Starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Diana Dors, this film starts with three mysterious deaths, where the people involved appear to be murdered but without putting up a fight. The deaths are ruled as suicides, but Police Colonel Bingham (Lee), regards the deaths as suspicious. All three are trustees for a prominent orphanage in Scotland, and after a mysterious bus crash nearly takes out three more trustees, events look more suspicious than ever. Lee is joined by his friend Dr Mark Ashley (Cushing) to investigate the mysterious happenings.
The film starts out as a detective story, with the policeman and his friend trying to work out who is behind the mysterious deaths. One of the orphans from the bus crash is in the hospital, and her guardians want her discharged. A young doctor is reluctant to do so, confiding in his superior (Cushing) that there is something wrong with the girl, who keeps moaning about fire and burning when she is not burned and there was no fire in the accident. The girl’s mother Anna Harb (Diana Dors) turns up at the hospital, but as she is no longer the girl’s legal guardian she is not allowed to see her. A reporter picks up the story when Harb phones the paper, hoping she can make a story out of the separation of mother and daughter (even though the mum has been in jail for murder, making a decent reason why the girl would be taken into care.) The younger doctor hypnotises the girl Mary, getting more details about the ‘fire’ which are about some completely different event and certainly nothing the child has experienced personally. The reporter meets the doctor and persuades him to let the mother and she come to the hospital to meet Mary.
Bingham and Ashley arrive to a hysterical scene. Anna is screaming at and berating her daughter outside the hospital room, who is crying and trying to get away. The reporter is trying to pull Anna away, and other hospital staff eventually overpower her. She runs off, and Ashley, incensed that his young colleague was involved in such a thing, enters the hospital room, only to find Ashley dead, stabbed.
This leads the investigation to the orphanage where Mary lives, on a Scottish island. Anna goes there as well, and police search for her, believing her responsible for killing the doctor and, later, one of the boys from the orphanage. Three more trustees apparently die in a boat explosion, but Ashley examines the remains recovered from the boat wreckage and concludes the trustees were already dead. This convoluted plot leads to a strange and supernatural conclusion.
While Lee and Cushing are, as always, excellent, they struggle to lift this film above the mediocre. Dors is a capable actor but is given a role which in many respects is very cliché. Other familiar British actors (including a young Michael Gambon) do their best but most of the characters are not very well written.
In my opinion this film had a premise with some promise and could have been a lot better with a better script. It is slow moving in parts, especially with lots of unnecessary footage of Anna the mum trudging around the island hiding from the police and watching the orphanage, most of which did not add to the story at all. The supernatural element is only made clear at the end and would have been improved if it had been clearer that something spooky was going on earlier. The only hint was Mary’s hypnosis bringing out a memory that belonged to the founder of the trust that ran the orphanage. The young doctor theorizes about the girl being psychic, but nothing else is really said until the end.
Spoiler alert. Other scenes involving the police, locals helping to search the island, a missing child who turns up dead with occult symbols on his body, and so on, seem to be padding out the bare bones of a story that really could have been much more interesting. It is only at the very end that we find out the ‘dead’ trustees have been transferring their memories into the orphaned children, removing the children’s own. The trustees want to live forever. But this is where a story more focused on this would have been helpful because the viewer is left with a multitude of questions.
How is this memory transference done? The film does not even attempt to answer this. A couple of the trustees are left as adults, to run the orphanage and put up a front, one assumes. Did they volunteer not to be made young? That was nice of them. There seem to be teachers and carers who are not trustees. Are they not noticing anything? When the boy disappears and is found with occult symbols, there is no point to the marks on his body except that Mary (who has the founder’s memories because she is the founder) felt like it. Mary appears to be unhinged. She actually kills Anna after Anna breaks into the orphanage. Is the memory transfer process flawed, causing insanity? Or is it just Mary/the founder who is crazy? While the other trustees as children are in the final scene, we only know who they are because they are wearing adult clothes. They say nothing and we get no sense of what they are like. They follow Mary, but earlier one of the remaining adult trustees has said the founder knows everything and they have to follow her. It is like a cult.
The ending is so inexplicable that it suggests the film makers had no real idea how to end the story. The arrival of Ashley and police via helicopter save Bingham (who the children were about to kill) but the wind generated by the helicopter fans the bonfire flames so that Mary’s clothes are lit on fire. She screams and runs off, stops to make some statement about ‘cursing’ God, and then throws herself off the cliff into the sea. Then, all the other child trustees also head for the cliff and jump into the sea. One assumes they all drown. This is where the film finishes. It would be in keeping with the cult-like mindset, but there is no build up to this. Again, because the others have not spoken we get no sense of how they feel about anything, other than jumping in after their leader. It really is one of the odder endings I have seen in a movie.
“Nothing But the Night” is one of those films that are frustrating because they are missed opportunities. Had the writers written a story about a cult that wants to live forever, that uses (and essentially kills) orphaned children to get what they want, exploring their attitudes and how they are achieving their goal, we would have a much better film. As it stands, I would recommend it to Cushing and Lee fans, but not much else.