Cavalcanti and Dead of Night

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 on the shape of the film as a whole.

“About the sequence of the ventriloquist,” he wrote in the early 1970s in his unpublished memoirs, “the American critic Parker Tyler, in his volume Classics of the Foreign Film (1962), writes a sentence that pleases me, like all the other appreciations made about my work, including well-defined restrictions: ‘This concise story is so intrepid that it sheds its dazzle on its companions; so Cavalcanti, the unevenly gifted foreign director, may have shed his dazzle on the British directors here participating with him.’ ”

Cavalcanti was astute enough to understand how the phrase “unevenly gifted” could be a compliment, just as he knew that in the cinema a good, strong connection is the key to a successful whole: “Don’t forget that when you are shooting, each shot is part of a sequence and part of  a whole; the most beautiful shot, out of place, is worse than the most trivial.” This guidance was one of fourteen principles that he set out in an article that he wrote for the periodical Film Quarterly in 1955.

Cavalcanti returned to the theme in his memoirs as he reflected on the challenges that had been involved in integrating the episodes of Dead of Night into a single, unbroken narrative:  “In a novel to be adapted for the cinema, the scenes already have unquestionable links, which are necessary to the unfolding of the story. These are, in most cases, purely literary; while in a selection of scenes, made expressly for a film, cinematographic links have to be more direct and sure, permitting better control on the impact of their totality. Unfortunately, even the best producers do not always understand these considerations.”

The best producer with whom Cavalcanti worked in Britain was Michael Balcon, the head of Ealing Studios. Cavalcanti’s wish to produce a truly cinematic film led him, in about 1945, to suggest to Balcon that they leave on the shelf the script of the studio’s intended Dickens adaptation, Nicholas Nickleby, which, although it had been written during the war, had been postponed, eventually to go into production in 1946 after Dead of Night.

It wasn’t that Cavalcanti didn’t think it was a good script; he actually admired the work of its writer, John Dighton, who had “really tried with simple courage to transpose, not only Dickens’ style, but also his spirit, into film terms”. The problem was simply that a faithful adaptation of one of Dickens’ longer novels (816 pages in the Penguin edition) narrowed the possibilities for cinematic invention. Instead, Cavalcanti suggested a film that, under the title The Green Chair, would dramatise the hugely popular reading tours that Dickens undertook during the last years of his life: “Seated on a green velvet-covered armchair, the writer knew how to move his great public, reading the best episodes of the stories.”

But Balcon was not prepared to take a chance on an unproven idea. While he was responsible at Ealing for the exceptional collaborative spirit that had been so conducive to creative achievement, he was at the same time a practical man who had to keep the studio financially afloat. A well-known novel such as Nicholas Nickleby could provide the exhibitors with the box-office certainty they craved, but it was much more difficult to predict what might be the fortunes of The Green Chair.

Cavalcanti had no choice but to continue with the production of Nicholas Nickleby. It turned out to be a commercially successful film but not a memorably cinematic one. “The truth,” he observed, “is that the studio couldn’t lose the capital invested in the finished script and that they expected Nicholas Nickleby to become one of those perfect machines to create emotion.” The Green Chair became a ghost project never to have a life of its own. It left its spirit instead among the ghouls of Dead of Night, until ...

... half a century later, the actor Simon Callow proved the appeal of the concept when in 1996 he appeared as Dickens performing his public readings for the BBC TV programme An Audience with Charles Dickens. He then followed up in 2000 with the successful one-man play The Mystery of Charles Dickens.

All that is needed now is for the ghost of Cavalcanti to come back from the dead of night to turn The Green Chair into a movie at last. It would, no doubt, dazzle with the same cinematic invention as Rien que les heures, Went the Day Well?, Champagne Charlie and, not least, Dead of Night.