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NIGHT MUST FALL
Rating: 
USA. 1937.
Director – Richard Thorpe, Screenplay – John Van Druten, Based on the Play by Emlyn Williams, Producer – Hunt Stromberg, Photography (b&w) – Ray June, Music – Edward Ward, Art Direction – Cedric Gibbons. Production Company – MGM.
Cast:
Robert Montgomery (Danny), Rosalind Russell (Olivia Grane), Dame May Whitty (Mrs Bramson), Merle Tottenham (Dora), Kathleen Harrison (Emily Terence), Alan Marshal (Justin Laurie), Matthew Boulton (Inspector Belsize)
Plot: Dora, the maid to wealthy, cantankerous old Mrs Bramson is about to be fired. She blames all her problems on Danny, the man she is involved with who won’t marry her. Mrs Bramson tells her to bring him to her so she can sort him out. But when Dora brings Danny to Mrs Bramson, Danny instead succeeds in wholly charming her and she offers Danny a job. Mrs Bramson’s niece Olivia becomes increasingly suspicious of Danny and his influence over the house and begins to suspect that he may be responsible for a murder in the area and that the mysterious hatbox he carries may contain a severed head.
This is a rather good psychological thriller. Although it adheres closely to the original stage play (first produced in 1935) and its single setting, it succeeds in being remarkably suspenseful. At the center of the film is a performance from Robert Montgomery that, from the outset, is intensely threatening in its boisterous gregariousness. Although Montgomery’s amazingly broad accent never succeeds in convincing for a moment, the performance is a very good one, he having the ability to suddenly change between charm and threat without ever losing his smile. The scenes where he succeeds in totally wrapping Dame May Whitty around his little finger with a little flattery are highly amusing. Indeed the film is, if anything, one about the appeal that conmen have on their victims and how victims become targets of their own willing deception.
Skillfully using Montgomery’s performance director Richard Thorpe builds the film to a remarkable tension. Like the scene where Montgomery sits whistling as Rosalind Russell suddenly remembers how the killer was heard whistling in the woods. In another scene Montgomery stands by the fire confronting her – no violence is present in the scene but an enormous amount of inherent threat is generated by simply having him whittle at a piece of firewood as he talks. Quite a degree of sexual tension is generated too – although as had to be the case for the time nothing could ever be implicit – but the scene where Montgomery confronts Russell in the kitchen, saying he knows she returned because she wants adventure is one moment that comes close. Russell’s performance, a study in guarded suspicion, is one that is almost as good as Montgomery’s. The suspense is often undercut by a sense of humour – in the canny observations from the shrewd provincial characterizations of the servants, or like where the tour-guide turns up offering guided tours of the murder site, even lines like “They’ll never find her,” which immediately cuts to a scream outside the window as the body is found.
The film’s psychological portrait – in seeing Montgomery starting to crack under the weight of the guilt he carries – adds a particularly interesting dimension. But it is after this point that the film seems to falter somewhat, giving some of the characters particularly ill-motivated actions – Olivia for example takes the hatbox back from the inspector when keeping it would surely be the crowning achievement in her psychological battle to prove Danny guilty, and for no apparent reason she hands it back to Danny – unopened too. (At this point the film could have branched out into a real cat-and-mouse game). Equally so the police inspector turns up with evidence that Danny was not only seen with the missing woman but absent from his room on the night of the murder – but what does he do but let him go after Danny offers a nominal lie to explain it away.
This is a film that would benefit enormously from a modern remake. (It was remade, but not very well as Night Must Fall (1964) by director Karel Reisz with Albert Finney as Danny and Mona Washbourne as Mrs Bramson). A modern remake would readapt the play for the 1990s, allowing the sexual tensions their natural reign and cutting out the woolly-headed motivations that the film’s period allowed it to get away with.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1993
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