Straight on Till Morning

If, like me, you like your Hammer films to feature vampires and things that go bump in the night, you're likely to be disappointed with this film. After the first few minutes, I wasn't expecting Straight on Till Morning to be any good, but things do pick up; and once they do, the film does become interesting and represents a more than decent seventies offering, even if it isn't what we've all come to expect from Hammer studios. The film is set and shot in London and features a typically British seventies style, as the fashions and set design are very true to the period. The film plays out more like films such as 10 Rillington Place than your average Hammer Horror fare, and focuses on Brenda; a shy, irritating and naive girl who goes to live in London after telling her mother that she's pregnant. She moves in with the pretty Caroline, but begins to feel lonely and while out walking one night, spots a dog that she decides to kidnap. Upon returning the dog to her owner, the rather odd looking Peter, and telling him why she did it; he asks her to move in and she accepts. However, she doesn't realise that her new housemate is actually a vicious psychopath...

Straight on Till Morning isn't particularly violent or bloody, but that isn't to say that the film isn't disturbing. Most of the film's nastiness is implied, and while I wouldn't have minded seeing Shane Briant's silly hairstyle psycho going on the rampage with a Stanley knife, the way that director Peter Collinson ('Fright', 'The Italian Job') goes about implementing these scenes does give the film more of a poignant edge. The lead role goes to Liverpudlian actress Rita Tushingham, and for me she's just a bit too irritating. She fits the film perfectly by the way she looks and acts, but I found it very difficult to care about what happens to her due to the fact that I had to cringe during her every scene. Shane Briant is the other side of the offbeat central duo, and the most memorable thing about his appearance in the film is his haircut - which is ridiculous to say the least! This does, however, make his role all the more intriguing...as I never thought that someone who looks so silly would be capable of murder! The ending is a bit forced, but its fun enough getting there; the atmosphere is claustrophobic and the relationship between the leads is never boring. Overall this isn't a great Hammer film - but it's a different one and I enjoyed it.

Straight on Till Morning is certainly one of the most atypical films that Hammer Studios ever produced. It begins like a social realist kitchen-sink drama, replete with fragmented snapshot montage editing similar to Ken Loach's Up the Junction – incidentally, a film remade by Peter Collinson the director of this film. And for the first third of the film it seems like this is going to be another such gritty drama, however, it takes an unexpected detour when it suddenly turns into a psychological thriller. It's an extremely unusual combination that isn't entirely successful but definitely interesting. In actual fact it's one of Hammer's more intriguing efforts in my opinion because it's so weird.

The story is about a naive young girl called Brenda who moves to London to try and find a man. She winds up staying with a very strange foppish man called Peter who is in fact a serial killer of women.

The social realism and montage heavy editing is entirely at odds to anything else Hammer ever put out. This is a film that has way more in common with the British New Wave than it does with anything previously produced by the famous studio. None of the characters are particularly likable, with the men in particular very creepy and/or deeply unpleasant people with appalling haircuts. The central relationship between Brenda and Peter is, to put it mildly, bizarre. It's difficult to see what either of them sees in each other; while Peter's strange issues with beauty are a little hard to fathom. Nevertheless, I thought this one was not bad at all. It wasn't predictable in the way that most Hammer films tend to be. It was pretty bleak and overall a commendably uncommercial offering. Definitely worth a look if you like downbeat psychological dramas.

A conventionally offbeat early seventies psycho-thriller alive with zooms the way today's are with steadicam in which Rita Tushingham is a waif from the provinces who is abused by a smoothly misogynistic control freak upon her arrival in the big city the way she was seven years earlier in 'The Knack'.

It's quickly obvious were all this is going, but the vivid location work around Earl's Court and a good cast (most of them - like a feral Annie Ross in huge hair and a tiny dress - actually seen only fleetingly) keeps you watching; despite rather than because of it's gimmick in constantly referencing Peter Pan.

I hadn't seen this movie for decades because it hasn't been shown on terrestrial TV for years, but I decided to buy the Region 1 DVD release (there's no official Region 2 UK release as yet) and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Well it's difficult to dislike Rita Tushingham in any film, but it's directed in such a great style by the late/great Peter Collinson (director of The Italian Job (1969)fame), with a bleak beginning that could only be Britian of the 1960's/1970's and with a real snap shot of how things were in London back then.

This is a very different type of film from Hammer, when compared to their usual offerings and must have been truly shocking back then with it's level of cruelty, but it's a classic movie you simply have to own and the fact it's unavailable in the UK (the very place it was made & with an all British cast) is scandalous.

Although Hammer's output from the 60s and 70s was dominated by splendid Gothic horrors, their filmography from that period also contained a number of lesser known psychological thrillers—titles that were no doubt produced to cash in on the success of films such as Hitchcock's Psycho and French chiller Les Diaboliques.

One of the last such efforts to be produced by Hammer (before they turned their attention to making TV comedies into full-length features) was the intriguingly titled Straight on Till Morning, which somehow managed to combine murder with the more mundane elements of a 'kitchen sink' drama.

Rita Tushingham stars as Brenda, a desperate, dowdy young woman who leaves her home in Liverpool to try and find love and happiness in London. After finding herself a job in a trendy boutique, and a room to rent at a work colleague's groovy pad, Brenda begins her search for a man, but finds attracting the attention of the opposite sex much harder than she thought it would be.

When Joey (James Bolam)—the one man with whom Brenda might have had some luck with—winds up in bed with her blonde nympho flat-mate Caroline (the lovely Katya Wyeth), the distraught girl flees into the night where she chances upon a lost dog that belongs to Peter (Shane Briant), a wealthy young man who could be her Mr. Right. If only he didn't have homicidal tendencies, a bizarre hatred of beauty, and a very sharp Stanley knife...

With this interesting story, exploitative content, and talented cast, Straight on Till Morning could have been superb, but the film's iffy editing (which irritatingly intercuts rapidly between scenes), combined with director Peter Collinson's frustrating decision to suggest his nasty violence rather than show us the goods, ultimately means that the film doesn't fulfill its potential.

Still, even though the film isn't classic Hammer by any stretch of the imagination, it's worth checking out for the hilariously horrible 70s fashion and fun scenes of swinging London, Briant's incredible mop of blonde hair that steals every scene it's in, the hysterical moment when Tushingham goes into town to glam herself up only to return looking like a bad drag queen, and a couple of genuinely disturbing moments that include a surprisingly bleak finalé.

5.5 out of 10, rounded up to 6 for IMDb.