If I had had the very slightest premonition when I took that bungalow that I was about to be mixed up in an affair such as that which developed from a certain night in June, I should probably have fled to the ends of the earth--or, at any rate, have remained in my old lodgings at Dover.
The third J. S. Fletcher mystery novel from 1930 that was published in the United States was The South Foreland Murder. I like this book rather better than the first from that year, The Borgia Cabinet, mainly because it feels more "real world." Cabinet was a generic artificial country house mystery but Foreland seems more like something that might really have taken place.
The story is narrated by a Dover solicitor bachelor named Savvery, who has rented a bungalow near the village of St. Margaret at Cliffe, located between Dover and Deal, not far from the South Foreland Lighthouse. It is set explicitly in 1911, three years before the outbreak of the Great War, though the book was published in 1930--a nineteen-year disparity! The Fletcher mysteries from the later Twenties and the Thirties which I have read have all felt decidedly anachronistic to me; perhaps they are all meant to be set in the past, within a few years on either side of the war.
Fletcher was only 57 in 1920, which is hardly, I would say (perhaps defensively), superannuated; but he doesn't seem to have been concerned with keeping up with modern times, making it surprising that he seems unquestionably to have been the most popular "modern" English mystery writer in the United States during the Roaring Twenties.
Perhaps the bulk of Fletcher's anglophiliac reading audience missed the "good old days" before the war, an ostensibly gentler time when autos were still a novelty, less forward women wore big hats and long dresses and gangland slayings seemingly were not a weekly occurrence in Chicago and other perilous urban American citadels.
Another hugely popular English mystery writer during the Jazz Age was the similarly old-fashioned E. Phillips Oppenheim, not to mention the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose detective Sherlock Holmes made his "last bow" on the eve of the Great War, only to take the stage again to solve yet more murder cases, retrospectively set, between 1924 and 1927. It took nothing less than the Grim Reaper Himself finally to put a full stop to the crime writing careers of these Victorian/Edwardian men.
As a group Doyle's last Holmes stories are, truth be told, pretty weak broth compared to those from the glory days, though "The Problem of Thor Bridge" is generally beloved and there's much to be said for the final Holmes tale, "Shoscombe Old Place." Fletcher's later works from the 1930s generally are shorter and weaker than the ones from the late teens and early Twenties. I think Foreland is one of the better ones, however.
To get back to this book (finally), lawyer Savvery's bungalow neighbors are:
Mr. Rennard, a friendly, obvious man of means, "always ready to pass the time of day and to invite you into his bungalow for a whiskey and soda and an uncommonly good cigar."
Mr. and Mrs. Thacker, a "grocer and Italian warehouseman" and his pretty, younger wife, who is "gay, vivacious and something of a chatterbox."
Mr. Chettle, in a cottage a little further away, "a quiet, moony-looking chap," one of those artists.
This sunny setup is soon disturbed when Mr. Rennard one early morning is found shot to death at his bungalow--most efficiently, narratively-speaking, at the end of chapter one. Savvery finds himself at the center of events (the ingenuous police are quite nice about frequently including him in their investigative efforts); there are vanished jewels, a favorite plot contrivance of Fletcher; and, much less typical of the author, at least in my experience, a rather shockingly bloody climax in Monte Carlo (tactfully told at second hand, but still....).
It's the usual Fletcher formula in many ways, including the solution that comes to both the investigators and the readers by happenstance, but it's highly readable, the narrative going down like, one presumes, those whisky and sodas of Rennards. I have to give Fletcher credit: he was good, and supremely efficient, at what he did. As long as you don't expect by the book fair play detection, locked rooms and ingenious clues and the like, you should enjoy it all if you like classic British mysteries.
Was Fletcher really a sort of precursor of the police procedural? Perhaps so, the more I think about it, though admittedly his depiction of police work makes old Freeman Crofts look like Jack Webb or Ed McBain. But, really, while we are revising everything else about there vintage era of mystery, we really should think about beginning to reckon with the "Dean of Mystery Writers," Mr. J. S. Fletcher.
Striking jacket design for Knopf's edition of The Borgia Cabinet. JS Fletcher was one of the publisher's most lucrative authors, though Knopf had a shiny new pony in the stable by the name of Hammett.
The Borgia Cabinet was the first of three mystery novels published in the United States in 1930 by veteran English mystery writer J. S. Fletcher. Cabinet popped up in January of that year, followed by The Yorkshire Moorland Mystery in May and The South Foreland Murder in September. 1931 would see The Dressing Room Murder start up the Fletcher production line all over again in the following January. Fletcher was, you might say, a prolific writer.
And say it they certainly did at the time. One newspaper wag speculated in 1930 that English thriller writer Edgar Wallace had actually "written all of England's literature," only to be corrected by J. S. Fletcher's publisher Knopf that Wallace works accounted merely for half of England's literature, the other half being supplied by their man Fletcher.
One of the ways in which mystery genre history has gone wrong, as history, is to omit inclusion in studies of once hugely popular writers who have fallen out of print. Fifteen years ago, mystery genre history, when it came to its so-called "Golden Age," was largely confined, in Britain, to the Crime Queens Christie, Sayers, Allingham and Marsh (and sometimes Tey), and, in America, to the tough guys Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
Practically no one--there were a few exceptions--was studying Freeman Wills Crofts, R. Austin Freeman, Earl Derr Biggers or Erle Stanley Gardner, say, and they certainly weren't perusing Edgar Wallace or Carolyn Wells or J. S. Fletcher. Yet the latter two authors, the first American and the second British, were during the 1920s and into the 1930s two of the most popular mystery (as opposed to thriller) writers in the United States--a fact which is still greatly lost on people today.
Unlike the also very popular Mary Roberts Rinehart, Wells and Fletcher were mass producers of mysteries, often publishing three or four (or more) crime novels in a single year. Fletcher took off in the States after American president Woodrow Wilson famously praised his book The Middle Temple Murder (1919), which until this last decade remained the one and only Fletcher book that remained often in print. In the United States in the Twenties Fletcher sold better than Christie or Sayers and to many American crime fans he most represented modern English mystery.
There was a great irony here, in that Fletcher--who was only four years younger than Arthur Conan Doyle and Fergus Hume, just a year younger than R. Austin Freeman, Eden Phillpotts and Carolyn Wells and three years older than venerable E. Phillips Oppenheim--was a very old-fashioned writer indeed. His Twenties mysteries ostensibly took place during the Twenties, I suppose, but they really were products of the Victorian or at best Edwardian era. And they weren't really tales of detection, or let us say deduction, either.
Fletcher's mysteries have plenty of mystery to them, to be sure, but they tend to have very little genuine intelligent detection by the police detectives. They investigate, vigorously follow leads, then usually get a surprise solution generously handed to them by the author in the last few pages of the novel, at least in my experience with reading Fletcher. The man certainly had this formula down and his books are easy to read and often enjoyable, but it was really S. S. Van Dine and to some extent Earl Biggers who brought the art of detection home to American mystery readers in the second half of the Twenties (followed by Ellery Queen).
I have a hardcover American first edition of another Fletcher mystery, False Scent (1925) that has some rather interesting marginalia in it on a couple of pages. I wish I knew more of the book's provenance. The letter "H" is stamped in it and there is a bookstore stamp on the front endpaper from Pomeroy's, a department store chain in eastern and central Pennsylvania (where my own mother is from--she may have been to a Pomeroy's in Harrisburg or Pottstown for all I know).
Anyway, the presumably native Pennsylvanian buyer of this book was pretty dubious as to its merits, judging from the marginal comments. He (?) complained that the detective figure in the novel, one Stevenage, was quite a dull dog indeed. Fletcher tells us that "in spite of his comparative youth... [Stevenage was] already a man of achievement and of further promise in the Criminal Investigation Department....at eight-and-twenty....[he had] peculiarly acute instincts, stiletto-like perception, and a habit of cool procedure as dependable as chilled steel." This particular reader, however, wasn't buying it.
On page 258, there's an inadvertently funny exchange between Stevenage and another man, a civilian named Featherstone, with whom Stevenage gets quite chummy. The latter man informs Stevenage that a certain suspicious character was clean-shaven, leading Stevenage to lament that this man then could not be his suspect Whatmore, because that man is bearded. To this Featherstone ingeniously suggests that Whatmore might "easily have shaved his beard off....Don't you think that's just what he would do?" To this Stevenage assents: "Maybe!"
