THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT (II)
DON'T TAKE IT TO HEART
BLACK NARCISSUS
A PLACE OF ONE'S OWN
SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON
DRACULA & HAMMER FILMS
Ghosts can be invoked by accident or by design. and a comical example of the former is Don't Take It To Heart (1944). Billed as an ‘extravaganza’, it features Richard Greene as Peter Hayward, a young man who visits the ancestral home of Chaunduyt Court. While there he’s attracted by a photo of Mary, daughter of Lord Chaunduyt – and he stays on in the hope of meeting her by pretending to be interested in some old manuscripts unearthed after a recent German bombing raid. The explosion has wrecked a Chaunduyt tomb and also set free a wild prankster of a ghost who decides to involve himself in village politics, and, with Peter’s help, prove that local land ownership has been in the hands of the wrong family for hundreds of years.
Don’t Take It To Heart was produced by Sydney Box a year before the great success of The Seventh Veil, for which he and wife Muriel won the Oscar for Best Screenplay. They went on to become known for a series of realistic melodramas. Unfortunately, Don’t Take It To Heart was not a popular film of its day. Indeed its eccentric lunacy is far better suited to modem tastes. The American director Jeffery Dell, though, was not to realize this, and his film career was virtually over when the film failed. Dell’s novel, a satire of the British film industry, was aptly entitled Nobody Ordered Wolves.
Another film that had troubles on its release was Black Narcissus (1947), a torrid, atmospheric thriller of sexual repression amongst nuns in the heart of India. In America this proved far too sensitive and controversial a subject matter for the censors. The late 1940s was a time when the power of the Catholic League of Decency was at its peak and Black Narcissus was savaged: all the flashbacks of the nuns were cut (because they suggested that nuns might recall the past wistfully), as were the scenes of the nuns putting on silk stockings and lipstick. One cut even changed the meaning of the story - suggesting that the ‘evil’ nun is driven mad because she is seduced, rather than because she wants to be.
However, the film still managed to scoop two Oscars, for Photography and Production Design. A curious, nightmarish quality is built up throughout. Deborah Kerr plays Sister Clodagh the Mother Superior, who is faced with the task of keeping the remote convent in operation. Intimations of horror develop as the environment (heat, isolation, elevation) plays tricks on the imagination and eventually drives one nun, Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) to the very edge of madness and murder. Throughout the film the use of sound is unsettling: drums pick up the rhythm of heartbeats and rainstorms, and horns are carefully mixed in with the sound of the wind.
A film that similarly careful in manipulating the audience through technical skill is A Place Of One's Own (1945). The makers of this slight but eerie ghost story were by coincidence all former newspapermen: producer R. J. Minney was the editor of the Sunday Referee and Everybody’s Weekly; writer Brock Williams was a journalist in the West Country; and director Bernard Knowles had begun as a photographer on the Detroit News. They were making their cinema debuts and it is perhaps their backgrounds that give the film a grounded sense of realism amid the gilded visuals. Knowles had previously worked as cameraman on The 39 Steps (1935) and King Solomon's Mines (1937); as director he decided that no special photographic trick effects would be used. Thus Ernst Thesiger (who plays the ghost) is presented for real, but with a soft accent and uttering mysterious words so as to suggest something unusual. Thesiger himself said: ‘I looked at a distant object without focus and put a faraway tone in the voice – these are the secrets of being a ghost’.
Exteriors for the film were shot at Esher in Surrey at an old house which was reputed to have its own ghost, a white lady who walked the grounds on certain moonlit nights. During production there were no problems from her - instead the real issue was flying bombs which dropped on the house and destroyed the front doors. Thankfully the props department at the studio were able to put together replicas at the workshops and not delay the shoot.
It’s the rich detail of the sets for A Place Of One’s Own that are so impressive. To devise them, designer John Elphick worked with Thex Whistler, one of the most famous artists in Britain at the time, whose specialty was the Victorian era. Sadly, A Place Of One’s Own was his final screen work - he was killed in action in Normandy in July 1944.
Thirty years on from The Clairvoyant, young writer-director Bryan Forbes covered similar territory in Séance On A Wet Afternoon (1964). Forbes, who had been an actor, turned screenwriter with The League Of Gentlemen, an exciting thriller about disgruntled ex-Army officers banding together to rob a bank. In 1962 he wrote and directed Whistle Down The Wind, a touching story of a young girl (Hayley Mills) who finds an escaped convict in her father’s barn and believes him to be Jesus returned to earth.
