The Night of the Party

A film from the beginning of Michael Powell's career, still without Emeric Pressburger.

A serial product (Powell made no less than five films in 1934, and would make six more in 1935), with cinema gaining audiences due to the recent introduction of sound.

This is a typical detective film, in the style of Hercule Poirot's whodunit, almost entirely filmed indoors, without much rhythm and whose main virtue is to be able to keep in suspense, until the end, who the murderer is.

It would be hard to guess, from this film, the enormous qualities that the director would demonstrate in the following decade.

Obviously inspired by Agatha Christie and her stories of Poirot, Michael Powell's The Night of the Party takes what should have been a tightly focused murder mystery and just lets out all of the tension by actually trying to follow real police procedures. What should have been a pressure cooker of tension as everyone is trapped in an enclosed location with a murderer ends up just feeling wane as police pursue one lead and then another over the course of days and weeks afterwards. It just ends up feeling like a waste of a solid setup and concept.

Lord Studholme (Malcolm Keen) is having a party for the visiting Princess Amelia (Muriel Aked). To this party he invites a cast of characters from his daughter Peggy (Jane Baxter) to her friend Joan (Viola Keats), daughter of the police inspector Sir John (Leslie Banks), the writer Chiddiatt (Ernest Thesiger) whose work Lord Studholme's papers have regularly trashed, and Studholme's secretary, Guy (Ian Hunter) who is having a secret love affair with plans to marry Peggy. There are a handful more, but that's the real focus, everyone who could possibly have a motive for killing Lord Studholme. Though, there's extra business about John in that Lord Studholme wants to start an affair with her, but she doesn't want it while he forced her previous lover, Howard Vernon (Cecil Ramage), to sell him the love letters she had sent him.

The movie takes its time to establish everyone, a good half-hour (out of a film that's only an hour long), and it's probably the film's greatest strength. People feel individualized and specific. People get real motives for what they could do to Lord Studholme.

The plot turns at the party when the princess, deciding that she's bored and won't be told no, dictates that they should all play a game called Murder where, drawing cards out of a hat, one person is declared the murderer, a second the investigator, the lights should go off for ten minutes, and they should play act the murder and then the investigation. Chiddiatt jumps at the suggestion, getting behind it especially when he discovers that the princess has a gun with blanks in it, and everyone gets involved, Sir John's arrival negating the need to randomly choose someone to investigate. Of course, Lord Studholme gets murdered, and we have our suspects.

If Christie would have written this, it'd have happened in a remote country house, not an inner city, posh apartment. No one would have been able to leave as Sir John, or Poirot, would have kept everyone there to dig into their pasts and dramatically draw out the truth of who killed him for nefarious means. Well, that's not how Powell and his writers, Roland Pertwee and John Hastings Turner, decide to play things. Sir John gets immediately sidelined when he calls his fellow police officers at Scotland Yard to take over. They let everyone go, and the investigation becomes a series of interviews about information we already know, eventually zeroing in on one of suspects because his knowledge of certain aspects makes him the most obvious suspect.

And then we get to the courtroom scenes. I rolled my eyes instantly because courtroom scenes tacked on to the end of movies rarely work that well. They vacillate between boring and unbelievable, and at least this has the good sense to go into fully unbelievable and, one might even call it, exploitative. It's kind of amusing.

So, the actual murder mystery feels bungled, but the character work leading up to it is interesting in and of itself. It feeds into an abbreviated courtroom bit, but it ends with a kind of ridiculous bang, a ridiculous bang that I was pretty okay with, even if it was a small moment that did little to elevate what had come before. This isn't exactly some great failure, the character work is too decently well done for that, but it is something of a wet squib when it actually gets to the murder mystery part. In terms of this quota quickie period, it's very much on the low end, but that it's still sort of okay is a testament to Powell's abilities behind the camera, I think.

In 1935 Gaumont British produced 14 films including such classics as The 39 Steps and First A Girl.They also decided in that year that they would make this quota quickie and handed the job to Michael Powell.What the end results show is that even a great director such as Michael Powell can not turn dross into gold.Of course any film which features the ever theatrical Ernest Theisiger can not fail in part to be entertaining but this really is a rather lame effort and clearly Powell just wanted to get it done with as quickly as he could.The denouement of this film reminds me of the Perry Mason series when in the courtroom the culprit breaks down and confesses.To be quite honest by a process of elimination it is not that difficult to guess whodunit.Muriel Aked has what must be one of her best roles.

