viewing attention. As discussed elsewhere in the book, there is a great deal of subtext in the film dealing with male sexual anxiety associated with the various threats arising from the War and how these placed constraints on British manhood. ‘Hearse Driver’ can be read as an examination of a deep fear of commitment and marriage as well as mortality; Hugh Grainger does not want to give up his life as a daredevil racing driver any more than Potter or Parratt want to give up the game of golf. Tacitly, they all know that some sacrifice is necessary for a marriage to work. Grainger is prepared to make this sacrifice in the face of his own mortality. Potter and Parratt evidently want it both ways (double entendre intended, as will be discussed later); their sacrifice, however, means less time spent on the golf course, literally playing the field. The themes of sexual jealousy and impotence, present in both ‘Ventriloquist’s Dummy’ and ‘Haunted Mirror’, are also addressed in ‘Golfing Story’. Potter and Parratt are certainly jealous creatures in their own boyish and bewildered ways and the loss of golf to one or other renders them functionally impotent; the separation from the phallic paraphernalia of golf clubs echoing the theme of castration anxiety hinted at in ‘Christmas Party’ and apparent in others.
None of this mining for thematic consistency is to deny that there are weaknesses in the story. There are narrative problems with the tale itself; the characters in the other tales at least attempt to remain rational and natural in their responses even if the events that unfold around them have supernatural or horrific elements. They react as we would expect, possibly even as we would do ourselves, whether through terror or denial. The characters in ‘Golfing Story’ do not behave in a way with which the audience can readily identify; they serve the function of delivering a punchline, much as the characters in a joke must often behave in an illogical or non-relatable way to serve the ends of the joke itself rather than any ends of their own. The story is told second- or even third-hand, being essentially an extended tall tale; the host Eliot Foley is present but peripheral in the story as he tells it, inserting himself into the narrative purely to aid the telling of the anecdote, which sets it apart from the other stories. It is not experienced first-hand by the narrator, nor is it recorded and retold as a result of investigation and therapeutic interrogation as in ‘Ventriloquist’s Dummy’. We are not seriously expected to believe that the events in ‘Golfing Story’ really happened, which paradoxically lends plausibility to the film’s other fantastical sequences.
Something the story does which the others do not is to serve as a cautionary tale or a morality play. Unlike the other stories, in which the protagonists are acted upon by external circumstance or are victim to unspeakable forces, the story here is one of how to act, one of how to be a ‘chap’ in the closed male world of the golf club and, by extension, how to be a man in a society hidebound by expectations based on gender roles. Sexual mores were changing, as were gender roles in a country affected by the war years. ‘Hearse Driver’, ‘Haunted Mirror’ and ‘Ventriloquist’s Dummy’ all explore notions of individual male responses to this. ‘Golfing Story’ by comparison takes a broader look at this notion of the companionable, dependable figure of the British Chap in the popular imagination. The creation and maintenance of this figure in the years surrounding Dead of Night owed a great deal to ‘Golfing Story’s two principle actors, Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne.
Radford and Wayne had been first paired together in The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock 1938), alongside Michael Redgrave, where they portray the characters Charters and Caldicott, a double act they went on to play in several subsequent films. They presented them as an archetype of the specifically English, rather than British, upper middle class male at large in the world: solid, self-deprecating and dependable. Ready to do their duty when called upon, they nonetheless came over as essentially comic creations, slightly bewildered by all things non-English and possessed of an assurance of the superiority of their view of the world and their place in it, an assurance which was not necessarily reflective of their innate insights or capabilities. Their main motivation in The Lady Vanishes is to attend a cricket match, a desire pursued with single-minded intent, though when the chips are down the chaps stand up for what is right. A chap might be a bit of a duffer, but he is essentially decent and ever keen to do what is expected of him without the mental burden of over-examining the situation and requiring no other motive than duty and loyalty to one’s friends and one’s country. Forever Little Englanders abroad or at home, existential self-examination is not their strong point.
‘We’ll play for her – tomorrow morning, eighteen holes.’
