Shuttered Deaths: Night Watch (1973), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Laurence Harvey

Based on a 1972 play by Lucille Fletcher (known to suspense fans as the woman who wrote the much-adapted radio plays Sorry, Wrong Number and The Hitch-Hiker), Night Watch is an admirably nasty 1973 English film shocker starring Elizabeth Taylor and Laurence Harvey.

Taylor plays Ellen Wheeler, a wealthy matron living in London with her second husband, John (Laurence Harvey).  Life is rather dull for Mrs. Wheeler, seemingly consisting mainly of buying flowers, doing jigsaw puzzles, smoking cigarettes and making insomniac late-night wanderings over her stylish house, gazing moodily through the great windows at that creepy unoccupied mansion next door with the menacing, constantly banging shutter.

Ellen wants to go away to the Mediterranean with John, but he's more interested in his vague job in finance and his after dinner drinks.  Then there's her visiting old friend, Sarah (Billie Whitelaw), who is between jobs and onto a new (married) boyfriend.  Oh and that odd garden-loving neighbor, Mr. Appleby (Robert Lang), whose father used to own Ellen's house, but is now reduced to a basement flat.

Just what horror goes on in that house next door?
Robert Lang and Elizabeth Taylor

Ellen still has nightmares about the death of her first husband, Carl, who was speeding down a country road at eighty miles an hour with some tart all over him, when he went off the road, killing himself and said tart.  Ellen had to go to the hospital to identify her husband, something she relives in her nightmares.  These nightmare sequences are some of the scariest parts of the film, being shot with jarring imagery that reminded me very much of a modern horror flick (see the last image in this piece, below).

Nightmares become real when late one night Ellen sees a dead body, bleeding copiously from a slashed neck and propped up in a wing chair, through the banging shutter of the house next door.  At least that's what she tells people, but of course no one believes her--not John, not Sarah, nor the skeptical Inspector Walker (Bill Dean), who is called in to investigate.

What's going on here? Was there really a body? Is someone trying to drive Ellen mad?

a vision of terror

Okay, if you haven't seen this film before, you're probably thinking this all sound pretty cliched.  But Lucille Fletcher by this time was a very old hand at this sort of thing and she definitely has some new tricks up her sleeve.

For suspense fans Night Watch is a tremendously enjoyable film, the sort where the reviewer wants to discuss the ending, but is honor-bound from doing so (be careful when you read internet reviews though).

Part of the fun as well is going back forty years to the early seventies.  There's Liz's flowing caftans, big jewelry and bigger hairdos, Laurence's turtlenecks and paisley ties, the men's ginormous sideburns (they start out huge with Laurence Harvey and only get bigger), and even, I swear to God, an ascot!

There's even a faux Tiffany light shade hanging over the dining nook (you can see it on the far left in the second image, where Liz is screaming her head off) that took me right back to the house I grew up in the 1970s (I wonder if that shade is still there).

Could Ellen be going mad?
Laurence Harvey, Elizabeth Taylor and Billie Whitelaw

How did I miss this film back in the 1970s?  I was just seven when it came out, too young for this sort of thing at the theater, but I'm surprised I never saw it on seventies television.  I loved these kinds of films back then (about my scariest film memory ever is watching "Bobby" back in 1977).

Elizabeth Taylor is great in this role, though I understand that it was the only Gothic she ever did.  Laurence Harvey, who was terminally ill at the time (he died only a few months after the film opened), is quite good too, though it's Liz's show.

The first thing I ever saw Laurence Harvey in was a late seventies rerun of "The Caterpillar," a famous Night Gallery horror story (Harvey did this the year before Night Watch).  He also played the sardonic title character in the blackly humorous "Arthur," an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  He starred as well in The Running Man, based on the Shelley Smith suspense novel, and, of course, the great espionage suspense film The Manchurian Candidate.  He's very good in these sorts of roles, where you're never quite sure whether he's redeemable or just flat-out wicked.

Is Laurence Harvey up to something again?

Billie Whitelaw became famous to American audiences a few years later as the sinister Mrs. Baylock in The Omen.  The year before Night Watch she co-starred in Alfred Hitchcock's penultimate film, Frenzy.  More recently, she had a memorable role in Hot Fuzz, a brilliant little send-up of police action films.

