Friday the Thirteenth

Interesting mix of Hitchcock-type of mystery and early film noir has a London bus careering down the road, on a rainy Friday the 13th, at 11.59pm, when lightning strikes causing an accident which kills two on board. Big Ben winds backward, and we're taken back to Thursday the 12th and shown (in far too much detail?) the lives of the people involved in said bus accident. This series of vignettes ties together each individual's story, placing them together on this doomed bus ride. The mystery comes from wondering which of the two passengers perish in the accident.

A bit of fun is had along the way at the expense of ridiculous clichés and superstitions (seven years back luck, throwing salt over one's shoulder, the film's date of occurrence) and the last scene, with the small boy and the old lady, is most amusing.

Despite its age, this film retains its undoubted charm and attraction, and is a fine, surviving example of early British cinema. It has an underlying air of eeriness, interspersed with shafts of humour which are not out of place, and serve to demonstrate the assured direction & production values involved. So many episodic type films are disjointed and untidy, but this is not one of them. The standard of acting helps a great deal, and the various disparate characters come across as interesting and believable. All in all, this long-forgotten little gem is well worth anyone's attention, in spite of the one jarring note in the film which, surprisingly, escaped the censor's attention!

This movie pops up now and again on the ABC in Australia at about 3 am in the morning.

It starts off with the scene of a bus crash in London.

The films has got flashbacks of each character as the film progresses, plus the lapsed photography of Big Ben winding back, to symbolise what events occurred thirteen hours ago, up until the bus crash.

It took me a while to understand it, but it was enjoyable nonetheless.

If Sean Cunningham and Quentin Tarrantino got together and made a film, this may be the result - due to the flashbacks and small stories tying in, and deaths.

I am unsure of the main characters, as it has been a while since I have seen it, but a rare gem indeed.

An early connecting lives film, much like a 1930s 'Pulp Fiction' without all the vulgar language and violence, it is very well done in most aspects, and considering when it was made, it is well ahead of its time. The film editing and the acting - especially from Gordon Harker and Robertson Hare - are particularly strong points of the film, and the overall product is engaging the whole time through. Arguably there are at least one too many characters, which complexes the film much more than is necessary, however this hardly subtracts from this very unique and highly interesting, but too often forgotten, early British film.

Absolute grabber of a movie, and given its age, years ahead of its time. I first saw this the week my dad came home with a neighbor's TV, that the guy had thrown on the scrap heap. A tinkerer with all things electrical, dad had it working inside two days. This was July 1955...and then probably only the third house in the street to HAVE television! Pretty much the first thing we ever saw on that grainy and flickering old 12-inch screen was THIS film. "It's pretty OLD dear," I recall my mom telling me!

Almost 50 years on, and it doesn't seem any older - rather like World War I in that respect! Terrific little fantasy about a London omnibus carrying thirteen passengers, that crashes, killing one of their number. Then, in flashback we pick up on the lives of these people and what brought them to being on this bus that very day.

Returning to the crash at the end of the film, the victim's identity is revealed, perhaps the inspiration behind the 1960 movie THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER.

If ever you come across this little gem, I suggest you watch it!