Straight on Till Morning (1972) - film review

Tired of her humdrum life in Liverpool, twenty-year-old Brenda Thompson says goodbye to her mother and heads down south to start a new life in swinging London.  She dreams of finding a man who will whisk her off her feet and give her a baby.  She gets her chance when she finds a stray dog one evening.  She takes the dog back to her flat, washes it and, the next day, returns it to its owner, hoping for something more than a polite thank you.  The owner turns out to be an attractive young man named Peter and he offers Brenda a strange proposal.  If she agrees to live with him and do all his housework, he will consider fathering her child.  Scarcely able to believe her good fortune, Brenda agrees willingly.  What she doesn’t know is that Peter is mentally unstable and makes a habit of luring women to his flat so that he can slice them up with his Stanley knife.  Brenda’s happy little fairytale is about to become nightmarish reality...

With its almost surreal mix of social realism, fairytale artifice and implied slasher movie violence, Straight on Till Morning is one of the bleakest and most adult horror films made by Hammer.  It is a creepy synthesis of Beauty and the Beast and Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), where the two protagonists are emotionally unstable adults who resemble children living in a bizarre fantasy world.  The unreality of these two characters somehow makes the world they inhabit more disturbing, making this a particularly uncomfortable viewing experience.  If this film were a piece of confectionary it would be a sugar-coated marshmallow, with an arsenic-tipped razor blade hidden inside.   A propos, the title comes from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan: "Second to the right, then straight on till morning", an appropriate but unsubtle allusion for a story about two people who refuse to grow up.

Straight on Till Morning was one of a number of experimental thrillers that Hammer made in the early 1970s in a brave but ultimately doomed attempt to reinvigorate its horror portfolio and improve the company’s financial prospects.  Michael Carreras had recently taken over the management of Hammer from his father and was keen to move away from the traditional Gothic horror films that had been popular in their day but which were now looking increasingly dated.   Although Carreras ultimately failed to achieve his objective, he did allow Hammer to move into some exciting new areas and make some of its most interesting films, albeit over a very brief phase of its history.  

Straight on Till Morning was typical of the kind of film that Michael Carreras wanted his company to make – a traditional thriller that had something of the aesthetics and maturity of a European art house film.  With its sophisticated camerawork and frenetic crosscutting, the film feels surprisingly modern for its time, even if its depiction of the London social scene was slightly dated for the time the film was made.  Although it avoids the explicit visceral violence of today’s slasher movies, the film achieves the same effect through sharp editing and ingenious use of sound – the result being some of the most horrific sequences to have appeared in any British film.  The denouement is particularly sadistic, ripping the guts out of a fairytale happy-ever-after ending so ferociously as to make the brothers Grimm look like Enid Blyton.

The film was conceived by screenwriter John Peacock, who was eager to write a piece especially for up-and-coming actress Rita Tushingham, who had achieved instant stardom with her first two films, A Taste of Honey (1961) and A Place to Go (1963).  Michael Carreras liked the screenplay and engaged Peter Collinson, one of Britain’s most promising young film directors, to direct it.  Collinson had recently directed The Italian Job (1969) and would go on to make one or two other notable films before he died from cancer, a few years later, aged 44.

The leading male part was given to an unknown actor, Shane Briant, who would make his film debut in this film.  Hammer saw Briant as a potential star and would groom him as a possible replacement for its ageing lead actors Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, giving him prominent roles in films such as Demons of the Mind (1972) and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974).  Briant’s androgynous good looks and sinister yet childlike persona made him an ideal choice for the part in this film.  The actor would later find fame through his lead role in a memorable television adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1973).

Straight on Till Morning was released in a double bill with another psychological thriller, Fear in the Night.  Curiously, the latter was the supporting film, in spite of the fact that it featured some better known actors, Peter Cushing and Joan Collins – suggesting that Hammer considered Straight on Till Morning the superior film.  One of its marketing points was Annie Ross, the famous jazz singer who both appears in the film and sings its haunting theme song, which was released, unsuccessfully, as a single in the UK.  Whilst the film garnered some positive reviews, it was not a commercial success.  The failure of this and similar films would drive Hammer back in to making old-style Gothic horror films and low budget adaptations of television sitcoms, thereby hastening its demise.

© James Travers 2009

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