This exchange prompted the reader to scrawl testily in the margin:
Who is the detective--Stevenage or Featherstone? Query: Could a C.I.D. man be as stupid as Stevenage and still be C.I.D.?
On the final page of the book, 295, the reader frustratedly adds:
Again--How can a detective be as stupid--and lucky--as Stevenage! Answer: His brains were "abstracted."
Well, the truth is this sort of police detective is a stock character in Fletcher's books; we see him again and again. And, yeah, he is rather ingenuous, to put it generously. But he steadfastly sees it through to the end and gets his man (or woman), mainly due to some timely good luck late in the book.
Let's see how it all works in The Borgia Cabinet.
This book is a highly traditional, if not to say somewhat generic, country house murder mystery. Fletcher came up with a more intriguing title than usual for this one, but it could easily have been called Murder at Aldersyke Manor. What is the eponymous cabinet you may be wondering? It's a repository of obscure deadly poisons which the eccentric murder victim, Sir Charles Stanmore, thought it amusing to keep, unlocked, in his study. Of course Sir Charles has been bumped off with one of these criminally accessible poisons!
Certainly it appears that there are plenty of people who might potentially have wanted to do away with Sir Charles, starting with Lady Stanmore, a younger woman who despised her husband and may have been seen in the woods kissing her cousin James Beck, a Wimpole Street physician. Then there's Sir Charles' young secretary, Miss Fawdale, his nephew and heir, Guy Stanmore, and his sister-in-law, Guy's mother, the widowed Mrs. John Stanmore.
Of course there's a solemn-faced butler, Bedford, in the wings, as well as a nosy overbearing housekeeper, Mrs. Protheroe, and a parlor maid, Purser. There's Sir Charles' helpful law partner, Mr. Gilford, and a man by the name of Mapperson, who wanted to purchased a valuable diamond necklace, vanished since the murder, from Sir Charles. (Whimsically there are also minor characters named Holmes and Watson.)
Detective-Sergeant Charlesworth of Scotland Yard goes investigating and eventually forms a theory, but it's knocked aheap in the last twenty pages of the novel.
There's no brilliant Christie-like clueing or even the rigorous detection of a John Rhode or Freeman Crofts. But it all reads pleasantly and smoothly right up to the very late solution of the crime (s); and there's nothing wrong with that. It turns out quite a few readers over the last century and more did not really want to have wrack their brains too hard when perusing a mystery.
J. S. Fletcher
What's odd though is how Fletcher was presented to the public by American publishers. "The Dean of Detective Story Writers," we are told on the back of the dust jacket of False Scent. This follows:
The world is full of confirmed Fletcher addicts. His mystery-detective stories of the puzzle variety have made him the favorite story teller of thousands. The secret is that he plays fair with his readers in his stories. All the facts that his detectives have to go on are there for his readers to see--and he tells a surprising story in a soothing, artless manner.
Does Fletcher pull surprises, on his detectives and readers? Absolutely, yes.
Yet his mystery stories, at least the ones I have read, are not really puzzle stories, in the sense that they provide readers with a puzzle they can solve. Fletcher only hands out key pieces of the puzzle to his detectives and readers right at the end of the story. Neither the police nor the readers can really solve the crime; they merely are allowed to witness the revelation of the truth. Inevitably this is disappointing to the more demanding puzzle fans, though it may be closer to the actuality of most crimes as they are really solved.
The future in American mystery lay not with Fletcher, who would pass away, an anachronism at age 71, in 1935, but with Dashiell Hammett, the other major mystery writer in Knopf's stable. Not only was Hammett a more exciting writer, he was actually a better deviser of puzzles. And he influenced many more writers. Yet there has always remained a fair flock of Fletcher fanciers. I'll try to review a better one by him soon. He did do better mysteries than this.
I'm happy to say that the publisher Stark House has published Nothing Darker Than The Night a collection of essays from the last fifteen years by me (many of them revised and expanded) on hard-boiled and noir crime fiction. 48 (!) articles and essays, ranging from around 1300 words to nearly 18,000 words. (Most follow in the middle of those two lengths.) It's a big book, 424 pages. Definitely a book to dip into at one's leisure and pleasure. Also available as an ebook.
I hope some of my fellow bloggers will get around to reviewing the whole thing someday but in the meantime a Goodreads reviewer, "AC," gave the book five stars and commented: "A wonderful collection of essays by a rather cranky reviewer and critic that covers a great deal of interesting biographical information about Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, as well as a host of lesser known books of crime fiction and noir, including many of the short stories of Cornell Woolrich. Lots of interesting material to browse and to read in."