Seance On A Wet Afternoon is a thriller with elements of the ‘other world’. Myra Savage (Kim Stanley) and her husband Billy (Richard Attenborough) are an odd couple. She’s a professional medium, but unhappy at her lack of recognition. Forced by her mother to exercise her ‘visionary’ abilities, Myra has gone a little crazy and a plot is hatched to kidnap a child (most of Myra's seances are through her stillborn son Arthur), so that after the kidnap she will be able ‘show’ the police the child’s whereabouts. Because he loves her, Billy abducts a little girl and they hide her in their own home. (The child believes she has had an accident and is in hospital.) Myra contacts the child’s parents and tells them she can help, and the distraught mother (Nanette Newman) will clutch at anything. Everything seems to be going to plan, until the police call and Myra holds a séance; in her trance, she blurts out the truth.
Seance is a clever film. hinting at the delicate balance of grief and insanity. Its tension builds from a subtle under-played style, but it ranks as one of the last of its type. British horror films had always implied rather than explicitly shown carnage and fear. Times, however, were changing.
After the record 1,635 million admissions to cinemas in 1946, they had slumped drastically by 1959 to 600 million. Many other forms of entertainment, including of course television, had contributed to the fall-off. In the 1950s, the cinema devised new forms, new spectacles, to keep the public interested. Cinemascope, huge epics with casts of thousands, even 3D was tried, but nothing really caught on in Britain. The weekly trip to the cinema was falling out of favour and attendances continued to drop. One thing that a new, commercially minded film production company could try, though, was to give the audience that still remained something it couldn’t get on television. And that was horror! Chills and thrills and all in gaudy colour.
Hammer Films was formed in 1947 (or rather re-formed, since the company existed in the 1930s but under different management). The new owners were James Carreras and his son, and their plan was to make low-budget, almost B-feature movies would titillate the punters. No film was to cost more than £20,000 and by this reckoning they calculated that five films a year would bring in £25,000-worth of profits from Britain alone. As the production budgets were so low, obviously they could not attract big-name stars. So they decided to choose catchy titles instead!
Hammer operated almost like a mini-studio, developing a repertory company of directors and actors so that each film would have a consistent look and style. A formula was born – Hammer would have in instant identification with its audience. When you saw the Hammer Film Logo, you knew immediately what to expect. In the early 1950s, Hammer cut its teeth on thrillers and sci-fi films such as The Last Page (1952), directed by Terence Fisher, a Hammer regular, Four Sided Triangle (1953), and Spaceways (1955), but soon horror was the watchword. The Quatermass Experiment (1955), directed by Val Guest, was the beginning but if British audiences found that a shock, nothing prepared them for the successive hits The Curse Of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958). In particular, the latter was an incredible exercise in blood-letting that had people queuing round the block.
Dracula was in colour and the evil count was played not by a monster, but by the tall, handsome Christopher Lee. When he advanced from the shadows to sink his teeth into the pale neck of an ‘English Rose’, audiences and the girl closed their eyes in near-ecstasy, as the sensual undertones of Dracula suddenly became very clear overtones. Being bitten by a vampire was sexy. Lurid advertising and the film’s ‘X’ certificate caused an uproar of criticism and controversy. But Rank, releasing the film, were unconcerned and the public packed the cinemas. Dracula was a hit.
James Carreras was also unconcerned despite his being dubbed the ‘King of Nausea’. His success was well worked out, as he explained: ‘We’ve found a formula for spine-chillers that never misses… You make the villain of your story look just like the good-looking man, or the pretty girl, you might see on the underground any evening. You imagine you could trust him anywhere, then suddenly you’re alone with him - Wham! He starts to do terrible, awful, ghastly things!’
Dracula and The Curse Of Frankenstein were directed by Terence Fisher with great flair. With continued success, Universal Pictures now made available their whole library of 1930s horror films to Hammer for re-makes. It was probably a shock to everyone at Hammer that these early films were such a success, but they paved the way for literally hundreds of films, utilizing every horror variation.
TWINS OF EVIL, COUNTESS DRACULA, HANDS OF THE RIPPER, BAD TIMING