DVD/150: DEAD OF NIGHT (Alberto Cavalcanti / Charles Crichton / Robert Hamer / Basil Dearden, 1945)

TALES FROM THE CRYPT, VAULT OF HORROR... No, the best British portmaneau horror film remains Ealing's 1945 film DEAD OF NIGHT which can still chill.

An architect is invited by a potential client to stay for a weekend. He feels déja vu when he arrives and tells the assembled guests he feels he knows them from his dreams.  One by one they recount unsettling incidents that happened to them...

They include a racing driver's strange dream saving him from a deadly accident; a young girl's ghostly encounter during a party game; a woman's gift of a mirror to her fiancée drives him murderously deranged; and two golfing friends extend their rivalry beyond the grave.

But the best remains Michael Redgrave's nightclub venriloquist driven schizophrenic by his doll's persona.

Only after all these are told does the architect realise why it is all familar to him...

Still haunting after 75 years...

Shelf or charity shop? DEAD OF NIGHT resides in the limbo of my plastic storage case - scaring the bejeebus out of the other dvds. Basil Dearden directed the linking story as well as the racing driver sequence, Robert Hamer directed the haunted mirror sequence, Charles Crichton directed the golfer's story (which is the only segment that outstays it's welcome) while Alberto Cavalcanti directed the Christmas party and the ventriloquist sequences.  There are memorable contributions from Mervyn Johns as the fearful architect, Miles Malleson as a cherubic harbinger of death, Sally Ann Howes as the pert teenager, Googie Withers as the buyer of the mirror, Frederick Valk as the pragmatic psychiatrist, Elisabeth Welch as the owner of the Chez Beulah cabaret, and above all Michael Redgrave's schizo ventriloquist - his final scene confrontation with Hugo the dummy remains genuinely disturbing.

50 Favourite Musicals: 42: KERN GOES TO HOLLYWOOD (1985) (Jerome Kern / various)

The 50 shows that have stood out down the years and, as we get up among the paint cards, the shows that have become the cast recording of my life:

First performed: 1985, Donmar Warehouse

First seen by me: as above

Productions seen: one

Score: Jerome Kern / various 
Book: Dick Vosburgh

Plot:  Four singers explore the songs of Broadway and Hollywood composer Jerome Kern with a particular emphasis on songs that were used in the Golden Age of the Hollywood Musical.

Five memorable numbers: WHY WAS I BORN?, BILL, CAN'T HELP LOVIN' DAT MAN OF MINE, SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES, REMIND ME

Before the Donmar became a player, along with the Almeida, in the off-West End, mini-National Theatre stakes, it was the humbler Donmar Warehouse and staged an eclectic mix of plays, musicals and cabaret.  In 1985 David Kernan formed 'Show People' to put on shows that had evening and regular late-night performances so performers in other shows could catch them too.  In that year they staged two revue-style shows which followed the tried and trusted formula of SIDE BY SIDE BY SONDHEIM - cast of four with some occasional biographical detail to space the songs out - and both are on my Top 50 musicals list.  The first is KERN GOES TO HOLLYWOOD which was Kernan's idea to showcase the remarkable songbook of Jerome Kern, emphasizing songs written for or used in films.  Kernan brought together a trio of female singers which gave the production a sheen of pure class: Elaine Delmar, Liz Robertson and, in particular, the glorious 81 year-old Elisabeth Welch who was nominated for an Olivier Award.  The show transferred to Broadway the following year for a short engagement but long enough for Welch to again be nominated, this time for a Tony Award.  On the back of her success in KERN she returned the following year to the Donmar with her own show, luckily for posterity both were recorded.  I was lucky enough to meet her around the time of KERN and when I complemented her on the show she said her only regret was more emphasis was not placed on the lyricists who had been on the top of their game with Kern's music.  KERN GOES TO HOLLYWOOD was a fantastic show and could certainly do with being revived... but where would you find performers of such impeccable musical taste and class nowadays? 

There is no video footage of the show but here is Elisabeth Welch's glorious version of WHY WAS I BORN? - existential pain never sounded so lovely... and just for you Elisabeth, the lyricist was Oscar Hammerstein II.

Elisabeth Welch

My third helping of BROWN SUGAR pays tribute to the glorious Elisabeth Welch, one of the most gracious interpreters of popular 20th Century song.

Born to a half-black, half-native American father and a half-Scots, half-Irish mother, the young Elizabeth appeared in Broadway black revues with contempories Josephine Blake, Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson and Adelaide Hall and it at this here, in 1923, that she introduced the song "The Charleston". By the end of the 1920s she had joined Blake and Hall in Paris where she too thrived in the more accepting cabaret scene of Jazz Age Europe.

