Dead of Night

1. These four BBC screenings of Dead of Night were responsible for our own first contact with the film. For the record, and in the interests of jogging any readers’ memories as to when they might have first seen it, the station broadcast the film on Tuesday 19^th April 1977, Saturday 16^th February 1985, Sunday 27^th December 1987 and Sunday 10^th June 1990.

2. Despite the pressure from government and censor to avoid the production of horrifying material during the war years it was quite common practice at the time for studios to submit scenarios for potential films of a disturbing nature to the British Board of Film Censors for assessment. In the months before Dead of Night, Ealing submitted a number of ideas for future films that, thanks to the negative reception from the BBFC, failed to see the light of day. These included The Anatomist, a tale about a surgeon associate of Burke and Hare, Uncle Harry, concerning a poisoner, and The Interloper, an Angus MacPhail-penned adaptation of the 1927 Francis Beeding novel The House of Dr Edwardes, which in diluted form would later become Hitchcock’s Spellbound. If the censor’s decisions had been different Dead of Night may not now be regarded as quite such a singular work of the macabre from the period.

3. The Head of Ealing’s art department, S. John Woods, hired the services of several leading British artists to produce images for the studio’s posters. Lesley Hurry’s memorable Dead of Night artwork was equalled in excellence by illustrations for other Ealing releases from the likes of Edward Bawden, John Piper, Edward Ardizzone and James Boswell. Needless to say any remaining original Ealing film quad posters routinely fetch high prices when they come up for auction.

4. Further evidence to back up this most frequently quoted piece of Dead of Night lore amounts to a letter that Fred Hoyle wrote to Sir Harold Spencer-Jones, most likely in the summer of 1952, from which this extract is taken:

5. For completists everywhere, here are the details from the English Heritage listed building record for the grade II listed Buckinghamshire farm house that played Pilgrim’s Farm in the film. Let us quietly ponder on the additional changes that Walter Craig would have affected if he ever got round to working on the building:

House. Late C17, altered. Rendered and colourwashed, the upper storey with planked timbering, the ground floor with thick walls of concealed flint and brick. Old tile roof, rebuilt brick chimney between right bays. 2 storeys and attic, 3 bays. C20 3-light leaded casements, matching French doors in centre bay, C19 gabled porch with blocked entry between right bays. C20 lean-to to left. Attic casements in gables and rear dormers. Rear has tall gabled staircase projection to centre, and later outshots to flanking bays, the left raised. Lower C19 colourwashed brick wing attached to N. E. corner. Interior has timber framing with long curving braces to first floor, arranged in 5 bays with narrow central bay. Stop-chamfered cross beams; some timbers re-used. Winder staircase.

6. The ‘Dutch’ in ‘Dutch Angle’ is a corruption of ‘Deutsche’, which reflects its extensive use in German Expressionist cinema. The tilt shot is inescapable throughout The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. It was used brilliantly in The Third Man (Carol Reed 1949), cheesily in the 1960s Batman television series and excessively by directors such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam and Sam Raimi.

7. ‘The ‘lumber room’, the phrase that Sally uses to describe the attic space in which she first evades the advances of Jimmy Watson in ‘Christmas Party’ and then succumbs to a sucker punch from Walter Craig in the final part of ‘Linking Narrative’, was also the title of a popular short story written by Saki (Hector Hugh Munro). Given that story’s use of the room of its title as a liminal space through which the writer propelled his adolescent characters, it seems likely that it was an influence on film’s makers.

8. ‘The Hullalooba’ constitutes Dead of Night’s ‘requisite song-and-dance number’, not that it occupies a whole lot of screen time, which is interrupted at that with cuts back to the dressing room scene between Frere and Kee. But it’s worth noting that the song was written by Anna Marly. Born into Russian aristocracy at the time of the October 1917 revolution, Marly spent her early life in France before moving to Britain to escape the German occupation. She was a leading supporter of the Free French movement and famously penned the resistance anthem ‘Chant des Partisans’. Marly was named a Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur in 1985.

9. After being convicted of the murder of her half-brother Francis, Constance Kent served twenty years in prison before being granted release in 1881. She emigrated to Australia in 1886 where she lived out the rest of her life. She very nearly lived long enough to see Dead of Night, dying on the 10th of April 1944 at the age of 100.

10. Sally Ann Howes appears to be the only cast member who has gone on record as having experienced something akin to the supernatural events depicted in the film. There are claims attributed to her in Richard Kleiner’s 1970 book ESP and the Stars which suggest she possessed Extra Sensory Perception and on several occasions in her life she had pre-knowledge of the imminent death or hospitalisation of friends and loved ones. The most notable occasion came in 1956 when her fiancé, the society photographer Sterling Henry Nahum, known as ‘Baron’, was admitted to hospital for a routine hip operation but died unexpectedly shortly afterwards from complications. Kleiner’s book claims that soon after a visit to the hospital, when all seemed well, Sally Ann knew, as though it were written, that her husband-to-be was going to die.

11. The owners of the Spessart Museum in Lohr am Main, Bavaria would have you believe that they possess the original ‘talking mirror’ that formed part of the real life origins of the Grimm brothers’ Snow White story. They will tell you that the mirror once belonged to one Claudia Elisabeth von Reichenstein, second wife of Philipp Christoph von Ertha upon whom the Grimms modelled the Evil Queen. The mirror through which Alice steps in Through the Looking-Glass is purported to still hang in the five-bedroom house built by Henry Liddell, father of Alice Liddell, in Charlton Kings, a suburb of Cheltenham. It is believed that Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) visited the house for four days in the 1860s and was inspired by the ornate mirror.

12. Elizabeth Welch only has a small part in Dead of Night but her contribution to the wider world of entertainment spanned seven decades. She is best known for her songs ‘Stormy Weather’ and ‘Love for Sale’, singing the former at the denouement of Derek Jarman’s 1979 film version of The Tempest. A contemporary of Paul Robeson, with whom she worked on two films directed by J. Elder Wills, Song of Freedom (1936) and Big Fella (1937), Welch has come to be recognised as an important figure in the advancement of African American culture in the twentieth century. The recipient of numerous awards and accolades in later life, Elizabeth Welch died at the age of 99 in 2003.

13. Cavalcanti, along with Dead of Night co-director Robert Hamer, was gay and Michael Redgrave was bisexual, though the extent to which this informed the treatment of the story or the performance can only be a matter of speculation. The treatment of the subtext is necessarily oblique; it cannot be said that ‘Ventriloquist’s Dummy’ initiated the era when British cinema came to address the matter more directly. We would have to wait a decade and a half for the release of Victim (Basil Dearden 1961) starring Dirk Bogarde for that to commence.