So by the time of Dead of Night’s production Radford and Wayne, both fine character actors in their own right, were an established screen double act. As Charters and Caldicott, or variations of them under different names, they had appeared together in five films by the time Dead of Night went into production, including Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat’s landmark propaganda film Millions Like Us from 1943. They would go on to appear together in six more films, perhaps most memorably in the quintessential Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico in 1949. Like Dead of Night’s other protagonists they have little back story beyond the brief outline of their love of golf and devotion to each other, but uniquely the characters were firmly cemented in the consciousness of British audiences of the day as familiar personas and comic embodiments of sterling British qualities. Naunton Wayne plays Larry Potter, the loser of the bet who walks into the lake, the quieter and more reflective of the pair. Basil Radford plays George Parratt, the more overbearing and blustering of the two; full of brio and bonhomie, it is nonetheless he who betrays the friendship with his act of cheating during the golf game to decide who wins the hand of Mary.
For all the comic baggage of the Radford and Wayne partnership there is a serious undercurrent to the story, one shared with other stories in the film, namely that of survivor guilt suffered by men who made it through the war unscathed, at least physically. The notion of fair play was central to British manhood at the time and this was tested as never before during the Second World War. British cinema had been largely co-opted into the wartime propaganda effort by the Ministry of Information and films made during the war were encouraged to emphasise the quiet sacrifice of doing one’s duty in the face of the Nazi peril. Parratt’s act of betrayal is more heinous in this light, and Potter’s calm acceptance of the outcome and of his fate all the more affecting. Many thousands of British men had played their part in the war and were never to return; they too accepted their fate and had acted in accordance with the obligations of duty. Potter’s slow walk into the lake and the poignant image of his hat floating on the surface of the water is a reminder of those gone but not forgotten in the public consciousness. Those who kept their lives and returned often felt that this survival was a betrayal of the sacrifice of their compatriots, that they too should have died and were unworthy of their continued existence.
Parratt’s guilt over his actions is given form and interlocution through his haunting by Potter, whose air is one of overall disappointment in his friend rather than anger or bitterness. This constant strain on his conscience symbolised by Potter’s ghostly presence threatens Parratt’s happiness with Mary; he is undeserving because he survived where his friend did not. At the end of the tale, when the strain becomes too much, he manages to swap places with the friend he betrayed, albeit inadvertently. As a result he is rid of the guilt which haunts him and the desire to allow a fallen comrade another chance at life and happiness is fulfilled. As acknowledged in an earlier chapter, this subtext of survivor guilt is picked up specifically through Hugh Grainger’s injured conscience in ‘Hearse Driver’, the survivor of a motor racing crash who believes initially that he may only be alive at the fatal expense of another driver. Both stories anticipate the theme’s extensive exploration in A Matter of Life and Death, where David Niven’s RAF pilot is the only survivor of a bombing mission which is lost returning from a raid. His story is one of survivor guilt manifested as a contest between Heaven’s claim on him as one whose time had come and the love he finds in his earthly existence after his survival.
There are also echoes in ‘Golfing Story’ of another, earlier, Powell and Pressburger film, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), in which a lifetime of friendship between the English stalwart Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey) and his honourable German opposite Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook) frames the events of two World Wars and the Boer War. This tale of two deeply noble opponents revolves around their pursuit of Edith (Deborah Kerr), who Candy loses to Theo during the Boer War, and explores notions of duty, sacrifice and the emotional and moral costs of war. It also dissects the changing role of women brought on by a world changed through successive wars. Deborah Kerr plays two further characters who appear later, chronologically, in the film; Candy’s wife Barbara and his wartime driver Angela. All three of Kerr’s characters take an active and assertive role in the tale and alter the trajectory for the two men, helping them to confront the moral codes and assumptions they embodied. The character of Mary in ‘Golfing Story’ is, in contrast, vanishingly underwritten. She serves no other function than to offer a prize to the competing friends and seems remarkably sanguine about the outcome being one that will suit her. Sanguine to the extent that she is clearly expected to be unperturbed by the switch at the story’s conclusion; a heartfelt off-screen scream at the reappearance of the deceased Potter would be quite understandable at the end of the tale, but we don’t get one. Of course, this is all of a piece with a bar room anecdote and we are never invited to take this particular tale at all seriously. What can be read into ‘Golfing Story’s ending is a male fear of disposability and the fate of relationships between men and women during war. We can be certain that many marriages never happened which would otherwise have done, had war not intervened in the lives of people either through death or long separation. In light of this the story has an added poignancy; people made the best they could of the ravages of war and moved on. Situations they did not choose due to world-changing events beyond their control were adapted to and accepted without complaint.
