So Far

The brilliance of Dead of Night, Ealing’s celebrated omnibus of supernatural tales (not a horror film as contemporary commentators tend to call it) lies less in the individual episodes than its connections. It benefited hugely from the presence of the director and producer Alberto Cavalcanti, who understood the importance of how things fit together. He directed probably the most praised episode in the film, “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy”, but took much more pride from his impact

It was a great pleasure last Friday to be able to talk about British film noir at a conference in Paris. The general feeling that participants seemed to have at the end of this three-day event was that they had even less idea about what British noir was than at the beginning. But as the term is so often associated with disillusionment, doubt and confusion, I found it paradoxically satisfying that we were not able to reach any neat answers. The quote from Denis Diderot on the