{"id":359,"date":"2014-02-11T18:49:33","date_gmt":"2014-02-11T18:49:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dvdchoices.co.uk\/?p=359"},"modified":"2014-02-11T18:49:33","modified_gmt":"2014-02-11T18:49:33","slug":"dead-of-night-gets-the-blu-ray-treatment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dvdchoices.co.uk\/?p=359","title":{"rendered":"Dead of Night Gets the Blu-ray Treatment"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Dead-of-Night-8575_1\"<\/a>DEAD OF NIGHT Various Directors\/StudioCanal \u00a0<\/strong>StudioCanal have issued the newly restored Ealing Classic DEAD OF NIGHT<\/b> on DVD and Blu-ray- so how does this classic British horror film look in the 21st<\/sup> century? The glorious multi-director Dead of Night<\/i> is not quite the only British horror film made in the 1940s, but it so nearly qualifies for that title that all other rivals for the title seem footling. On its original cinema showing, the film created something of a minor sensation \u2013 it should be remembered that such fare was rare indeed on British screens in this era and audiences hungry for a dose of the macabre or the supernatural had to be grateful for all the crumbs they were thrown. The fact that such an unsettling piece of work \u2013 surrealistic and nightmarish on the deepest level — was a product of the comfortably bourgeois Ealing Studios, famous for its affectionate and indulgent pictures of a certain version of British life, is perhaps part of the film\u2019s appeal. The presence of the actors Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford (so memorable \u2013 and hilarious \u2013 as the cricket-obsessed Englishman in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes<\/i>) perhaps lends an air of cosy complacency to the piece, but their episode should be seen in context\u2019; the \u2018golfing\u2019 story is basically a jeu d’esprit<\/i>, an attempt to lighten the mood between darker sequences. And the darkest episode \u2013 which is also not without a deeply sardonic humour \u2013 is one of the great glories of British Gothic cinema: the ventriloquist’s dummy episode directed by the maverick Brazilian auteur Cavalcanti and starring Michael Redgrave as a man obsessed with his wooden alter ego (Redgrave, of course, was an actor well acquainted with psychological conflict in his own troubled life, often channelled into his work). The subversive nature of this deeply creepy episode should not be underestimated \u2013 and the murderous, independently-minded dummy at war with its putative master has been much imitated since (cf Lindsay Shonteff\u2019s Devil Doll<\/i>, 1964), and it is perhaps only within the context of a portmanteau ghost story film that such an unyielding picture of psychosis and obsession could be presented (it goes without saying that the force of the episode is often due to the quietly monomaniac playing of Redgrave; if the actor considered this performance to be a lightweight assignment sandwiched between his more serious work, that would be to seriously underestimate the truthfulness of his performance — a performance all the more impressive given that its levels of psychological observation were more at the service of raising the hackles on the viewer\u2019s neck (a function the film can still effortlessly maintain 60 odd years later) than offering a plausible picture of psychosis.Dead of Night<\/i> takes on board a varieties of interesting psychological issues, such as the stripping away of layers of psychological deceit in the innocence of the dream state and even incorporates an examination of the British tendency to \u2018pull together’ to obtain a common goal — which might be said to be what happens with the very disparate group of individuals that the architect played by Mervyn Johns meets at the house he finds himself arriving at in his recurrent dream. Are we shown in these very different types (young, older, spontaneous, stuffy) a microcosm of British society? (Even though the real agenda is, of course, to provide a variety of narrators.) And speaking of this last aspect, the film also provides an early example of the unreliable narrator — at least one of the stories we’re told is, quite self-consciously, a lie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DEAD OF NIGHT Various Directors\/StudioCanal \u00a0StudioCanal have issued the newly restored Ealing Classic DEAD OF NIGHT on DVD and Blu-ray- so how does this classic British horror film look in the 21st century? The glorious multi-director Dead of Night is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dvdchoices.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dvdchoices.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dvdchoices.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dvdchoices.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dvdchoices.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dvdchoices.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dvdchoices.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dvdchoices.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dvdchoices.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}