I was pleased with this take and will even cop to "cranky"--though I might just say opinionated! You definitely will get opinions in this book.
It's also reviewed here in Steve Steinbock's The Jury Box column in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
Night starts off with with a nine-page introduction on how I came to get interested in hard-boiled and noir crime fiction in the first place. (Readers of this blog may recall how I started reading Agatha Christie at age eight and remained an exclusively Anglophile classic mystery reader for decades.) The two sections, roughly equal in length, are devoted respectively to hard-boiled and noir crime fiction.
'Hard-Boiled" has multiple essays on Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, as well as pieces on Hammett's Thirties and Forties shadows (lesser known writers who followed him) and on Gore Vidal (his Edgar Box mysteries) and two women crime writers, Margaret Millar, Ross's amazing wife, and Mignon Eberhart (!). Yes I look at hard-boiled influence in unexpected places, like work by Eberhart and traditionalist crime fiction guru S. S. Van Dine.
Crime may or may not pay but it certainly inspires some fascinating fiction
On Hammett there is original research on the mystery woman in his life, Elise De Viane (the girlfriend he likely drunkenly sexually assaulted), a new look as his short Continental Op stories which challenges received wisdom on them, and analyses of four of his novels. With Chandler I analyze his attitude toward classic British crime fiction (something widely misunderstood), his bitter and rather stupid feud with Ross Macdonald, and his ironic epistolary relationship with crime writer James M. Fox. With Macdonald I look largely at his attitude to crime writing and the evolution in his own work. I greatly admire the "hard-boiled triumvirate" but I don't pull occasional punches when it comes to criticism either.
I also look at some obscure right-wing and left-wing hard-boiled crime writers, as well as the depictions of Asians in American pulp fiction. That latter piece was inspired by a letter written in the early Thirties by a Chinese immigrant in rural Arkansas to a pulp magazine, in which he politely complained about the way Asians were portrayed therein.
down the boulevard of broken dreams
"Noir" starts off with a very long piece--if it were fiction it would almost be a novella--in which I revise the "tragic homosexual" legend which has grown up around Cornell Woolrich. A great deal of new biographical information here. I also look at his seminal noir novel The Bride Wore Black, and, as the goodreads reviewer stated, a good deal of his short fiction, including pieces which have been very little studied.
Probably the second most significant piece in the collection is on the colorful, quizzical life of Fredric Brown, a great vintage crime writer similar to Woolrich in some ways. Huge amount of new biographical details here. There's also a look at Brown's novel The Screaming Mimi. There are two articles apiece respectively on Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding.
The last sub-section collects nine introductions I have written to Stark House reprints of noir novels that were adapted to film, including James Gunn's rather amazing Deadlier Than The Male (filmed as Born to Kill), Theodore Strauss' rural noir Moonrise and Edna Sherry's spectacular Sudden Fear, adapted as an Oscar-nominated film starring Joan Crawford.
I'm pleased with this book and hope my readers will take a look. If it does well enough, a collection of my vintage true crime essays (a score of those) will follow. And then lastly, I hope, essays on classic crime fiction, which is where I started.
John Hobart (Dana Andrews) at Stonehenge investigates the clue of the parchment runes. Or as The Rocky Horror Show irreverently put it in 1975: "Dana Andrews said prunes gave him the runes and passing them used lots of skills."
Happy Halloween! For this friday fright night I thought we might take a look at one of my favorite vintage horror films, Night of the Demon (1957), indeed one of my very all-time faves, which I first watched about 25 years ago, long after I first saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The film is also by way of being something of a mystery.
What did Rand Hobart see on the night of the murder, the night of the demon?
The atomic Fifties was the great decade of sci-fi radioactive monster movies, like the landmark Japanese film Godzilla (1954), about a great mutated dino from the vasty deep who wrathfully rises from the waters to devour Tokyo. There were plenteous American horror stories too, like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) (another prehistoric beast strikes, this time in America) and It Came from Beneath the Sea (giant octopus tangles with the Golden Gate Bridge), both with special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen. So, some filmmakers thought, how about a fire demon?
