Carnacki on Film

John Coulthart's blog { feuilleton } has a  post about the recent appearance on youtube of an early television adaptation of one of William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki stories, "The Whistling Room." A version of this adaptation appeared on youtube in the 2010s, and the unusually crisp version up on youtube now is diminished only by the lack of quality of the adaptation.  Coulthart notes:

Whatever power the original story may possess is thoroughly absent from the TV adaptation, a mere sketch of a narrative that wasn’t very substantial to begin with. Alan Napier—Alfred the butler in the Batman TV series—is hopelessly miscast as Carnacki, being more of a bungling buffoon than any kind of serious investigator.  

Coutlhart dates the production to 1952, which is doubtful. Oddly, IMDB gives two separate listings for this show, the first, gives it as Season 1 episode 32 of Chevron Theatre, broadcast 22 August 1952.  The second, gives it as Season 1 episode 42 of the Pepsi-Cola Playhouse, broadcast on 18 July 1954.  The new youtube version, linked at Coulthart's blog but also here, sources it from the 1954 Pepsi-Cola Playhouse. 

I suspect the 1954 date is the correct one, for on 2 April 1953, Hodgson's sister Lissie wrote to August Derleth, pleased that she was imminently to receive $125:  "It is most exciting to know you may be able to sell other Carnacki stories to be 'televised'. I am afraid I am very foolish, but I don't understand what a 'television film' is! They surely cannot act 'The Whistling Room'!" Lissie was paid in May 1953, but no other Carnacki stories were sold to be filmed at that time. 

Coulthart suggests that the source of interest in "The Whistling Room" was probably the printing of the story in Dennis Wheatley's A Century of Horror Stories (1935),  but the above correspondence shows that the proposal came to Derleth and it was likely a result of the Mycroft & Moran edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, published on the 31st of December 1947. Derleth had spent much of the month of August 1952 in California working on teleplays of his own stories, so he certainly had Hollywood connections by that time. 

I previously wrote about the surviving Hodson adaptations at Wormwoodiana in 2009. I am pleased to add this newly discovered one to the short list.

 

 

 

William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land

One of the many pleasures of book hunting is that it's still possible to flush out a decent title in a charity shop.  So at lunch time I was at the Salvation Army store and found the above book hidden away on a lower shelf - a colonial edition of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land.  Price: $2.  There are two sets of advertisements at the back, dated November 1911.  The publisher is Bell & Co and it has the standard Bell's decorated covers.  My understanding, which could well be wrong, is that colonial editions were made from the 1st edition sheets, cheaply bound by the publisher (not necessarily the 1st edition publisher, as not all publishers had colonial libraries), and sent off to the colonies. Some colonial editions are rarer than others and it would be interesting to know how many copies were printed - was there a set print run for each book in a colonial library, or did it vary for each book, for example a proportion of the first edition run?

Here is a contemporary Australian review of the Bell's edition, published in the Western Mail, a West Australian newspaper, in June 1912:

A NEW PILGRIM'S PROGRESS 

"The Night Land," by William Hope Hodgson. (G. Bell and Sons Ltd., London.) "The Night Land," a love romance by William Hope Hodgson, contains close on 600 pages of mysticism pure and unadulterated. If the patient reader can manage to survive the first 150 pages, with their frequent and irritating references to such obscure and occult things as Monstruwacans (not a tribe of North American Indians, be it said), Mighty Pyramids, Lesser Redoubts, Earth Currents, Home-calls, Diskos, Brain Elements, Master Words, Hour Slips, Thrilling Aether, and the rest of the remarkable quasi-transcendental jargon the author indulges in, and if the semi-archaic phraseology of the whole lengthy narrative does not hopelessly pall, the patient reader aforesaid may find some entertainment in the surprising Baron Munchausen-cum-Gulliver adventures which befall the hero of the book in his perilous quest after Naani, his lost love, who wanders forlorn and solitary in the mysterious Night Land. Finally, if the reader perseveres to the bitter end, he will doubtless be gratified to learn that the nameless hero does verily and indeed bring Naani back to the security of the Mighty Pyramid, and the paternal guardianship of the Master Monstruwacan, despite desperate and sanguinary encounters with ghostly silent ones, horrible yellow things, ferocious night hounds, huge and hairy humpt men, enormous and malodorous slugs, as big as small hills, and other dreadful nightmare monsters, all of which loathly beasts he successfully combats in his journey through the difficult and direful country of Plains of Blue Fire, of a House of Everlasting Silence, of Fire Holes and Hills, and mighty slopes and gores, and a great many more unpleasantly dangerous obstacles to safe travel, which in these glad days of Cook's universal tourist tickets would very properly be looked upon as Exceedingly Bad Management. However, all this happened in the early morning of the world, although, by the by, an obsolete airship is mentioned. There may be some subtle and occult meaning in Mr. Hodgson's ingenious chronicle, but if this is the case it is so carefully hidden away as to be beyond the capacity of the average intellect. Possibly, if one may hazard a guess, it seeks to extol the triumphs of True Love over all opposition, even including a descent into the shadowy Night Land of Death, and we offer this tentative suggestion for the problematic benefit of those as unskilled in such arcana as ourself. Despite its grotesque setting, the story of the name less hero's tender love passages with the winsome Naani in the wilderness is very attractively told, indeed it is quite the best part of a singularly prolix and perplexing book. The hero’s lament when he supposes Naani to be dead after winning safe through so many perils is one of those felicitous little touches which go far towards making the whole wide world kin.

"And lo! in that moment when I neav to be in mine armour, I to mind sudden again that I never to have waked to discover mine own maid kissing me in my sleep. And the pain gat me in the breast, so that I had surely ended then, but that the Master Doctor set somewhat to my breath, that eased me, and gave something of dullness unto my senses for a while."

Our copy is from the London publishers. 

“Classic Fantasists on Film”: William Hope Hodgson

There are three filmed adaptations of fiction by William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918), two of them being based on his most-anthologized short story “The Voice in the Night” (1907), and the third is from one of his short stories of the occult detective, Thomas Carnacki.

The first, chronologically, was a straightforward version of “A Voice in the Night” done in the U.S. as the twenty-fourth episode of the hour-long NBC television series Suspicion (1957-59), a rival to the more famous CBS series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-62). In fact the rivalry perhaps instigated this production of Hodgson’s story, for after “A Voice in the Night” was reprinted in the July 1954 issue of Playboy magazine, it re-appeared soon afterwards in the anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV (1957). Broadcast on 24 March 1958, this episode had a small but distinguished cast and crew, most of whom became well-known in the industry. The cast of four included James Coburn and Patrick Macnee as the two sailors on the ship who hear the tale, and James Donald and Barbara Rush as the couple who are the victims of the fungus. The director was Arthur Hiller. The script is well-written and well-acted, and, though a black-and-white production, the program stands up well to the passage of time. This is the best and most effective of the three film productions made from Hodgson’s tales.

A further adaptation—indeed, a re-conceptualization—of “A Voice in the Night” is to be found in the Japanese film Matango (89 minutes, color, 1963). Hodgson’s story is reframed around a yacht trip taken by five Japanese men and two women. They become lost in a storm, land on a deserted island, and find a derelict ship filled with mold and fungus. As they starve, some begin to eat the mushrooms (matango), with results as found in Hodgson’s tale. It makes for a better-than-average B-movie, with decent special effects for its time, though it suffers from limited characterization and a barely adequate script. Nonetheless, a good deal of the creepiness of Hodgson’s story comes through effectively.

The final production is of “The Horse of the Invisible” (1910), one of the Carnacki stories. It was the fifth episode of season one of the U.K. television series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1971-73), first broadcast on 17 October 1971. A color production filling an hour time-slot, it starred Donald Pleasance as Carnacki, and Tony Steedman as Captain Hisgins. Both are dreadful, and the script itself isn’t very good either. The whole production has an over-earnestness that elicits sneers (or even laughter) rather than suspense.