Back in New York in 1931, she introduced Cole Porter's "Love For Sale" to Broadway and, at Porter's request, she came to London in 1933 to appear in NYMPH ERRANT with Gertrude Lawrence. During the lengthy rehearsal period she was allowed to appear in a new revue where she introduced "Stormy Weather" to London. She settled in London where she was a vital presence on stage, radio, screen (co-starring in two films with Paul Robeson) and was seen regularly on early television broadcasts. She opted to stay in London during WWII adding concert tours for servicemen to her activities and here she stayed, constantly working until her retirement in the early 1990s and she died in 2003, seven months short of her 100th birthday.

I was lucky enough to see her in the 1980s when she appeared at the Donmar in her own show and in KERN GOES TO HOLLYWOOD. I met her while she was appearing in the show and she had a lot to say about how although the show celebrated the composer Jerome Kern that as a singer she felt the lyricists should be equally lauded.

Elizabeth left an idellible impression on anyone who saw her on stage - myself included - and, when filming his version of THE TEMPEST in 1979, Derek Jarman could not have chosen a better actress to play a Goddess. Her rendition brims with love, sly fun and sheer artistry.

Well Constant Reader, that's *that* crossed off the list. For some reason, I have never seen a production of THE TEMPEST. I know... killing isn't it? Not even when Vanessa Redgrave played Prospero at The Globe - and if I didn't see that....

I had seen Derek Jarman's 1979 film version but remember being totally baffled by it as I was not familiar with the play - all I remember was Elisabeth Welch as a Goddess singing STORMY WEATHER - utterly brilliant! Sadly Miss Welch was not available for reasons of mortality to join the cast at the Old Vic on Thursday. More's the pity.Sam Mendes' production is the latest in his much-vaunted and slightly pretentiously-titled Bridge Project in which two productions are cast with both English and American actors. Much is always made of this, Kenneth Branagh could bore for Britain on the AMAZING concept of using UK/US actors play Shakespeare, but it's been going on for years ffs! John Gielgud's Hamlet to Lillian Gish's Ophelia; Paul Robeson's Othello to Peggy Ashcroft's Desdemona; James Mason's Brutus and Gielgud's Cassius to Marlon Brando's Marc Antony and Louis Calhern's JULIUS CAESAR, Gielgud's Henry IV to Orson Welles' Falstaff in CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT etc.

I saw one of Mendes' Bridge productions last year THE WINTER'S TALE which was ok thanks to the performances of Simon Russell Beale and Sinead Cusack but hardly earth-shattering. THE TEMPEST sadly cannot draw on even these talents.

Within 10 minutes of the production starting I was groaning. I had heard the reports that Stephen Dillaine as Prospero was muffling his delivery but even before he spoke we had Alvin Epstein making noises as Gonzalo - "Ee o' eh' Ba Ee ho" was all I heard - and I was about 10 rows back in the stalls. I was all but shouting out "Speak from your bumhole not through it!"

Ok let's name names - out of the American actors I liked Christian Camargo's Ariel (hardly 'an airy spirit' but well-spoken and an arresting presence), Ron Cephas Jones' Caliban (again well-spoken and with a real stage presence), Jonathan Lincoln Fried as Alonson (a bit stolid but again well-spoken) and Thomas Sadoski as Stephano (a nice hair-trigger feeling of menace)Now the English - I liked Edward Bennett as Ferdinand but I was aware too that his over-emphatic delivery and stolid presence offers little variety in his performance, Anthony O'Donnell gave his usual sterling support as Trinculo making the 'rude mechanicals' scenes bearable and although Juliet Rylance was a convincing Miranda I found her delivery annoying, horribly reminiscent of Stella Gonet's matronly tones.
Which brings us to Stephen Dillaine as Propero. I must put my hand up to say I don't care for him much, I find his wheedling delivery profoundly irritating and earthbound. But who wants an earthbound Prospero? I don't understand how an actor can be given the opportunity to play one of the great roles and piss it away as Dillaine does. You want to feel the poetry in his lines? You want to hear Shakespeare speaking through him in his farewell to the theatre? Well you won't get it from Dillaine who plays the whole thing like an irritated old giffer moaning from his garden shed.I can only presume he is taking his lead from Mendes but it's a misguided lead. The production never felt to be leading anywhere or even know it had arrived. I waited for something to happen, to lift us out of the Old Vic to Prospero's unnamed island but we remained trapped in Tom Piper's cave-like set although Paul Pyant's subtle lighting shifts at least gave us an idea of where we should be in our minds.

As I sat there I found myself drifting back to Ian Charleson - although to be honest it doesn't take much for that to happen.

Ian was a well-received Ariel in 1978 at the Royal Shakespeare Company opposite Michael Hordern's Prospero and would have been sixty this year, the perfect age for Propero. Imagining the way Ian could have made the lines come alive made me resent Dillaine's whittering all the more.