Sure, this supernatural creature may have been spawned by the Prince of Darkness rather than Oppenheimer and his science boys, but wouldn't a monster from the literal Hell be damn scary too? And indeed it was, when the film first showed up back in 1957, under British auspices, under the title Night of the Demon. (In the US in 1958, where it had some minutes shorn, it was known, rather more pulpishly, as Curse of the Demon).
For inspiration, the filmmakers drew not upon some sci-fi author but rather a proper Edwardian don and amateur ghost story writer, one Montague Rhodes James, aka M. R. James, to my mind the greatest ghostly yarn spinner of them all. His original book of horror tales, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) is, I think, the greatest such collection extant.
Night of the Demon actually is based on a later James short story, "Casting the Runes," which is drawn from a follow-up volume, predictably titled More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. (1911) Give the people what they want, what? I have reviewed that volume here.
On rereading it a few years ago, I realized that, as with the case of Robert Bloch's Psycho, I liked the film better than the source, where the action seems to me a bit attenuated, though there are some brilliant bits and the overall conception too is brilliant--demonically brilliant.
MR James
I have a great yen for classic horror films and my favorites in this field--Night of the Demon, Night of the Living Dead, Psycho, The Birds, The Spiral Staircase, The Uninvited, The Innocents, The Haunting, The Old Dark House, Frankenstein, to cite a few--are some of my all-time favorite films in general. I think Night of the Demon generally does not get quite the credit it deserves, though I believe it is more appreciated as a notable film today than it was at the time of its release.
In your typical Fifties monster film, the slay's the thing, as it were. It's all about the monster sowing vast quantities of creative destruction and you just hope that the acting and dialogue will be barely adequate along the way.
However, Night of the Demon, in essence is, really, a Hitchcockian thriller, its "MacGuffin"--Hitchcock's invented word for the object that propels the plot--a piece of parchment inscribed with cryptic ancient runes. It's a mashup of a monster movie with a suspense thriller, with quite a bit of noir thrown into the picture as well. And the acting quite lives up to the story. Director Martin Scorsese has placed Demon on his list of the Eleven Scariest Films of all time. Good for him! See also this appreciation by British Film Institute curator Vic Pratt.
a rather noirish shot from Night of the Demon, when a weary and deflated Professor Holden (Dana Andrews) and his loyal semi-love interest Joanna Harrington futilely try to persuade local police that Holden's life is being menaced by a satanic warlock who employs sorcery to kill.
One of the major driving forces behind the film, appropriately enough, was friend of Hitch Charles Bennett, who between 1929 and 1942 worked on the scripts of six of the director's films: Blackmail, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Sabotage, Young and Innocent and Foreign Correspondent, receiving his sole Oscar nomination for the script of the last of these films.
not an obscene phone call but certainly a frightening one Gladys Cooper in "Night Call" wherein a bedridden old woman is terrorized by a late night caller from beyond the grave
Demon was directed by Jacques Tourneur, who is best known, I suppose, for the trifecta of "literate" horror films he did with famed Forties horror film producer Val Lewton--Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man--though Tourneur also directed the very well-regarded noir flick Out of the Past and one of the classic Twilight Zone television episodes, the eerie and sad "Night Call," which starred elderly English actress Gladys Cooper, a three-time Oscar nominee whose first American film was Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, where she played the sister of Laurence Olivier's handsome Gothic brooder Maxim de Winter, who may or may not have slain the first Mrs. de Winter.
Is this a demonic manifestation or a carnival stunt?
Though Tourneur like Bennett himself had qualms about the film as it transpired, Demon actually is my favorite among the films of the director's that I have seen, including Out of the Past. Known for his economy with explicit fright effects (he was a master of low-budget ambiguous scares), Tourneur apparently didn't want actually to show the demon explicitly in the film, where it appears not once but twice, at the beginning and at the end.
Both Tourneur and Bennett were highly critical of the producer Hal E. Chester's monkeying around with the film. Chester brought in a blacklisted American screenwriter, Cy Endfield, to pepper up the script, which he deemed too tame and British. Bennett later said that if Chester "walked up my driveway right now, I'd shoot him dead." But there's obviously a great deal of Bennett's handwork left in the script.
modern film poster which refrains from showing the demon
Among fans of Demon, the matter of the monster's visibility has become a matter of debate: should the demon have actually appeared directly in the film; and, if so, was two times one time too many? A contingent condemns the first of the demon's appearances as gratuitous, and I can understand the criticism, though ultimately I don't share it.
