It's always long goodbyes at your event horizons

It was snowing this morning, the first snow of the year. We watched it spiral lightly out of the dawn-blue overcast. It didn't seem to be sticking, but it was beautiful, and made the world look like something else for a little while.

It stuck.

You can dream yourself to sleep if you want to, my love, but try not to wake your dead

The sequel: an autumn winter's evening.

But Will was not smiling as he listened. He said thoughtfully, "You just said, in the next year. And the verse says, 'On the day of the dead when the year too dies.' But that doesn't make sense. Hallowe'en isn't the end of the year."

"Maybe once upon a time it used to be," Bran said. "The end and the beginning both, once, instead of December. In Welsh, Hallowe'en is called Calan Geaef, and that means the first day of winter. Pretty warm for winter, of course. Mind you, nobody is going to get me to spend the night in St Cadfan's churchyard, however warm."

—Susan Cooper, The Grey King (1975)

Perhaps nothing happens in this world unless somebody dreams about it first

If you don't like flying, there are any number of movies you shouldn't watch. I don't know where The Night My Number Came Up (1955) rates on the scale of "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (1963) to Airplane! (1980), but it's an efficiently tense, ambiguously supernatural thriller that cleverly diversifies its dread: the human mind can conjure mountains of fear from molehills of information, but no amount of cool-headedness can roll back the fact that it is a terrible death to fall from the sky and more terrible still to know it as it happens. Most terrible of all would be to know that it would happen, wouldn't it, though you'd try your hardest to dig your heels in, look for the loopholes, forestall the foretelling. Of course you would. Ask the Oracle of Delphi sometime how often that works out.

There were 8 passengers, the scene-setting tagline of the pre-credits card reads, 5 crew, and behind the title as it fades in stands the shadowy, unlucky sum of 13. Thirteen minutes into the film, I could swear I'd encountered its premise as an urban legend: a dream which appears to point toward a future disaster, except that the present conditions run counter to it, except that conditions begin to change, and very soon what could formerly have been dismissed as coincidence and apophenia has started to look like cold hard precognition. "It was just a silly, jumbled-up affair like any other dream," RN Commander Lindsay (Michael Hordern) demurs, but it's the night of the Ghost Festival in Hong Kong, the streets filled with monks throwing rice and paper houses and hell money burning, and he's soon persuaded to recount for his host's dinner party, like a ghost story for Christmas, his vision of a twin-engine Dakota in distress—lost over the sea, radio dead and fuel running short, smashing up at last in a snowstorm over a fishing village's tiny, rocky bay. He tells it genially, but it's a chilling little episode, especially since his audience includes one of the dream's starring players, the distinguished Air Marshal Sir John Hardie (Michael Redgrave). Good thing he and his personal assistant will be continuing on to Tokyo in a Liberator, not a Dakota, then. "But we are going in a Dakota," Hardie corrects the flight lieutenant mildly, lighting his pipe. "We're going on in the same Dakota." Now we understand the opening frame of a middle-aged naval officer unexpectedly offering his services to the search for an aircraft gone missing over the mainland of Japan, of which the body of the film is the explanatory flashback. The question isn't whether the crash will happen, but how. It robs the narrative of none of its tension, even discounting the nerve-twitching bait-and-switches of small divergences that seem to offer a breather just in time for another chunk of the dream to fall casually and crushingly into place; if anything, the blunter the ending looks, the more unpredictable the characters become. The film isn't just about free will and fatalism. It's also about fear.

Turn by turn, we watch the characters struggle with what they believe about the universe, what they know about themselves, what they don't want to be forced to admit about either. Owen Robertson (Alexander Knox), an experienced China hand who spent his war in a Japanese internment camp, confesses to his old friend Hardie that he'd "sooner walk for a week than fly for an hour." He's never been on a plane in his life, and now that a senior diplomat wants him on hand for an important conference in Tokyo, this dream-ghosted flight will be his first. One might call it an inauspicious beginning, but one also imagines that Robertson with his condescending dismissals of Chinese folk religion as "fears and superstitions that we laugh at as childish—medieval" would scorn even the figurative invocation of omens. Learning that he claims to have written a conclusively debunking book makes this bowtied, silver-streaked civil servant look even more like the archetypal rationalist all but inviting the paranormal to punt him into the next time zone, but as we watch him dodge around a painter's ladder while Flight Lieutenant "Mac" McKenzie (Denholm Elliott) laughs softly at him, tucks his cap under his arm, and walks deliberately underneath, we realize he's a believer desperately trying not to. He does his best to get a couple of soldiers off the plane when he realizes they'll make up the fatal number of the dream, fails similarly to keep the passenger manifest all-male just because in the dream there was one girl aboard. "So we're eight after all," Mac whistles, leaning back on the bar where the older man is downing a large brandy. "Seven men and a girl. Full steam ahead for the dream." I know the conventional wisdom is that Elliott was an undistinguished screen juvenile until his reinvention as a magnificently seedy character actor in Nothing But the Best (1964), but truly, he had edginess as far back as I've seen him—it's a hallmark of insouciant, quick-tempered Mick in The Holly and the Ivy (1952), but there's something of it even in decent doomed Morell of The Cruel Sea (1953), some irony or fragility in those blameless brows or that mouth that was never quite innocently beautiful. It's certainly present in McKenzie, whose bumptious keenness gets immediately on Robertson's nerves and may find an answering antipathy in the viewer, especially after he breezily implies to the admiring audience of the young Miss Robertson (Doreen Aris) that he could have had quite the high-flying career if the air marshal hadn't grounded him with the "cushy" honor of being his PA, which isn't the whole truth, or really the truth at all. As we learn in confidence from Hardie, Mac came by his DFC honestly, one of the best of the few of the Battle of Britain, but "quite suddenly—well, it was the way things happened in those days—complete breakdown." He never fought again; he flies only as a passenger and when Robertson mistakes an expression of real concern from this sharp-edged young man for more mockery and snaps before he can catch himself, "And are you the sort of man that can accuse another of—" we don't even need to hear a word like cowardice to understand why Mac looks suddenly, shockily defenseless, facing the one charge his demure smart mouth can't answer. Lindsay's dream included the nasty detail of a passenger who "went mad with fright . . . lost all control of himself." Both of these white-knuckled men can imagine themselves in that condition and we don't want to see it any more than they do.