The late Robert Lang, who plays Mr. Appleby, also was a noted English character actor.  Bill Dean as the scoffing British police inspector does a good job too.

The DVD has a good print of the film, in which throughout, by the way, there is an adroit use of classical music (also the obligatory late sixties/early seventies spinnet).  All in all, this is a superior domestic suspense film, better than I expected it to be, and warmly recommended to those looking for a good seventies scare.

a frightening (though stylish) nightmare

A Touch of Class: The First Time He Died (1935), by Ethel Lina White, and Going Wrong (1990), by Ruth Rendell (Then and Now #3)

The first time he died, Charlie Baxter was genuinely touched by the signs of his popularity....

Reading The First Time He Died, the superb fifth crime novel of Golden Age British suspense writer Ethel Lina White, I was struck--not for the first time--about how oddly underappreciated Ethel Lina White is.  One of her novels, the once highly lauded The Wheel Spins (1936), was made into an Alfred Hitchcock film, The Lady Vanishes, customarily deemed the best of his British pictures.  Another White novel, Some Must Watch, was filmed in the 1940s by Robert Siodmak as The Spiral Staircase, a classic old dark house thriller and the movie most often assumed to be Hitchcock film but in fact isn't.

In addition to her good film fortune, Ethel Lina White wrote fine suspense novels that stand on their own merit and also are a (surprisingly neglected) link between the Gothic and sensation novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and modern psychological crime novels.

Ethel Lina White

I hope to illustrate this point in this installment of Then and Now by comparing The First Time He Died with Going Wrong, a novel by the great modern Crime Queen Ruth Rendell.

Ruth Rendell

The rarest of Ethel Lina White's crime novels, The First Time He Died is also one of the author's four or five finest.  Briefly, the novels tells of the scheme of three individuals--Charlie Baxter, his wife, Vera, and the couple's friend, Puggie Williams--to commit insurance fraud by faking Charlie's death.  Grave complications naturally ensue. 

Though published in paperback
by Collins, The First Time He Died is
the rarest Ethel Lina White crime novel

This suspense novel indeed is superbly suspenseful ("Miss White works up her macabre passages with consummate skill," declared one reviewer), but it also exhibits literary styling above the genre norm at the time.  The three main characters all are memorable, but so, even, are minor characters.  An anonymous  schoolgirl who develops an instant crush on Charlie when he performs a chivalrous act for her is, for example, expertly limned in the few pages of the book she occupies:

The girl went home feeling that every cell in her body had been subjected to a chemical change.  For the first time she experienced the chaotic upheaval of Nature.  Hitherto, she had been a boy, and would have been murderous to a Constant Nymph* on the hockey field.*

*(The Constant Nymph is a bestselling 1924 Margaret Kennedy novel considered scandalous by many at the time for its depiction of adolescent female sexuality)

Particularly interesting is White's depiction of how the characters in the novel are affected by their class sensitivities.  Charlie, who comes of intensely respectable middle-class stock, scandalized his family be taking a follies girl as his wife (White makes it absolutely clear that Vera's livelihood consisted of removing her clothes in public).  Both Charlie and Vera in spite of themselves are rather in awe of their friend Puggie, a bibulous sponger who tantalizingly may have been an Eton and Oxford man at one time:

It was evident...that he had begun life in a different social sphere from that of his friends, and had probably met them when he was sliding down the ladder and they were climbing up, so had clung to their necks, as ballast.

Charlie's sense of class inferiority comes into central play in the novel, when he becomes enamored with Jennifer Burns, a budding crime writer of superior social position.  Incidentally, Jennifer is no mere scribbler of puzzles, oh no!  She'll have you know that she has loftier pretensions than "mere puzzles":

"I came here to collect material for a book....You know, atmosphere and types.  I must get realism."

"What sort of a book?" he asked.

"Crime.  Of course, I shall concentrate on the psychological aspect--the mind of the criminal."

Since the reader by this time has long come to suspect that the mind of Charlie has pronounced sociopathic tendencies, the situation becomes quite interesting....

