Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing confer with Georgia Brown in NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT.
film—adapted from John Black- burn’s 1968 novel NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT—ended the venture and Dennis Wheatley’s TO THE DEVIL—A DAUGHTER, which they had developed, was passed back to Hammer. Unlike Tyburn (pro- ducer Kevin Francis’ attempt to mimic Hammer’s style), Charle- magne seemed interested in ex- panding the genre envelope, drawing on contemporary British authors and mixing horror, sci- ence fiction and conspiracy thriller elements. Oddly, NOTH- ING BUT THE NIGHT—the title, never explained in the film, is from A.E. Housman’s poem “A Shropshire Lad” (“Oh never fear, man, nought’s to dread,/Look not left or right:/In all the end- less road you tread/There’s noth- ing but the night”)—shares many elements (Scots island, a police- man led to a fire by a little girl, even traditional songs in the score) with THE WICKER MAN, which Lee would appear in only a few months later. Now, Lee seems more passionate about THE WICKER MAN, which he
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didn’t produce, than this, which he did (though Keys gets sole producer credit).
A series of mysterious deaths of elderly, wealthy individuals connected with the shadowy Van Traylen Trust prompts Colonel Charles Bingham (Lee), a police official, to come out of retirement and investigate. A party of happy orphans, who live at an institu- tion on the Scots island of Bala maintained by the Trust, are in- volved in a coach accident. Young Mary Valley (Gwyneth Strong) suffers post-traumatic flashbacks to memories which aren’t her own, which intrigues concerned physician Dr. Haynes (Keith Barron). Bingham pres- sures his long-time friend Sir Mark Ashley (Peter Cushing), also a doctor, to take an interest. Anna Harb (Diana Dors)—Mary’s real mother, a former prostitute, murderess and psychic—tries to see her child, but the highly-in- fluential members of the Trust prevent her. When Haynes is murdered and Mary returned to Scotland, Bingham and Ashley
probe the Trust, which is at the heart of the British Establishment they are both members of, and discover its sinister purpose. The ultimate revelation aligns the film with a little cycle of self-perpetu- ating evil pictures which includes THE WITCHES (another Keys production), THE MEPHISTO WALTZ, THE REINCARNATE and THE BROTHERHOOD OF SA- TAN. THE WICKER MAN caught the zeitgeist with its grim, sacrifi- cial ending, but this defaults to Good triumphing (a bit too eas- ily) over Evil (the lesson about getting too near a fire while wear- ing ritual robes is reinforced again), albeit with an incidental breaking of a long-standing screen taboo that might have hurt the film’s commercial chances.
In Blackburn’s novel, the Lee and Cushing characters are called General Charles Kirk and Sir Marcus Levin. They appear in a series of books which mix es- pionage, crime and horror, from A SCENT OF NEW-MOWN HAY (1958) to FOR FEAR OF LITTLE
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