The Man in Black
The Man in Black has interests; in yoga, in Oriental art, in history, and in murder, attending an auction of the many objets d’art of the estate of the late Henry Clavering, a man who had suffered from ill health but maintained a fascination with the mystic, training his body to enter a deep trance from which it would be dangerous to rouse him without the proper procedure.
His interests mocked by his second wife and stepdaughter, it is to his first child Joan he leaves almost his entire estate of Oakfield Towers to be inherited when she turns twenty one with only token sums to his second family, Bertha and Janice, immediately scheming to ensure Joan is driven insane before that date, committed to an asylum and put from mind.
Adapted from “the BBC sensation,” anthology horror and mystery radio show Appointment with Fear which ran from 1943 to 1955, its host and narrator was Valentine Dyall as The Man in Black, serving the same role in the film version of that title, unseen but introducing the surviving Clavering clan, fragile Joan (Hazel Penwarden), vindictive Bertha (Betty Ann Davies) and grasping Janice (Sheila Burell), chainsmoking as they plot over breakfast.
Joined by Janice’s fiancé Victor Harringtom (Anthony Forwood), a more pleasant presence for the tortured Joan but persuaded to join the gaslighting when it becomes advantageous to do so, the family fortune the prize which trumps all, directed by Francis Searle in moody monochrome shadow on location at Oakley Court, later famous for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, throughout it is a gorgeous film of outright cruelty and villainy.
A nest of snakes presided over by the venomous Bertha, Davies astonishingly not even forty when the film was shot and tragically dying following complications from appendicitis only a few years later in 1955, the same year Les Diaboliques was released, in many ways a Continental companion piece, it is disappointing the excellent Sid James is not given more to do, underplaying saturnine Henry and swiftly excised from the frame but not from memory.
Handsomely restored in 4K from the original negatives, Hammer’s new edition of The Man in Black is packed with two commentaries, features on Valentine Dyall, John Dickson Carr, the creator of Appointment with Fear, “horror radio” in general, a 1988 interview with Francis Searle and three archive radio recordings of his stories, along with stills, publicity material and a booklet of new essays on the film and its genre.
The Man in Black is available on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray from Hammer now