How similar all this is to Ruth Rendell's psychological tales of troubled urban loners, drifters and outright psychos, particularly her novel Going Wrong. This 1990 tale details the obsessive passion of street criminal made good Guy Curran for his childhood love (and social "superior"), Leonora Chisolm.  If it sounds a bit like Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby--albeit with the lyrical beauty and romanticism removed (there is little "gorgeous" about Guy Curran)--Rendell herself would agree, as she even references F. Scott Fitzgerald's great novel in her own book.

the sad romance of illusion

Guy's problems seem to stem from his inability to appreciate that the class barrier evidently is a nearly insuperable obstacle to cross even in Britain in 1989.  He is repeatedly belittled by Leonora's friends and family for his poor taste and his retrograde values (among other things, he thinks women should dress attractively, he likes Andrew Lloyd Weber musicals and he consumes meat).

At one point Leonora's mother, Tessa, lays it on the line to Guy: "To be perfectly frank, no matter how much money you've made, you don't belong in our class."  Granted, as Tessa goes on to add, Guy's criminal past and obsessiveness would be problematic under any circumstance.  Still, the charm of Leonora's smug family and friends quite escapes me!

With their shared themes of criminality motivated by class sensitivities and obsessive passion, The First Time He Died and Going Wrong have considerable similarity (it could be said that the Rendell novel, over twenty years old, itself is now somewhat out-of-date in this respect).  I would say, however, that as s a suspense novel The First Time He Died is clearly the superior of the two.

To be sure, Rendell has produced numerous genre masterpieces in the suspense field, such as A Demon in My View (1976), A Judgement in Stone (1977), The Lake of Darkness (1980), The Killing Doll (1984) and The Bridesmaid (1989) (to say nothing of her Barbara Vine titles), but I would not classify Going Wrong among these books.

Suspense is suspended and the great reveal is what the English call a damp squib.  There is a cruel twist that reminded me of the ironically-titled Julian Symons novel The Man Whose Dreams Came True (1968), but to me it felt perfunctory.  Finding the characters rather uninteresting and unlikable--excepting Guy's amazingly steadfast, second-best girlfriend--I didn't much care what happened to them.

Irony 101: be careful what you wish for

So, score one here for Ethel Lina White.  Let's hope an enterprising publisher reprints The First Time He Died.  It is, I would say, a suspense classic. Now I think I may go reread A Demon in My View or The Lake of Darkness....

Note: For a recent piece on Ethel Lina White, see Martin Edwards' review of her novel Some Must Watch. The Passing Tramp

Another Pass by Jefferson Farjeon (1883-1955)

J. Jefferson Farjeon (the "J" stands for Joseph--Farjeon was named for his maternal grandfather, the famous American stage actor Joseph Jefferson, and was known as "Joe" to friends and family, even though readers knew him as Jefferson Farjeon) is one of those prolific Golden Age mystery writers who has fallen into almost total obscurity today--quite unjustly, I think.

(pictured below: Farjeon's grandfather, Joseph Jefferson, in his signature stage role, "Rip Van Winkle," and  Jefferson's country home in southern Louisiana, today a stunning house museum, where Farjeon's mother grew up)

 And a link to an informative page on Joseph Jefferson (1829-1905):

http://www.monroehistorical.org/articles/files/090101_jefferson.html

Between 1924 (The Master Criminal) and 1954 (Castle of Fear), Farjeon published by my count fifty-five adult mystery novels (including a few under the name Anthony Swift; he also published several children's mysteries).  He achieved considerable popularity in both the United States and Great Britain, in the latter country becoming one of the staple authors of the Collins Crime Club from 1929 until his death; and he had the distinction, along with such authors as Josephine Tey, Ethel Lina White, Selwyn Jepson and Francis Beeding, of having one of his works, in his case the play (later novel) No. 17, made into an Alfred Hitchcock film.

(pictured below: still from the Alfred Hitchcock film Number 17.  See http://dcairns.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/candlelight-and-shadowplay/

Farjeon is barely remembered today, except for the Hitchcock connection and for his being the brother of beloved children's writer Eleanor Farjeon (he was also the son of the accomplished Victorian novelist Benjamin Farjeon, but the father himself is pretty neglected these days as well).