‘We can’t go on like this old man, she’s ruining my game.’
This acceptance is another example of the film’s interrogation of Britain’s wartime notion of duty and its consequences. Radford and Wayne portray a schoolboy notion of what this duty means, playing Potter and Parratt as not quite fully formed adults, bickering and competitive yet devoted to each other. It is a little surprising that a woman ever managed to come between them. In his essay on the film Leon Balter asserts that the relationship is a sublimated homosexual one. He quotes Freud’s idea that ‘shared heterosexual attraction between to the same woman is an expression of homosexual attachment between men – defensively disguised as heterosexuality’ (op. cit.: 771). As mentioned, ‘Golfing Story’ anticipates another theme of ‘Ventriloquist’s Dummy’: the central idea of a homosexual love triangle. However the attraction of the two men for each other in ‘Golfing Story’ seems less sexual than simply narcissistic; as Balter points out, they desire in each other what they see in themselves. They have no lust for anything that they do not already have, the greatest sacrifice that either can contemplate is to give up golf, and were it not for the intrusion of the prospect of marriage this is something they would never even consider. In this light, the golf clubhouse can be seen as the ultimate male retreat and one with a well-documented and inglorious history of exclusion on grounds of both race and particularly gender.
‘Golfing Story’ is loosely based on a short story by H. G. Wells. ‘The Inexperienced Ghost’, published in 1902, tells the story of a golf club member who encounters a ghost whilst staying overnight in the clubhouse. He recounts the story as a fireside tale to his fellow members and seems more concerned about the low social status of the ghost on first encountering the wretched soul, demanding to know if he is a member. He discovers the ghost can only leave by repeating a complex series of hand movements. In telling the story he proceeds to perform them himself and drops down dead. The very-much-alive George Parratt vanishes after performing similar gestures at the end of ‘Golfing Story’ – referred to as ‘passes’ in the script – though in the Wells short story the hand gestures are implied to be Masonic in origin, adding further bite to a critique of the closed-off rituals of a male-only space. The setting and the denouement survive from the Wells version, as does the sense of the exclusive male preserve of the golf club and the notion that a ghost preserves the innate character of the deceased, echoed in Parratt’s insistence that Potter should still remain a gentleman despite being dead, a sentiment that is a little rich considering Parratt’s less than gentlemanly behaviour.
In a wider cinematic context ‘Golfing Story’ belongs partly in a tradition of comedy horror, a sub-genre that David Pirie, in his touchstone study of British horror films, A New Heritage of Horror, is keen to distance from mainstream horror cinema. Pirie makes the case that most comic horror films belong in another tradition altogether, relying on pastiche of horror conventions and in many cases a high camp aesthetic that runs contrary to the aims of a genuine horror film. While this distinction has merit, many mainstream horror films consider comedy to be a valuable addition to their toolkit and often include lighter moments as a counterpoint or release from tension.
‘I’ve returned from my watery grave to haunt you.’
By the time of Dead of Night’s making the comedy horror tradition was already well established in Hollywood; The Old Dark House (James Whale 1932) was a camp comedy of manners adapted from J. B. Priestley’s 1927 novel Benighted. The Cat and the Canary (Elliot Nugent 1939) starred Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard in a more straightforwardly comic remake of an earlier 1927 silent version, itself a black comedy. In Britain, Will Hay starred in the Ealing-produced The Ghost of St Michael’s directed in 1941 by Marcel Varnel and written by Dead of Night’s Angus MacPhail; and from the same year, as mentioned earlier, the Walter Forde version of The Ghost Train was infused with more humour than previous screen versions courtesy of its stars Arthur Askey and ‘Stinker’ Murdoch.
