Review – Dead of Night (1945)

What eerie ability does this movie have to possess the minds of otherwise intelligent film people? It picked up ringing endorsements both from Martin Scorcese and one of my respected professors from my undergrad days. And yet it’s an insanely boring parade of un-scary scares. Almost every segment in this anthology piece is the sort of thing that might be unnerving if it actually happened to you but doesn’t make much of an impression when it happens to someone in a movie. The final sequence – a schizophrenic and his dummy bit starring Michael Redgrave – is the best of the lot, but even that one’s a cliché fest. I particularly dislike bad anthology pictures because they stand more of a chance than single-story movies; if one segment is weak, another might make up for it. But here everything is uniformly awful. See if desperate