Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Queen of the Night

Dead of Night (1945)/Queen of Spades (1949) is another disc we didn't get from Netflix - we took this out of the library. If you go to the link, you will see what library we frequent. I am doxxed! We have already seen Queen of Spades, an excellent movie, but we didn't have time to re-watch. But Dead of Night was new.

It begins with Mervyn Johns driving up to an old English farmhouse. His host meets him at the door and gives us some exposition. He has invited Johns, an architect, to the place to discuss putting up an addition. Johns is invited into a cozy living room and introduced to the other guests. But he already knows them. He explains that he has a recurring dream or nightmare. He always forgets most of it, but now he sees the house and guests and remembers them all from his dream. He even says that a penniless brunette will arrive - and indeed, brunette Renee Gad shows up and asks her husband to pay the taxi fare - she "hasn't got a penny."

One of the guests is a psychologist, Frederick Valk. He is skeptical, and offers prosaic explanations. Then each of the guests tells a story of the supernatural that happened to them or a friend. So this is anthology horror, with five stories plus the frame tale.

The stories are all different, some longer, some shorter. The styles and indeed the directors are different, with Basil Dearden doing the frame and the first story, with Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, and Robert Hamer doing the others. 

One is about a premonition of death, another about a children's game of Sardines where a girl finds a ghost child. One is about a world seen in a mirror. One is basically comic, about two golfers played by Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford. These were the two Englishmen in The Lady Vanishes who are only interested in the cricket scores. 

The last one, told by the doctor, is the most famous, a story about a ventriloquists dummy who wants to replace his ventriloquist. This isn't the first or last movie with this plot, but it's very well done.

In between these stories, Johns is getting more upset, vaguely remembering that something awful is going to happen - that he is going to kill someone. After the final story, he snaps, and finds himself in a series of hallucinations based on the stories he has heard. Then, SPOILER, he wakes up. It was a dream - the dream. He's driving out to that farmhouse to see about putting in an addition. He has already forgotten what the dream was about, but...

We found this to be excellent all around. The pacing was great, with longer and shorter stories with different tones keeping it fresh. The way the frame story worked out - again, not the first or last movie like this, but so well executed. Also, what other movie uses a dream for a time loop?

No comments: