In the 1940s, bombs were dropping on Britain and its gallant young men were doing their duty in khaki. Meanwhile, black-haired, velvet-voiced James Mason became Britain’s hottest domestic film star by turning women on with characters antipathetic to the Blitz spirit: dark marauders, demon seducers, Byronic antiheroes, and highwaymen wielding pistols and double entendres with equal zest. He tapped into the latent sado-masochistic fantasies of his audience, whether trying to clip Ann Todd’s fingers with his cane (in The Seventh Veil, 1945) or hacking Margaret Lockwood to death with a sabre (in The Man in Grey, 1943), before finding sainthood through blood loss in Odd Man Out (1947) and thus earning his ticket to Hollywood. Many of the films Mason strutted his stuff in during this time were made with propulsive energy by Gainsborough Pictures, one of Britain’s most prolific studios before it was eventually swallowed up by Rank. Quite a few of the “Gainsborough melodramas” and their ilk were essentially prototypical Harlequin romances, except with a vital strain of fetid sexuality and delight in finding the hot collar under the stiff upper lip and a quality of knowing, pulp energy that tickled the audience by taking their fantasies seriously, but not too much. Such films were the flipside to the era’s reputable war films, historical yarns that took a battered audience and let them bathe in a bit of lusty materialism for a while. Lockwood was Mason’s closest female equivalent, and the duo tussled with barely concealed erotic force and naughty dialogue in one of the most successful films of the period, Leslie Arliss’s The Wicked Lady (1945), where even Mason was forced to second-string status by Lockwood’s florid villainy.
The Night Has Eyes, also made by former journalist and screenwriter Arliss (no relation to the acting star George), seems to have laid down some of the blueprint for the melodrama craze, and represented one of Mason’s first real starring vehicles after several years of prominent supporting roles. Produced not at Gainsborough but by Associated British Picture, The Night Has Eyes casts bubbly blonde Joyce Howard against her type as Marian Ives, an uptight school teacher, crisply dressed and bespectacled in a manner reminiscent of Joan Fontaine in Suspicion (1941). Marian ventures into the unknown with her fellow teacher, the horny Doris (Tucker McGuire), in half-conscious search for any sign of what happened to their friend and colleague Evelyn one year earlier, when she disappeared whilst on a hiking holiday. Their vinegary elders in the school theorise snidely about her vanishing, which gets Marian up on her hind legs for swift rebukes. Doris tags along with Marian in protective acquiescence as they venture into the perpetually gloomy studio moors, with Marian’s obsession blinding her to the attentions of a good-humoured doctor on the train Barry Randall (John Fernald). With almost otherworldly compulsion, Marian leads Doris across the moors until they happen upon a remote house where the sole inhabitant is Stephen Deremid (James Mason), a dour recluse and former composer who greets the ladies with lines like, “I enjoy storms,” and makes sure their doors are locked to any unwanted visitations during the night.
Deremid has retreated from life since fighting in the Spanish Civil War and receiving a head wound. He’s oddly in a hurry to get rid of the two attractive women who stumble into his tiny world, but of course such brooding antisocial behaviour lights Marian’s fire, and she finds excuses to stay behind even after Doris departs in search of some less complicated men. Clearly made in the shadow of Hitchcock and the permanent mark he left on the British thriller, The Night Has Eyes also anticipates places Hitch would go. It also represents a pole of the romantic melodrama perilously close to the horror film, a genre banned for the duration of conflict by the British censor (indeed, genre historian William K. Everson included the film in his early ‘70s survey Classics of the Horror Film), although the film constantly hints at both imminent eruptions of violence and intimations of the supernatural that never quite resolve. Rather, the film strips the mechanics of Rebecca (1940) and its myriad Gothic predecessors down to the bare essentials of spooky house, naïve heroine, and brooding lover/killer. There’s also a strong dash of Gaslight (1940) and its ilk. I can see some vital thematic strands leading on to the oncoming noir film, including the common noir notion of a character who can’t be sure of his sanity because of war wounds. For further critical archaeological interest, here’s also distant anticipation of not just Psycho (1960) but also the giallo film’s appropriation of Gothic fiction canards for psychological symbolism, as Deep Red’s (1976) sealed room with skeletal secret is prefigured. Deremid is the archetypal stormy artist, possibly based on the composer Peter Warlock, and a Rochester type who tries to repel Marian with stern disdain that conceals his febrile desire, of course making Marian all the more determinedly interested (note to men: this only works if you’re James Mason).