Eleanor Farjeon

Why Farjeon should be so forgotten escapes me.  He was a popular writer in his day and received many good notices on both sides of the Atlantic.  Granted, a number of his novels fall into a pattern, as one would expect from a prolific genre writer.  And to be sure, Farjeon primarily wrote thrillers, but he was no slavish imitator of such bigger name thriller writers as Edgar Wallace, Sax Rohmer, Sapper and Sydney Horler (for one thing, Farjeon, whose father was a Jew, eschewed the antisemitism commonly found in English "shockers" at this time).  Joe Farjeon on the whole was a gentle and whimsical writer, giving his works their own distinct tone and style, closer, arguably, to the thrillers of Agatha Christie than those of the men.

At heart, Farjeon's thrillers are tales of the empowerment of the weak and the meek, who confront fantastic adventures and dark menaces, but triumph in the end.  Not counting his series character, the downtrodden but resilient "passing tramp" Ben, Farjeon's protagonists often are male clerks or female secretaries, "little people" leading drab, harassed lives, and longing for adventure--something they definitely find in the course of the narratives!  Farjeon is one Golden Age author disinclined to admire people simply because they have titles.

One can dip into any of the Farjeon books from the 1930s and 1940s almost at random and get a sense of his style.  The Windmill Mystery (1934), for instance, is a typical enough example (Farjeon sweetly dedicated this book "To My Dear Mother, who can no longer enjoy my books, but who still seems close to me when I write").  Let's let the Collins Crime Club tell us about the plot of this tale:

The windmill stood out dark and sinister against a background of angry cloud-castles that foretold the coming storm.  Lionel Savage, pack on back, and all set for a week-end hike, glimpsed it from the little wayside railway station and decided it might prove a suitable objective.  Crossing the heath, he met a charming girl, and when the storm broke they raced to the mill for shelter.  It was the start of an amazing adventure which rapidly developed in a crescendo of excitement, until as one hair-rising incident succeeded another the two hikers found themselves involved in a sort of non-stop Grand Guignol of thrills.

Now who can resist little wayside train stations and dark and sinister windmills?  Admittedly, this is a pretty typical sort of plot for Farjeon (with a windmill rather than a house, inn or even castle).  But Farjeon also wrote some unique books that emerged rather ahead of the rest of the pack.

Farjeon novels that in my view particularly stand out include (besides such "Ben the Tramp" books as Ben on the Job, 1952)

 the following titles:

1. Holiday Express (1935)

In this train mystery thriller the protagonist is a wonderfully-characterized child, an ingenuous young boy, and the book is written as if he himself had written it.

2. 13 Guests (1936)


Farjeon's take on a full dress, traditional country house detective novel, impeccably done.  The dust jacket of the American edition, pictured below, below carries Dorothy L. Sayers assertion that "Jefferson Farjeon is quite unsurpassed for creepy skill in mysterious adventures."

 3. Mystery in White (1937)

A classic situation: Christmas travelers exiting a snowbound train come upon an empty country house where something quite unpleasant may have happened....

4. End of an Author (1938)

A remarkable and original work: the perilous adventures of a burned-out, extremely prolific thriller writer (Farjeon himself had published thirty thrillers in fifteen years at this time) and his lady secretary in a remote part of East Anglia; wonderfully self-referential about the genre and the setting is superb.  Reprinted as Death in the Inkwell (1942) in the United States, with a last page that can be read only with the use of a mirror!  This tantalizing feature does not appear in the earlier British edition, evidently.  Willliam Lyon Phelps, former Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale and a prominent public intellectual in the United States who was a great admirer of Farjeon, called this tale "a brilliant, original and very exciting murder story."

5. Aunt Sunday Sees It Through/Aunt Sunday Takes Command (1940)

In this one the protagonist is an elderly woman who, thrown into a nest of crooks, proves to have amazing resources of character to draw on and a positive genius for extemporizing.

6. The Judge Sums Up (1942)

Farjeon's most successful attempt at a true detective novel and a forgotten courtroom classic.