First, a little about the plot of the film. It opens with a very frightened man, an English academic named Harrington (Maurice Denham), driving alone at night down a country road to the stately Georgian mansion of satanically goateed "cult leader" Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis).
Upon meeting Karswell, Harrington, clearly in a state of mounting hysterical fear, begs the cultist to "call it off" and promises that he in turn will halt the impending investigation of Karswell's cultish activities which he has organized. Karswell tells the frightened man that he will do what he can for him, but he clearly is far more interested in getting Harrington the hell out of his house before ten o'clock chimes on his antique mantel clock. Karswell is fearful too, but of what?
A reassured Harrington departs Karswell's mansion but upon returning to his own house sees to his horror a ghastly flaming demon materialize out of the darkness and pursue him. In his panicked flight he electrocutes himself on a fallen telephone wire; and then the spectral beast falls viciously upon him, rending his dead body in its claws. The police, we learn, declare that Harrington's death was an unfortunate accident and that his body was sadly mangled by "some kind of animal."
Harrington entreats Karswell to "call it off"
Next Professor John Holden, an American psychiatrist, shows up in England to attend the conference Harrington had organized. He is a confirmed skeptic of the supernatural who vows to carry on Harrington's investigation of Karswell. Well, the satanist isn't going to take that lying down! He has prepared another runic parchment, which he surreptitiously passes on to Holden at the British Museum. Now the demon is scheduled to make a repeat performance, this time for Holden's benefit (?). Can Holden, unlike Harrington, somehow evade his diabolic fate?
A very meek and mild Karswell "accidentally" encounters John Holden in the library at the British Museum
Holden watches a triumphant Karswell distortedly depart
The debate over the first appearance of the demon is a tactical one over circuitousness versus directness in horror films. Critics of the demon's first appearance say the viewer should be left in agonizing doubt whether there really is a demon at all, allowing them to think that Harrington might have been a hysteric and Karswell a faker.
I get the point about the uses of ambiguity, but I tend to agree that knowing that there really is a demon, and really quite a horrible one at that, greatly raises the dramatic stakes throughout the film. Supposedly Tourneur didn't direct either of the demon's scenes at the beginning and the end of the film, as they were forced on him by Hal E. Chester; but fortunately they are superbly done, like the rest of the film, if less subtly.
Admittedly Tourneur was a master of subtlety and of economical scares. I rewatched Cat People last night and still loved the film, which really has only three, highly ambiguous and brief, fright scenes. Most of the film could be simply a relationship "chick flick" about a man, his beautiful troubled wife, the man's gal pal who comes between them and the Lothario psychiatrist who is called in to "help" the wife.
Cat People premier, 1942 So the story goes, audiences laughingly "meowed" during the credits but soon realized how serious the film actually was
Tourneur relies on strong acting--French actress Simone Simon as the wife, Irina, and British actor Tom Conway, George Sanders' half-brother, as the psychiatrist, Dr. Judd, are especially fine--and superb cinematography and editing to propel the story and create tension. The actual scares are few, though when they come they are impressive. (The indoor swimming pool scene with Jane Randolph's terrified Alice Moore is especially famous; I think that the indoor swimming pool scene in the horror film It Follows must surely be an homage.)
What is that shadow stalking me? the swimming pool scene from Cat People
Irina is a Serbian native who thinks she is a "cat person," a descendant of wicked Serbian satanists who transformed into fierce cat creatures and were put to flight long ago by "King John." (Is this Jovan Vladimir? I'm not up on Serbian history before 1914.) Alice and Irina's amiable husband Oliver (Kent Reed) thinks sadly that Irina is losing her mind. Just what the truth is long left in doubt.
While Tourneur may have wanted to use the same approach for Night of the Demon, Fifties film audiences expected more obvious bumps in the night for their bucks. (Demon was released the same year as Hammer Film's big, blatant color horror hit Curse of Frankenstein.) And Night of the Demon indeed is an exciting roller coaster thrill ride. What Demon really reminds me of is an Alfred Hitchcock film, like one of the movies Charles Bennett scripted for Hitch in the olden days, like The 39 Steps, Young and Innocent or Foreign Correspondent.
