Dead of Night,

Ealing Studios, 1945,

Footnotes

Dead of Night is a black and white British anthology horror film, made by Ealing Studios. The individual segments were directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden and Robert Hamer. It stars Mervyn Johns, Googie Withers, Sally Ann Howes and Michael Redgrave. The film is best remembered for the concluding story featuring Redgrave and an insane ventriloquist's malevolent dummy. The film is one of just a handful of 'true' horror films of British cinema's first half-century, and certainly the most important film in that genre until the beginning of Hammer's horror cycle a decade later. Released in September 1945, just a month after the formal end of the War, it marks a break from the documentary-influenced realism which had dominated wartime films, particularly Ealing's.

Provenance:
From the Markku Salmi Collection (1943-2020), filmographer and researcher, who worked at the British Film Institute from 1975 to 2003. Born in Finland, Markku emigrated to Britain in the 1960s, and lived in London the rest of his life. His passion for film led him to the BFI, where he first worked at the Stills Library under Michelle Aubert. There he displayed an innate gift for cataloguing and identification, and compiled and edited the National Film Archive's Catalogue of Stills, Posters, and Designs, published in 1982 and still an invaluable resource. In the late 1980s he became the first head of the BFI's newly-formed Filmographic Unit, overseeing credits for the Monthly Film Bulletin, Sight & Sound, National Film Theatre programme notes, the BFI Film Classics series, and many other BFI publications, as well as the BFI's SIFT database, until his retirement in 2003. He also co-founded the film connoisseurs' magazine Film Dope, for which he researched countless authoritative entries.
- Catherine A. Surowiec

Literature:
Nourmand, Tony & Marsh, Graham, Film Posters Of The 40s, London: Aurum Press, 2002, pp.96 & 97 (illus.)