Straight on Till Morning Review

FILM: Straight on Till Morning (1972)
Directed by Peter Collinson
Starring: Rita Tushingham, Shane Briant
Studio: Hammer Films
Genre: Thriller/Horror

By Edward Staiger

In Straight on Till Morning, the reputable British actress, Rita Tushingham (A Taste of Honey, Doctor Zhivago) goes so deep into her role as Brenda Thompson, a vulnerable “virgin” who attracts the attentions and affections of a psycho killer, that she ends up becoming what few actresses would ever wish to be perceived as: a complete drip.

In its heyday, the studio, Hammer Films, had always been known for revelling in its perversities, and by the early ’70s, even as their countless Dracula/Frankenstein vehicles for Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing respectively continued to crescendo, they starting delving into “kink” which even back then could be interpreted as “kitsch.” Straight on Till Morning isn’t a period piece — it’s swinging London, anything’s possible, including a gifted actress like Tushingham, with her knack for nuance, taking the “ugly duckling” she portrays so seriously she can only get, well…uglier. Her Brenda’s the type of gal who’s so lingering and irksome that at a typical London bash, just to keep her out of everybody’s hair, they have her replenishing drinks, brewing coffee, even sending her out for cigarettes where on a deserted city street she’s predictably fumbling with loose change and that dang machine.

Tushingham’s chameleonic look has never bothered me. Her performance as Jo, the young, spirited, poverty-stricken, unwed mother-to-be in Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey, back in 1961, is one of the archetypal performances of that decade, which is really saying something. Tough, touching, naturalistic to the point of downright dumpy — the ’60s were full of such atypical, talented chameleons who, on the actress-side, completely changed the way we evaluate an actress. Tushingham was one of the first of these, if not the first, which culminated in those back-to-back Oscar-winners, in 1968 and 1969, two of cinema’s greatest performances, Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl and Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Ten years after her triumph in A Taste of Honey, Peter Collinson, the director of SOTM, takes naturalism to the grotesque. Tushingham isn’t dumpy, she’s dumped-on. With his prying, prodding, “jazzy” camerawork (quick cuts and layered close-ups), the ringing of a doorbell takes on the gravity of pushing the Doomsday Button, even a bit of nonchalent lip-licking between Tushingham and her co-star Shane Briant becomes like a clinical study on the stickiness of saliva — how saliva can coat the teeth and even lace the lips. Later in the film, deep in love with her psycho, she decides it’s time for a “new look,” a makeover. What subsequently happens to her in a beauty parlor is like what happened to Elsa Lanchester strapped onto Dr. Frankenstein’s operating table in The Bride of Frankenstein. It’s enough to send any psycho over the edge. The sight of Tushington in lipstick, a lacquered wig (like Wilma Flintstone finally letting her hair down), an oversized, shapeless dress that fits her like a cardboard box with a hole cut out for the head — of course, it’s the most horrifying sight in SOTM.

Collinson had just come off of another Hammer thriller, Fright, starring that slouchy, leering Susan George in the same year she tantalized every sex maniac in town while driving husband Dustin Hoffman bonkers in Sam Peckinpah’s classic Straw Dogs. In Fright, George is an-almost virginal babysitter left alone with the baby in an old dark house until a psycho plus a would-be boyfriend start interrupting her sips at the sherry. Casting George, with her insolent eye teeth and those eyes that try to say “no” instead of her normal “probably,” is a recipe for distaster when you’re trying to portray virginal, vulnerable or innocent. In his next film with Tushingham, Collinson apparently decided to get it right on all three accounts.

Obviously, Tushingham isn’t miscast, but Collinson and screenwriter John Peacock almost immediately begin mucking it up. When we first meet her, she’s decided to leave Liverpool for London. This means she’s abandoning her poor old widowed mom (who she lives with and who would never want her to leave) on the fabricated pretext she’s pregnant and needs to find a father for her child! Even for 1972, is this any way to receive a mother’s blessing? Is this any way to keep her mother from worrying to death so she won’t do exactly what she ends up doing — that is, eventually trekking to London herself to make sure that her daughter is all right which makes it the last trip that poor old murder victim will ever take? From the start, we see a Brenda/Rita who’s certainly vulnerable but also queasily befuddled.

And desperate. Brenda’s no sooner on a London sidewalk when she’s goggling and ready to gush over every guy she even, literally, bumps into. One of these bruised bruisers is the film’s psycho. Thanks to Collinson, these “goggling” scenes (my favorites in the film), rapidly edited close-ups of all the male extras he can crowd onto a London street scene, seem to set Brenda up as something of a madwoman herself. For such a blushing flower, there’s no fear on Tushingham’s face, only wonder: Liverpool never had such options! She has no discrimination, no sense — there’s even some kind of hulking fatso in the bunch — and she seems ready to embrace them all as a father for her fantasy. And how she can notice them all from underneath that pre-makeover Pekinese haircut she never pushes out of her eyes is another wonder.

Another wonder: she’s hired on sight in a London boutique although she has had no previous experience. And another: yes, another girl in the shop happens to be looking for a roommate. And wonders never cease: she runs into the psycho while he’s out walking his dog. And because she’s having a lucid moment because she now has a job and a roof over her head, she proceeds to snatch the pooch while he isn’t looking so she can give it a bath (?!) and return it the next day like a saviour and thus be formally introduced. In the grand tradition of horror film logic and dimwitted heroines, she’s hoping for the best and gets the worst.

Before you can say, “It’s love at first sight!” the two of them are already living together. She keeps busy mulling over meals for a killer who prefers the daily grind of living with a lover before they can get his goat and then deem them worthy enough to kill. With Brenda shuffling about and waiting on him hand and foot, he’s up to his ears in goat-getting. As played by Shane Briant, who will shortly after portray Dorian Gray on a Dan Curtis-produced American TV production, he’s sneeringly charming with a kind of fractured, pretty-boy Peter Pan face. He’ll never grow up and never stop killing. With his air of debauched innocence and all the saliva that seems to be flowing in this film, he’s like a piece of old Christmas candy spit out of somebody’s mouth and ready to gather dust and rot in the new year. And like Tushingham as Collinson corners her, there’s nothing wrong with his actual performance.

Perhaps the best way to watch this preposterous thriller, whose title like most of the proceedings doesn’t really ring true, is to see Tushingham, like many great actresses before her, turn to horror and often horrible roles in order to reanimate their screen careers. Hammer Films also gave us vehicles for Bette Davis, Talullah Bankhead and Joan Fontaine; elsewhere there was work for Olivia deHaviland and Joan Crawford, the latter being the only one of the above who totally trashed herself (her last film, Trog, left her bickering with a troglodyte). Still alive and working at the time, too bad she couldn’t have played “mommie dearest” in Straight on Till Morning!

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