'The Part of the Nightie' ... sorry, I mean 'The Night of the Party' is yet one more of the many, many, many 'lost' films that have returned from oblivion ... although this particular movie might perhaps have done better to stay lost. The single most notable thing about 'Night of the Party' is that it was directed by Michael Powell ... a film figure of such major importance that *any* movie he directed automatically merits attention. I saw this movie at National Film Theatre in March 2000; as a Powell completist (and a fan of actor Leslie Banks), I'm glad that I saw 'Night of the Party' but I'm in no hurry to see it again. (Full disclosure: in the mid-1960s, I worked with Ralph Smart, who had worked on the screenplay of this movie. He told me quite a bit about his early career, but he never mentioned 'The Night of the Party'. Now I've seen it, I don't wonder.)

Two of Powell's contemporaries in the British film industry were Pen Tennyson and Arthur Woods. Both of these men died very young during World War Two, after making only a couple of films apiece ... but, in both cases, their immense talent was manifest in these films: so much so, that cineastes must deeply regret that neither director lived to create a mature body of work. In Powell's case, although his life and career were thankfully long enough to create some of the greatest movies in the history of cinema, his earliest efforts (unlike those of Tennyson and Woods) showed little hint of his immense talent.

Here goes the plot, then. Lord Studholme (Malcolm Keen) is a press baron -- one of his newspapers is a tabloid cried the Sun -- and, like most press barons, he's a deeply unpopular man. He hosts a cocktail party in honour of Princess Amelta of Corsova (where's that when it's at home, then?). This movie very quickly shapes up to resemble one of those Agatha Christie novels where several different characters all have strong motives for killing the same person: several different people attending the party make clear their animosity for Studholme. This being a very unusual cocktail party, the guests decide to play a brisk round of Murder in the Dark. The lights go out, and when they come on again ... Lord Studholme is dead. Conveniently, who should arrive at just that moment but Sir John Holland, master sleuth of Scotland Yard (played by Leslie Banks, in his 'Arsenal Stadium Mystery' whimsical mode).

As I've noted, there's no end of suspects for murdering Studholme. However, the most obvious suspect is His Lordship's secretary, Guy Kennington (played by Ian Hunter). I was so bored during this movie, I started thinking up dead-awful puns. If Kennington is the killer, would the corpse be Kennington Offal? Ouch! Anyway, this is the sort of movie where the most obvious suspect can't be the real killer. Or can he?

The climactic scene is the murder trial at the Old Bailey, and it just doesn't come off. It's badly paced and very static, betraying the stage origins of this material. The murderer gives an incredibly banal motive for the crime ... and proceeds to whip out a pistol in the middle of the courtroom. I attended several trials at the Old Bailey in the 1960s and '70s, before metal detectors were standard equipment in courthouses. I suppose it's possible that a trial participant (especially one who isn't the defendant) could have smuggled a firearm into the Old Bailey in those days ... and perhaps it was even easier in 1935, when this movie was made. But I found the climax of this movie deeply contrived, not least because the set design only vaguely resembles the interior of the Old Bailey. But maybe that, too, was different in the 1930s.

The popular character actor Ernest Thesiger is in this movie. Thesiger gave one of his very best performances in 'They Drive by Night', directed by the aforementioned Arthur Woods. Those of you who have savoured Thesiger's pull-the-stops-out turns in 'Bride of Frankenstein' and 'The Old Dark House' will have difficulty believing that this actor is capable of giving a dull performance. Overripe, maybe, but not dull. Well, in 'The Night of the Party', Thesiger's performance is dull and lacklustre. I was more impressed with Muriel Aked -- a tiny, bird-like character actress -- as the party's guest of honour.

I'll rate 'The Night of the Party' just 2 out of 10. I don't recommend this movie to fans of Leslie Banks nor of Ernest Thesiger. I can't recommend it to Michael Powell fans either, unless (like me) you're a completist who wants to see as much of this great director's work as possible. Right, you've been warned. Next case!

As a mystery fan I was a little disappointed by this whodunit. I was getting the upper crust characters confused with each other and there is little running time to get them and their situations sorted. But there are two distinctive characters who save the film from becoming too stuffy. They are Chidiatt the flowery writer and the slightly dotty Princess Amelia.

Princess Amelia of Corsova is played by Muriel Aked. She's the one who proposes the game of murder in the dark. She has brought a toy gun along for the occasion. In the past she reveals that she's been told that she "can see better in the dark than any other woman I've known" by a man who has had enough experience to tell I expect. She has the best lines in the film especially when she's talking to the General.

Chidiatt is played by Ernest Thesiger. He takes charge of Princess Amelia's toy gun as he enthusiastically joins the game of murder. At one point he says he prefers guns to flowers but I notice he carries a posy in the court scene. He gets away with murder the way he talks to the Judge. Thesiger is so thorny and witty as usual and his impishness brightens up the film.