7. The Double Crime (1953)

A final country house detective novel in the traditional style, except here one of the key narrative focal points is a down-at-his-heels, ex-lag, Cockney traveling salesman, sympathetically presented.  An interesting look is provided at mansion life on both sides of the baize door.

Also worth noting is Farjeon's apocalyptic sci-fi novel, Death of a World (1948).  Appalled by the carnage of World War Two and the Cold War atomic arms race that followed, a dismayed Farjeon produced what was by far his bleakest book.  Some of Farjeon's post-war crime novels are darker as well, but none of them are remotely as grim as Death of a World, a genuine social protest novel by a Golden Age crime writer.

 In the May 1939 Penguin paperback edition of No. 17 (which was reprinted four times by August 1941), Jefferson Farjeon's author's bio (pictured above) gives some idea of his unique personality as a crime thriller writer:

He walks up and down when talking and thinking, always types his work himself, is ultra-tidy, vegetarian, but doesn't like vegetables (hence difficulties), takes a cold tub every morning, is pacifist, likes photography, tomato soup and drawing funny animals (Animals are funny because I can't draw them, he says).

Crime thriller writers tend to cultivate tough guy (and these days tough gal) images.  Not Mr. J. Jefferson Farjeon, who dared to be different.  Read him yourself for something different (if you can find him!).

The Passing Tramp

Ah, the passing tramp!  That convenient figure in Golden Age English country house mystery on whom the posh people try to pin the murder of their despised weekend host (the one they themselves all had quite excellent motives for killing).  Who could have slipped in through the French windows and clobbered Sir Ovid Overr-Baring with that bust of Wellington?  Why, it must have been a passing tramp, of course!

One enterprising Golden Age English mystery writer, Jefferson Farjeon (1883-1955), had the originality to make just such a "passing tramp"--a cheeky Cockney fellow named Ben--into one of the era's unlikeliest series detectives.  Ben appeared as the lead character in a series of eight Jefferson Farjeon crime novels, published between 1926 and 1952.  Ben also featured in an early Alfred Hitchcock talkie film, Number 17 (1932), which was based on the hugely popular play by Farjeon of the same title (it was also novelized by Farjeon).

Pictured at the top of this post (and, indeed, at the top of the page) is Leon M. Lion, a popular English actor who played Ben on screen (and on stage).  I much prefer the Ben of Farjeon's books, because over the course of the series Ben develops greater depth than Leon M. Lion's film version, who rather reminds me of Moe of the Three Stooges.  Be that as it may, the dust jacket of Detective Ben (1936), seen below, clearly owes a debt to Mr. Lion.

After World War Two, Farjeon revived Ben in two novels he published in 1952, just a few years before his death from cancer. The very last Ben novel, Number 19, likely was conceived by the author as the resilient tramp's last hurrah, its title obviously deliberately recalling the title of the first Ben outing.  The dust jacket of this tale better captures the Ben of the novels, I think (note his worn, split shoe).

One of the Ben novels was reprinted in 1986 by the Collins Crime Club as part of H. R. F Keating's "Disappearing Detectives" series.  Ben is worth reviving, both for his own intrinsic merit as a character and as evidence that the Golden Age mystery did not always revile the lower classes.  Author Seton Dearden approvingly wrote of Ben that he "is a mixture of Trimalchio and the Old Kent Road, a notable coward, a notable hero, above all a supreme humorist"; while the Saturday Review lauded his "adorable Cockney insouciance and nerve."

Interestingly, Jefferson Farjeon was a brother of Eleanor Farjeon, the famous children's writer, and a son of Benjamin Farjeon, a Victorian-era novelist who during  a highly prolific writing career produced several worthwhile mystery sensation novels.  The son carried with him something of the father's interest in and empathy for England's poor and downtrodden.

Jefferson Farjeon's "Ben" Mystery Thrillers
No. 17 (1926) (filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Number 17 in 1932)
The House Opposite (1931)
The Murderer's Trail (1931)
Ben Sees It Through (1932)
Little God Ben (1935)
Detective Ben (1936)
Ben on the Job (1952) (reprinted 1986)
Number 19 (1952)