This is an odd work of psychological suspense. At its core, it’s a bleak variation on Bluebeard: a woman meets a man whose past lovers–still embodied, in a sense, in some shut-away part of his home–have all met bad ends at his hand. But it adds an almost hallucinatory excess of style on top of that, sometimes to its benefit and more often to its detriment.
Straight on till Morning embraces its dark fairy tale heart, though. It even makes it explicit. Dreamy, awkward Brenda (Rita Tushingham) writes fairy stories herself, and she believes in them with such ferocious intensity that she goes to London to will herself into one: she’s a would-be princess looking for an enchanted prince to father her child. Fittingly, Tushingham plays Brenda with a lot of delicate strangeness, like she’s at an odd angle from everyone else’s reality.
Everyone else is in 1973, and she’s in Bruno Bettelheim, walking about in a world of fate and enchantment. She believes in, and seeks to live out, ideas that are big and raw and ungainly. This gives her a peculiar force, because the scale she’s operating on is so much bolder and vaster–she perceives archetypes and Platonic ideals before she perceives people and details–but it also makes her, crucially, not normal. She smiles too much. She tries to talk to men on the street.
It keeps her from connecting with the people she meets, even though they’re not quite as cruel as you might expect. It also leads her straight to serial murderer Peter (Shane Briant).
These two have a warped meet cute that could, in some other movie, lead to an oddball rom-com. Brenda remembers bumping into Peter on the street, and when she comes across his lost dog, Tinker–trailing his snapped lead behind him–and spies Peter calling for him, she realizes she has a surefire way to meet her prince. She takes the dog home–a move even Peter recognizes as odd–and spiffs him up with a bath and a bow before she brings him back. And is there anything Peter can do to return the favor? Why, yes: father her child.
He’s one of the only people in the world who would accept this proposal at face value and return it with one his own. He wants her to share a dream with him, be the literal Wendy to his Peter Pan: keep house and save him from a workaday adult world. All the oddness and intensity others reject about her, and the (relative) physical plainness that bars her from taking another lover–all of that is what Peter prefers. It’s a kind of love story on both sides.
But she doesn’t know what fairy tale Peter’s already in. If he’s a prince, he’s a cursed one who’s come to bitterly resent his own enchanted beauty and lash out whenever he finds it in others. This includes, in a scene that’s effectively harrowing even mostly off-screen, lashing out at his prettified dog … with a box-cutter.
As bizarre as all this is, it’s all fairly typical of the strange, almost surreally lucid British suspense of its era: a folie a deux where there’s an almost clinical exploration of a psychological strangeness that is itself too deliberately lyrical and literary to be quite real. Straight on till Morning, however, smashes it up with a hyper-kinetic editing style that makes its earlier acts a kind of cinematic chopped salad. It feverishly jumps from one impressionistically rendered scene to the next, trading any sense of flow for a more mosaic-like sense of mood that, alas, doesn’t hit the depth or social commentary of something like Peeping Tom. Even more than the hard-to-listen-to dog killing, this excessive frenzy of cutting makes it hard to recommend the movie, especially since it also feels at odds with the story’s actual strengths. It could have been based on a Ruth Rendell novel, but Rendell would have kept much tighter control of the material. This is too restless: by the time I’m allowed to settle into the bizarre tragedy of Brenda and Peter, I’m exhausted from all the visual overload.
Nevertheless, as one of Hammer’s occasional non-horror productions–though it’s certainly horror-adjacent–this is an intriguing, ambitious curio that, for all its flaws, is quite striking. It can’t quite do what it’s doing, but I like that it tried, and both Tushingham and Briant have the right off-kilter energy for their roles. It feels like the kind of movie it will be hard to shake having seen, and years from now, I’ll be trying to remember what film had the drawer full of murdered women’s money or the dog that was killed because someone gave it a bow. And I’ll be pleased to hit upon this name again: Oh, yeah, that. What an odd little film.
Straight on till Morning is streaming on Tubi, Shout, and Prime.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
Lauren James’s ProfileTags for this article
More articles by Lauren James
Anthologized
Dan Duryea gets a shave and a second chance.
Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
The Great S2E8, in which Gillian Anderson as her mother wreaks havoc on Catherine’s life just as she’s about to give birth. Her arc here ends in very Great fashion and it’s fun to watch Anderson (of course), icy and elegant, and Elle Fanning in a more manic, desperate mode as Catherine seeks approval from someone who can’t believe in her the way Marial or Peter does. Guest starring Jason Isaacs too as a hallucinatory version of Peter’s dad.