We don't want to see it happen to Hardie, for that matter, even though Redgrave was a past master—cf. Dead of Night (1945)—of scaling a character up to hysteria. I mean, on some level I believe that if you decide to detour two hours off your scheduled flight path for the sake of aerial tourism over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you deserve every supernatural inconvenience that can find you right down to the red-and-blue-toilet-paper-offering youkai, but I don't know that The Night My Number Came Up shares my views; instead it puts the air marshal in the normally human position of hoping that the decisions he's making are rational ones, influenced by practical considerations rather than unfounded fears, and in the eerier one of hoping that he's making decisions at all. We are given to understand that pilots have their own superstitions, their own apotropaic observances and taboos. "Then it wasn't like your dream," Robertson says eagerly when the pilot of the Dakota (Nigel Stock) offers a parallel instance of a nightmare that turned out all right, only to hear the airman respond seriously, "It never is, exactly." Three-star senior officer and veteran of two air wars that he is, Hardie is no stranger to this culture, nor is he immune to it. "Maybe events can be foreseen," he muses. "Certainly there's no effect without cause." He could have answered in the much stronger negative when questioned whether he believes, temporarily speaking the language of time travel rather than dreams, that "the cause may be happening now." Once the radio's croaked and the compass with it, the plane creeping round the storm-knitted coast of Sado Island while Hardie and the crew try to figure out the nearest airfield to their limited fuel supply, all we can hope is that he won't become like the pilots he warned Robertson about, who take anxiety as prophecy and at the moment of crisis don't even try to survive. At least we don't worry so much about Mary Campbell (Sheila Sim), who despite sharing most of her scenes with Mac brings far more to the film than the expected love angle. Elliott, of course, could have sexual chemistry with a cinderblock, but Sim had a knack for platonic rapport—it hurt her chances as a leading lady for all I know, but I find it much more interesting to watch than the standard boy-meets-girl manœuvres. She's as direct as McKenzie is slantwise, with her own wry sense of humor and a keen ear for what she's not being told. They share drinks but not a dance during the layover in Okinawa; the next morning on the last leg to Tokyo, he offers to get her a whiff of oxygen for her hangover and has to settle for bringing her a cup of coffee like an apologetic flight attendant instead. Their conversation about reason and belief is the best in the film, revealing the fresh-faced stenographer to be much more of a skeptic and even a cynic than the nervy veteran falling into camaraderie with her as naturally as other young people might fall in love. "It always seems to me," she answers thoughtfully, "that if something evil is foreseen, then we say it's fate and there's nothing we can do about it, but if it's good, then we can take the credit for ourselves . . . I suppose being interned has made me think like that." Especially in light of her role as the group's true nonbeliever, I appreciate that she is neither the weak link who snaps at the worst moment nor the prosaic support of the more sensitive men. Mary admits readily to being unsettled by the uncanniness of the situation; as the racing, icy clouds close in around the plane, she repeats the dream-mantra of "storm—darkness—snow" as calmly as recognition, almost smiling at white-faced Mac. No more rain-buffeted fakeouts, no more half-truths. "This is it, isn't it?"

( They're the worst poison a flying man can swallow. )

According to the opening credits, The Night My Number Came Up was adapted by R.C. Sherriff from "a story by Victor Goddard." Offscreen, that's Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard, KCB, CBE, DL to you, and the story was a nonfiction article in The Saturday Evening Post in which he claimed to have experienced just such a paranormal incident—a flight into a dream exactly as foretold. Given that I read almost as many books on the supernatural and occult as a child as I did actual fiction of the fantastic, I may well have encountered a version of Goddard's story, with or without the correct names depending on the degree of urban legend it had achieved. I feel confident saying I didn't dream it in advance. The picture was directed by Leslie Norman and photographed by Lionel Banes, both of whom give it a low-key, partly location-shot claustrophobia of the quotidian escalating fast into nightmare; it was a production of Ealing Studios, which just made some incredibly weird films during the reign of Michael Balcon, and can be found, slightly to my surprise, on Blu-Ray/DVD. Having now seen Sheila Sim cloud-watch with Eric Portman and philosophize with Denholm Elliott, I am forced to wonder what kind of liminal creature Richard Attenborough really was, since she evidently had the gift of attracting them. It is not the film's fault that I already haven't felt like flying in more than six months. This landing brought to you by my prescient backers at Patreon.