Dead of Night (1945)

Third viewing; previous viewings: October 15, 1988 and December 19, 1994

The Hearse Driver is based on The Bus-Conductor, by E.F. Benson (1st publishing 1906).
The Christmas Party is apparently not based on an outside source; it does, however, reference a real-life crime.
The Haunted Mirror is loosely based on The Chippendale Mirror, by E.F. Benson (1st publishing 1915).
The Golfing Story is loosely based on The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost, by H.G. Wells (1st publishing 1902).
The Ventriloquist's Dummy is based on The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy, by Gerald Kersh (1st published in 1939). Just for the record, the earliest story about a pathological relationship between a ventriloquist and his dummy seems to be The Rival Dummy, by Ben Hecht, first published in 1928 and filmed as The Great Gabbo in 1929.

An architect is hired to perform a renovation at a country house and, upon entering it, he recognizes the people assembled in the living room from a recurring dream of his. Each of them in turn then proceeds to tell a strange occurrence he or she has experienced or heard about. They involve, respectively, a premonition, an apparition, a hallucinatory mirror, a ghost, and a ventriloquist's dummy. The architect is increasingly overcome by fear of an impending catastrophe involving him and someone else at the house.

This collection of stories provides a sort of catalogue of fantastical motifs which have since become recurrent in the cinema. The underlying structure is an exploration of intrusion in its various forms. The main character enters a house for the first time and unleashes a series of narratives where Reality "cracks" allowing the Absurd or the Irrational to enter, a reflection of the War and the various kinds of invasion it entailed. We have such intrusions as the Dreamed upon the Consciously Perceived, the Future upon the Present, the Dead upon the Living, the Virtual upon the Real, Jealousy upon Love, the Role upon the Actor (or the Creature upon the Creator, or the Text upon the Writer/Reader), Impulse upon Reason (cf. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). The circular narrative provides a formal mirror of the structure as the beginning intrudes upon the ending; also, the lighter in tone The Golfing Story was seen by some viewers as an unwelcome intrusion rather than an agreeable interlude. From Christopher Mulrooney, I picked up (although, as usual, I am uncertain about the actual meaning of his words) the parallel between the reconstruction of a house and the reconstruction of a mind (both pointing allegorically to the reconstruction of a nation). I side with the majority in acknowledging the superiority of The Ventriloquist's Dummy over the other episodes, but all of them are good.

Rating: 75 (down from 88)