Dana Andrews' John Holden and Irish actress Peggy Cummins' Joanna Harrington, niece of the dead man, figure as the boy-girl romantic couple you will find in many a Hitch thriller, though romance is rather downplayed this time around, perhaps on account of the age difference between the two players. Andrews was 48 at filming and looked a decade older, while Cummins, who co-starred in the noir cult classic Gun Crazy seven years earlier, was 31. Cummins later in life said she felt she had only three really great moments in films, presumably Gun Crazy, Night of the Demon and, I'm assuming, the fine Victorian crime suspense drama Moss Rose (1947)--all "genre" you will notice!
Strangers on a Plane: Joanna (Peggy Cummins) and John (Dana Andrews) meet, disagreeably. Her writing with the light on is keeping him awake and he's very grumpy about it. Don't worry, they make up.
Joanna fends off the horny man to talk about the horned demon.
Andrews gamely and arguably pestily (it's the 1950s) tries to out some moves on Cummins, but Cummins, whose character is unusually strong-willed for a female horror leading lady of the time, is mostly not having any such nonsense. But still in classic fashion the pair have a "meet cute" bickering scene on the plane coincidentally taking them both across the Atlantic to England; it could be a scene not only from a Hitchcock film but a John Dickson Carr novel. They continue to bicker, off and on, throughout most of the film. For what it's worth Joanna is completely right about everything!
Once Karswell passes the parchment to Holden to call the demon down upon his enemy, the game, as someone once said, is afoot; and the pace doesn't let up. Tension is maintained throughout the film, which is punctuated by a series of virtuose set pieces. (In this article I will try to do some justice to them with some screenshots I took.)
haunted at the hotel: Dr. Holden starts hearing and seeing things at London's Savoy Hotel
inspiration for The Shining?
When John and Joanna visit Karswell at his rural Warwickshire mansion (the real life Brocket Hall), the satanist is giving a Halloween Party for the local children. I always wondered a little about this. We know that news of Professor Harrington's investigation into the Karswell "cult" has been getting into the newspapers; would local parents be all that crazy about having their children entertained by a Satanist? I guess we are the assume that the stories have been quite vague so far about Karswell's actual activities.
Anyway, when John and Joanna espy Karswell, he is a dressed as a clown (another possible red flag, in light of the tendencies of serial killer John Wayne Gacy), pulling "magic puppies" out of his top hat to the delighted squeals of the young ones. John decides that Karswell is really just a kindly old man at heart, albeit a con man and grifter of the gullible, but Joanna believes there is real danger. (The film would have us believe that Andrews is quite a bit younger than Karswell, though in fact Andrews was the elder by four years.)
The childrens' party possibly owes its inception to the magic lantern show which Karswell gives for adolescents in the James short story, but where that is genuinely diabolical and terrifying--it's clear that story Karswell is an utter sadist--film Karswell seems genuinely to like children. In an amusing bit Karswell's kindly but someone overbearing mother, with whom he lives, tells Joanna that her boy loves children and should be married but he's just so fussy. Then she recalls that Joanna is not married either.
I should say a few words about Karswell's depiction in the film and Niall MacGinnis' inhabitation of him. Love both! MacGinnes' Karswell totally dominates the film (with the exception of the demon's appearances). Alternately menacing, charming, sulking, chiding he's fascinating to watch. And underneath it all he himself seems is terrified of the unearthly forces he has invoked. MacGinnes' performance is a joy to watch and in modern times, with a big budget behind the film, it might have snagged him an Oscar nomination. (On the other hand Nicol Williamson's enchanting performance as Merlin in Excalibur didn't get nominated either--so much for wizards!)
Athene Seyler as Mrs. Karswell is marvelous as well. It's a good role for her to have worked with. Initially Mrs. Karswell seems simply the sort of comic relief matron beloved of Thirties films (including Hitchcock's own), but you gradually realize that there's much more to this woman than simply being a doting, indulgent mama. She really doesn't like what Karswell is doing and occasionally allows it to show for all her self-effacement. "Have I done something wrong?" she asks her pettish son at one point, clearly more out of exasperation than guilt. It's a wonderful passive-aggressive moment.
Karswell may be a satanist but he does indeed seem genuinely to like children and he is kind to his mother, a dotty enthusiast of spiritualism but clearly no hellish fellow traveler in the depths with her son. A "confirmed bachelor" (possibly gay; see his comments on the children's snakes and ladder game), Karswell seems to anticipate modern kooky basement-dwelling incel influencers, only they derive their power not from Satan, but, worse yet, social media.