I also have thrown on some Archer S1 episodes while I recover from strep throat. Weird how (1) the animation in S1 is really crude, especially in the faces, and not in a good way and (2) I am truly at a point where the humor I loved as a teen/college student has firmly calcified, feeling of a specific era even when it’s funny. (Fat jokes, some sorta trans jokes, gay jokes but at an awkward stage where the culture is trying to recognize homophobia isn’t actually funny, etc.) Nevertheless, “Phrasing” has become a part of my vocabulary and it probably won’t leave. Some great voice work here esp from Judy Greer and Jessica Walter. “Oh, was that not rhetorical?”
Justified, Season Five, Episode One, “A Murder of Crowes”
This is the start of the season that, as I remember, most people don’t like. Part of it is the Rapaport of it all, which I get – the guy has a douchebag face, though he seems to work for the character so far, and the show is working so far. If I have a real problem with this new Crowe, it’s that it feels like we’re repeating ourselves in a way season 4 explicitly didn’t. Opening with things working out for Dewey Crowe is funny enough even without the extra note that it’s caused by Raylan’s violent approach. Meanwhile, Boyd is struggling to keep his place in the world, which feels like a natural consequence delivered in an unnatural way.
Detroit being blue is funny – like a reverse of the cliche of Mexico being yellow, or like someone on the crew having seen the other parts of Traffic. Live the Dave Foley cameo as a Canadian.
Biggest Laugh: “Quality time is very important when they’re little!”
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “I’d like to note he thought he had four kidneys.”
Top Ownage: “Now pick up my goddamned money!”;
This is one of Grant’s favorites, as a counterpoint to a possible general trend. IIRC, he believes it’s the most Leonardian.
I wish I’d quit after season 4 to be honest, although I’ve heard plenty of defences of the last couple of seasons I just found them to be a slog.
Inside No. 9, “Mother’s Ruin”
Very cool blend of a British gangster story (I love that the gangsters move from using established Cockney rhyming slang to inventing their own, making them occasionally incomprehensible even to each other) and a dark horror/necromancy plot, with the relationship between the two brothers (Pemberton and Shearsmith) ultimately becoming quite touching and redemptive, especially considering one of them almost made the other into a blood sacrifice. Some nice gore, a very good comedy-drama-horror balance, and a great ending.
Live Music – my first gig of the year! I supported a French band called Special Friend who had an appealing laid-back noisy indie-pop vibe. Kinda reminded me of Yo La Tengo even though I wouldn’t actually say their songwriting was similar. My set went well, I practised hard for this one after a few months gigless and I was right on the edge of messing up my own voice as a result, but it held out and otherwise I felt well prepped. Did one brand new song which went well and felt good! The other support dropped out so it ended up being an early finish and, it being a Tuesday night, basically everyone was happy about this.
Double woooo for your own live music!
Interesting! This sounds low-key appealing to Tristan and I given our mutual predilection for believing in stories’ power over reality.
This is an interesting one to watch in that light, because while one could technically read it as reality (brutally) winning out over story, I feel like it’s really more like one story wins out over another.
Daleks’ Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. – Clearly, by 1966, it was the Daleks and not Dr. Who that was a selling point, on TV and in theory in the movies, though this one didn’t do as well and plans for a third film were scrapped. As before, we get an adaptation of a serial (one that i haven’t actually seen much of yet), and despite there being very little here that feels futuristic, the story is a fairly gripping and surprisingly dark tale of an Earth nearly done in by the Daleks and the survivors doing whatever they can to just go on, including betraying Doctor Who and his friends. As before, the budget is low for a movie but still allows for much better effects than on the Beeb, and we get some great visuals of ruined London and a Dalek ship that is cheesy but also quite well put together. Cushing is a bit engaged this time around, and the cast includes Bernard Cribbins (the future Dr. Who fan favorite as Wilf) playing a cop who gets sucked into things because he thinks the TARDIS is a police box; and Ray Brooks (The Knack and How to Get It) as a resistance leader.
The Practice, “Final Judgment” – Ellenor’s ploy to prevent her client’s execution works too well: off her meds she is indeed legally insane, but now that she’s off the meds, the judge rules if she goes back on them, the execution goes forth. Ellenor just barely manages to convince the judge that the client was insane when she committed the murders, saving her for now. But this is really David E. Kelley firmly arguing against the death penalty, going so far as to quote large segments of Clarence Darrow’s argument against executions from the Leopold & Loeb trial (the speech Orson Welles used in Compulsion). As someone on the same page as Darrow, I am fine with this, even if it doesn’t make for great TV more than once. Alfre Woodard is once again excellent, on and off the meds, and we get one of the better late run performances from Camryn Mannheim (who really seems less engaged now). There’s also a weird bit where the couple who won the suit against Big Booze refuse to accept a settlement and Bobby threatens to sue them for the good of the firm. With Bobby on the sidelines, Kelley doesn’t seem to know what to do with him. (Maybe McDermott being fired after this season was not a bad thing.)