“Bottles move… Things turn… Curtains catch on fire… Anything can happen. Queer, ain’t it?”
Things Happen at Night is a 1948 British supernatural comedy about a posh household bedevilled by a poltergeist coincident with an important business meeting.
Directed by Francis Searle from a script St. John Legh Clowes, adapting the stage play “The Poltergeist” by Frank Harvey.
Starring Gordon Harker, Robertson Hare, Alfred Drayton and Gwyneth Vaughan.
After its December 1948 premiere, the Tudor-Alliance production had another theatrical reissue in 1953. The same source-material comic play was dramatised for television in 1950 but no prints are known to survive.
Plot:
The upscale family of Wilfred Prescott (Alfred Drayton) has problems at their home with mysterious vandalism and fires.
It transpires that a poltergeist spirit is consorting with rebellious young daughter Audrey (Gwyneth Vaughan), but in their haste to collect on the damages the household has summoned an extremely annoying insurance agent, Joe Harris (Gordon Harker), who takes up residence indefinitely to sort the facts out – and to try to sell additional policies to a VIP weekend guest, a meat-and-dairy millionaire Elbury (Robertson Hare), overnighting to sign a contract with Mr Prescott.
An intruding Mr-know-all psychic-phenomena researcher with boxes of equipment and a sleepwalking butler add to the escalating ghostly mayhem.
Review One:
Directed by Francis Searle, a jobbing director who worked fairly steadily from the early 1940s to the beginning of the 1970s without making anything of any significance. This is no exception.
Based upon a stage play, The Poltergeist, by Frank Harvey Jnr, the film tells the story of the Prescott family, who are beset by strange events, usually involving coal. Hot coals from an unlit fire have burned a hole in a bearskin rug, other hot coals smash through windows and are found scattered on the floor.
As insurance man Joe Harris (Gordon Harker) shows up to assess the damage, a psychic investigator also arrives and announces that the acts are the work of a poltergeist, most likely connected to the family’s teenage daughter, who is going through a rebellious stage (this being a 1940s British film, this consists of announcing that she doesn’t like school).
While modern British cinema’s obsession with ‘street cred’ is rather pathetic, you can perhaps understand it more when you see older films like this, where everyone is frightfully posh – only members of the royal family seem to talk like this anymore. It’s one of those films that features a family who are supposedly struggling with money but still live in a massive house and employ a cook and a butler – I imagine working-class audiences were less than sympathetic to their plight. That such characters were considered ‘typical’ by the filmmakers says a lot. Harker, the main star, offers up a comedy turn as the lower class Harris (though when I say ‘lower’, he’s still essentially middle-class, with aspirations of social climbing that are, of course, mocked).
Snobbery aside, the main issue with Things Happen at Night is that it is neither scary nor funny. Performances are weak, characters unconvincing and the humour is feeble while the scares are non-existent. It takes more than the odd bit of petty vandalism to make a poltergeist scary.
The only real point of interest here is that this may be the first film to deal with poltergeists as opposed to ghosts or spirits. It’s also, oddly, structurally similar to The Exorcist – a young girl ‘possessed’, a mysterious expert turning up to exorcise the demon. That’s about the only point of interest though. A song and singer are credited, although neither appears in the film.
David Flint, MOVIES & MANIA
Second review:
“Well I certainly didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition,” goes the well-known Monty Python sketch. And I certainly didn’t expect to turn up an old British “quota quickie” horror-comedy (of a rather unscary kind) in what was sold to me as a DVD compilation of sinister old American crime dramas and glorious B&W suspense thrillers. Honest, constable, I bought the lot cuz Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss was in there, that’s wot happened yer honorable sir, I swears it!
Yet, Things Happen at Night grabbed me from the opening credit giving special thanks to Harry Price as technical advisor. Mr. Price – who died the year this programmer was released – had founded a prominent “National Laboratory for Psychical Research” and turned out a swarm of popular books covering his ghost-hunting throughout the UK. Some so-called haunted houses he championed, such as Borley Rectory, would become fodder for later horror-filmmakers. His own personal library of strangeness, the occult, mathematics and conjuring tricks allegedly numbered 4,376 volumes, and is now property of the University of London.
Even arch-sceptics have credited Price with having a remarkable mind and span of knowledge; pity that, having possibly begun his psychical career with some degree of scientific sincerity, he later embellished and exaggerated considerably, casting grave doubt on all his supernatural claims. Perhaps a Guilderoy Lockhart comparison is not far off the mark, Hogwarts fanciers.
Does Harry Price’s phantom involvement make Things Happen at Night more interesting? Well, no and yes, because otherwise, it is a fairly whispy farce, benefitting mainly from a stalwart ensemble of British comic-character performers providing a tame postwar sub-Ealing diversion.
Chief special effects are objects moving by themselves, which are mainly vases (this house seems to have the world’s largest collection of vases), which in the climax become skeet-shooting targets for lead farceur Drayton (who also DIED after this was made). There is a twist-ending punchliner/payoff that some of you might well see coming.
No backstory whatsoever is given to the poltergeist spirit – who, following 
Harry Price-style occult scholarship, remains always invisible, never manifesting as an apparition. It may amuse to ponder that this last detail, one of the defining principles of a “classic poltergeist,” was utterly abandoned for the Tobe Hooper/Steven Spielberg blockbuster Poltergeist series of several decades later. It is enough to make one wonder how much one’s degree in Parapsychology is worth in the jobs market nowadays. Best stick with insurance sales.Charles Cassady Jr, MOVIES & MANIA
Free to watch online on YouTube:
