Programme notes CH 03 — The Haunted Screen
Outward Bound
Strangers on a fogbound liner work out, one at a time, that the crossing has no return.
Nobody on board remembers coming aboard. A liner slides out of the fog with a handful of passengers, no officer in sight and a steward who answers every question sideways, and one by one they work out where they are bound. Warner's filmed Sutton Vane's play as the stage left it, one ship and a few rooms, and the stillness suits it: the dead here are polite. Leslie Howard, as the drinker who guesses first, is quietly frightened; Dudley Digges arrives late as the Examiner, a clergyman's idea of a customs officer. Helen Chandler, months before Dracula, is one of two young lovers who are not quite dead. Watch the steward, Alec B. Francis, who has made this crossing before.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Robert Milton
- Photographed by
- Hal Mohr
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Thirty-two years apart, two films about people nobody has told they are dead: a liner of well-mannered passengers in a studio fog, and a church organist driving west to Utah. Both let the audience guess a little before the dead do, and neither raises its voice.