The dance of attraction and repulse between the duo deepens as Marian dons a Regency gown dug up from the attic after peeling off those wet things, hinting at social regression in a remote place to a different time, recasting the modern duo as their historical avatars, to better enact longed-for sexual role-playing, thus essentially writing the thesis for an oncoming genre of historical bodice-rippers. Romance between the couple continues in violent alternations, from Marian dancing in liberated abandon to Deremid’s piano-pounding, to advancing on the camera in face-twisting anguish after he tries to run her off with insults, only for him to lose his nerve and chase after her. Intimations of that S&M quality common to these tales are on hand, as Deremid laughs over Marian falling into a water trough and then hefting her on his shoulder like a potato sack. Like the Women’s Pictures coming out of Hollywood, however, the appeal of this style of moviemaking very much hinged on appeal to female moviegoers, and The Night Has Eyes contains common motifs of the style, particularly in its heedless heroine on an adventure of self-discovery. Far from the odd blend of full-on melodrama and tongue-in-cheek proto-camp of The Wicked Lady, however, Arliss here generates a deliciously treacly atmosphere and plays things much more coolly in this 79 minute film. His Yorkshire is a fantasy place of never-ending overcast, the old dark house bordered by one of those natural features you know is going to figure in the plot prominently, the grim swamp where a slight misstep means horrible sucking death. Three paths through the mire are on hand, but only one is safe, which someone is inevitably going to have to choose between by film’s end.
One interesting, uncommon element here is very real: Deremid’s bitterness as a has-been veteran of the Spanish conflict, mentioning his spurning by his government and resentment that his health’s been used up and now has to sit out the new struggle against fascism. Although Arliss’ script assures that the world has caught up to his prescience, the acknowledgement is rare from a film of the time. Deremid’s abusive angst is soon revealed as more rooted in the fear that his wound has left him mentally unbalanced. He’s prone to blackouts during the full moon and fits of murderous stalking. Marian seems to witness good cause for this fear, as she comes across him in the night with the strangled body of a pet monkey in his hands. His housekeeper Mrs Ranger (Mary Clare) and handyman Jim Sturrock (Wilfrid Lawson) confirm this to Marian, as Ranger has remained to take care of Deremid since encountering him as a nurse in the recovery ward. Lawson gives a nicely off-kilter performance as Sturrock, seemingly a buffoonish hillbilly (calling his Capucin monkey a “cap-oo-cheen-ee”) but has the faintest hint of something perverse and threatening under the surface. The inevitable suspicion comes to Marian that Deremid might have killed Evelyn in such a spell, who finds signs around the house that she had visited it and constantly feels her presence, as if her shade haunts the place. Marian soon suspects the house’s fabled hidden room might contain her remains.
Penetrating this potential larder of Bluebeard is the last stage in Marian’s mission which has brought her with inexorable purpose from the cosy environs of her Girls’ School to the blasted heath of primal sexuality and lunacy. And indeed a skeleton sits boding in a chair waiting for her. But Arliss has a cool twist up his sleeve about both the nature of this discovery and the mystery enfolding the assailed lovers. He wraps up the film in a gleefully nasty confrontation out on the swamp where, of course, those three paths turn into Russian-roulette punishment for villainy, a one-in-three chance to escape, with the added kicker that although the safe path is chosen, hysteria and frenzied self-interest ends up feeding the swamp regardless. Howard, only 20 years old at the time, was a charmer in the mould of English film roses like Googie Withers, Binnie Hale, or a less posh Madeleine Carroll, and had made a mark in Love on the Dole (1941) where she worked with future ex-husband Basil Sydney; subsequently she made the equally nifty They Met in the Dark (1943) again with Mason before her acting career faltered and sank. She reinvented herself as a writer, anthologist, and socialite in Hollywood, whilst of course Mason went on to become a huge, if rather perpetually underrated star. The Night Has Eyes is one of the modest but real pleasures of ‘40s British cinema, but sadly good prints are hard to come by.