Karswell even talks of the money he gets from his "followers" that has made his and his mother's comfortable life possible. He can't have meddlers like Harrington and Holden threatening all that, he tells his mother; but, it's even worse than that: if it's not Holden's life that is taken it will be his.
While talking with John at the party, Karswell, frustrated with John's obstinate American skepticism, casually conjures a cyclone (wind storm) to demonstrate his powers to his nemesis, but that simply isn't good enough to do the job with know-all John. In doing so Karswell endangers the children, who are sent scattering across the lawn like bits of wrapping paper with their adult chaperones, in a scene reminiscent of the first bird attack on the schoolchildren in Hitchcock's The Birds, which came six years after this film. (I admit I'm not the first person to make this observation by any means.)
Finally Karswell bluntly tells John that he will die on the appointed date unless he drops his investigation. Yet John still scoffs.
The bulk of the rest of the film is devoted to John gradually realizing, finally, that the danger is real, that there is indeed a hellish supernatural menace at work to bring about his demise. Gradually the demon becomes more and more manifest on earth. The climax comes aboard a train--trains are so important in Hitchcock films--with John and Karswell essentially playing a sort of frantic game of keep away with the parchment (except there is no one who actually wants to get it). As for the parchment, it actively attempts to destroy itself, so that the demon can never be averted.
One man's life depends on who wins this game.
Along the way there are some smashing set pieces, which were Tourneur's great wont. There's the seance with medium Mr. Meeks (Reginald Beckwith), for example. Mrs. Karswell persuades John and Joanna to attend the proceeding, which she hopes will convince the American that the danger to him posed by her son is very real indeed.
This proceeding quickly goes from quite comical--Mrs. Meeks (Rosamund Greenwood) and Mrs. Karswell warble the tune "Cherry Ripe" because the spirits do like music so, don't you know--to rather horrible as Mr. Meeks becomes inhabited by the spirit of the late Professor Harrington and begins shrieking in horror that the demon is up there, in the trees. John angrily switches on the lights, bringing Meek out the trance gasping in pain (to the great chagrin of his doting wife), and marches out of the Meeks' home, convinced that this is all just a cleverly calculated con.
This is a scene straight out of a Hitchcock film, with the kind of colorful performances from minor players that really enhance the story. After spending only six or seven or so minutes with this couple, the Meeks, I was utterly delighted with them and wanted to see a whole film about them as well. I recall Beckwith playing a nudist in the droll Pink Panther farce A Shot in the Dark, so obviously he had an affinity for eccentric characters; but Greenwood as his wife is great too, in a part of few words.
Then there's John's tense and explosive scientific hypnosis session with rustic farmer Rand Hobart (Brian Wilde), an accused murderer in a catatonic state and a member of the Karswell cult. Also involved with this session is Professor O'Brien (Liam Redmond), a genial Irish Catholic professor rather less skeptical than Holden. Both Wilde and Redmond (the latter of whom appears periodically throughout the film) bring terrific conviction to this scene (see pic near top).
Wilde, who appears for only about five minutes, during that time is so good he does about as much to sell to the viewer the reality of that damn demon as the demon itself does. Even John gets persuaded. It's a scene which would have graced any noir film. (And here let me add for Andrews' detractors that I very much enjoy having one of the great Forties/Fifties noir actors in this film.)
I exclude from this article pics of the demon itself in the hope that it will be a surprise for people who are lucky enough to watch the film for the first time. (Since the demon was pictured in all the film's promotional material, it's probably a fat chance, however.)
Personally I love its appearances and find both of them quite terrifying, though the demon is only a model (and at one point a man in a suit I suppose), rather than a computer simulation. But then I find the giant ape in the original King Kong awesome too. You decide for yourself!
Holden finds himself but an incidental fragment in a fearfully malevolent world.
Setting that matter to one side, however, I still think Demon is a great film. I've heard people say that The Spiral Staircase is the best film Hitchcock never made, but I can't help thinking that had Hitch made a supernatural monster film, it would have been a lot like Night of the Demon.
Below: Julie Andrews sings "Cherry Ripe" in Victor/Victoria (1982).
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