‘Golfing Story’ only partly occupies this comic horror tradition, however, and does so more by virtue of its inclusion among and in comparison to the other tales in Dead of Night. Unlike other films firmly within the sub-genre the story does not even attempt to parody horror conventions. There is, however, another sub-genre of ghostly tales, which are more comedies of manners than scary movies, where ‘Golfing Story’ might fit more comfortably. An exemplar of this sub-genre would be Topper (Norman Z. McLeod 1937), adapted from a series of books by Thorne Smith and starring Cary Grant and Constance Bennett as a frivolous young couple who die in a car crash and return as ghosts. In an attempt to redeem themselves they try to improve the life of a dull, still living, friend (the eponymous Topper) whose antics entail escalating comic calamity before the happy conclusion.
David Lean filmed Noel Coward’s 1941 play Blithe Spirit in the same year as Dead of Night. It starred Rex Harrison and Constance Cummings, and tells the story of a novelist, Charles Condomine (Harrison), who invites a medium to the house he shares with his second wife, Ruth (Cummings), as research for his latest book. The medium inadvertently raises the ghost of his first wife, Elvira (Kay Hammond) during a séance, who proceeds to wreak havoc, killing Ruth in an attempt to reunite herself with Charles by tampering with his car. At the end of the film, Charles himself dies and joins his former wives in a ghostly ménage a trois.
The Topper films had a light-hearted and, for the time, risqué appeal, as did Blithe Spirit, with Coward’s sparkling dialogue never shying away from innuendo. For some reason it would seem that ghostly characters in the days of the Hays Code could sneak a little more past the censor and national sense of propriety than their living counterparts in other films. While the sexual allusions in ‘Golfing Story’ could hardly be described as anything other than mild, the once again corporeally present Potter’s final question to himself – ‘Do I make passes…or do I make passes?’ – before entering the marital bedroom unchallenged by the now-disappeared Parratt clearly signals his intent.
After Foley’s tall tale his mother is mildly scandalised that her son should repeat the story in company – ‘Really, Eliot, that story is totally incredible and decidedly improper!’ – and the ending of the piece with the interchangeable sex partners on a wedding night is unlikely to have escaped the censor’s pen in a more straightforward tale. Mary is much more keen than Parratt to retire to bed and consummate the marriage; Parratt’s reluctance is as much informed by his awareness of the ever-nearby ghost of Potter, but even without this he seems to exude a schoolboy nervousness and lack of worldliness regarding what comes next. On his return to the earthly realm, in contrast, Potter seems to have a much more enthusiastic anticipation of the pleasures of the flesh and eagerly makes his way to whatever necrophiliac delights await him and Mary, who he clearly expects to be unsurprised by his resurrection.
If ‘Golfing Story’ can stake a claim to any lasting influence it is arguably on the nominally more serious Amicus anthologies that Dead of Night so famously influenced. The Amicus films had a knowing, slightly camp comic feel to them and took from it the idea of deserving punishment for acts of venality, often serving as mini morality plays even if the punishment meted out was horrifically disproportionate to the offence. Despite this observation and this chapter’s overall defence of Charles Crichton’s contribution to the film it is still hard to deny that ‘Golfing Story’ is quantifiably, pound for pound, the least effective of the five nested stories in Dead of Night.
When viewed in isolation the truth is that it does not even succeed particularly as a work of comic horror. The film as a whole might have been better served with a more vicious and bitter edge to the comedy, the kind of cutting humour found in later Ealing comedies such as Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets or The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick 1955). However, as well as providing a necessary cleansing of our nervous palates between two richly frightening courses, it does make a significant contribution to the film’s examination of the crisis of British masculinity in the wartime and immediate post-war period. The themes of survivor guilt and male fear of disposability are touched on, alongside the echoing of themes more fully addressed elsewhere in the film. In particular the love triangle, the sexual jealousy and even the alliterative names of the protagonists find their full and more terrifying manifestation in the next and final story concerning the ventriloquist Maxwell Frere and his dummy Hugo Fitch.
