Often after a weeknight bar shift—one where closing goes smooth and we’re out at a reasonable hour—I’ll get home, crack a beer I really only want the first few sips of, and start a movie I don’t intend to finish that night. Some of these are ones I know I won’t be too invested in, ones I can as easily turn back on while cooking breakfast the next day, like an off-brand 1970s thriller or B-Western. The best ones are those that you drift off to sleep to, and want to drift off asleep to again the next night. They’re the film fables, the kind they don’t make anymore.
I had this thought while watching Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), the Albert Lewin-directed, Jack Cardiff-shot technicolor masterpiece set mythically on the Spanish coast in the 1930s. The film flows like an old fairy tale and a fevered dream, with promise and passion guiding every action, and the laws of the universe and eternity governed by unfulfilled true love. Drifting in and out of sleep as Ava Gardner emerges from the water on a ghostly empty schooner, wrapping herself in a sail, floating below deck and seeing a man paint a portrait of what seems to be herself feels like I’ve already slipped into a dream.
Timeless, perhaps haunted portraiture is what I found myself losing consciousness to just the other night while writhing in bed from norovirus, by way of Joseph Cotton’s obsessions with a ghostly Jennifer Jones in Portrait of Jennie (1948). The film’s most famous for its shocking color intrusion during its climax, where a bolt of lightning tints the black & white film green as a supernatural hurricane forms to doom the lovers, but the film overall is notable for its oneiric tone. Every time Cotten’s painter Eben spies Jennie (Jones), she’s at a strangely different age and of a different time, first apparently out of the early-1900s while he inhabits the depression-laden 1930s. Like Death in Venice’s Aschenbach (in more ways than one), Jennie’s vibrant joie-de-vivre brings life back into Eben’s art. Although she comes to embody everything that’s living for Eben, her spark exists just outside his world, coming with the blinding sun and going with winter fogs. I think I fell asleep when Eben went to visit Jennie’s convent graduation, or at least that’s where I picked it back up the next night.
Movies I’ve finished in a single night are Lawrence Gordon Clark’s legendary A Ghost Story for Christmas shorts that ran on the BBC in the 1970s. Perhaps the best of the bunch is his Dickens adaptation, The Signalman (1976), wherein a rural railway operator is haunted by an apparition that rings his incoming bell and appears at the end of his tunnel, waving some kind of warning. He recounts this encounter to a passing traveler, who at first spooked the signalman with his resemblance to the apparition. The traveler insists on a logical explanation, but there is none—bar for the ghosts that must inhabit the tunnel after a crash engulfed a whole passenger train. All of Clark’s annual A Ghost Story for Christmas shorts were adaptations; Dickens was the standout, as most came sourced from great British writer of ghosts M.R. James.
Jacques Tourneur also tried his hand at James, with his paranoid folk-horror Night of the Demon (1957), and while spooky in its own right (and including some of the earliest instances of jump scares), the overall motion of the piece doesn’t fit quite right for a falling-to-bed-fable. Better would be Tourneur’s elusive masterpiece I Walked with a Zombie (1943). The low-budget, Val Lewton-produced horror immediately whisks itself off into a dream world in the terrifying dark of the silent sea. Whether drowsy or fully awake, there’s something unplaceable about the way I Walked with a Zombie functions, as if the film itself is some kind of voodoo trance that creates its un-dead and somnambulant sleepwalkers—you can let the strange beat of distance drums carry you off the same as the characters.
