While best known to genre fans for Curse of The Crimson Altar, Vernon Sewell had a persistent interest in hauntings that led him to remake the same play as four different films. The play is L’Angoisse by Celia de Vilyars and Pierre Mills, and seems to have been a late Grand Guignol piece but I’ve not laid hands on it yet (next stop the BNF’s Gallican, of course). The basic plot is a couple buying a property discover occult shenanigans and bring in the specialists to solve the haunting, which stems from a familiar story of desire, betrayal, and a crime unsolved.

I do appreciate a good obsession.

His first go-round was 1934’s The Medium which I’ve not yet tracked down. The second was The French Quarter (AKA Frenzy) in 1945, which takes place in that fabled haven of artists. As you can see from the poster it emphasises the Grand Guignol connection. A bonus: Joan Greenwood plays the young ballerina who first draws the sculptor’s eye. Delicious Sibella in Kind Hearts and Coronets, of course. When she disappears the criminologist arranges for a psychic intervention to discover the truth.

I’m going to jump to the fourth adaptation, House of Mystery (1961) a short drama that played in the US as part of the Kraft Mystery Theatre television series. A young couple find a house that seems a bargain too good to be true. A mysterious woman hanging out there tells them the story of why that might be with a flashback to another young couple who found the house a bargain too-good to be true. Far too much time in Sewell’s films are spent with people standing around listening to someone tell them a story, or explain in great detail how sensible psychic phenomena are if you already grasp seemingly invisible things like radio, television, and electricity. Fortunately the second couple includes Nanette Newman so that helps. This time the husband is an inventor and the cruel wife gets a slightly different erm, final resting place. The psychic investigator is the always charming Colin Gordon and the medium Glaswegian Mary Urquhart.

I think the best may be Ghost Ship (1952) which you’ll have guessed, moves the plot to a boat—in fact, Sewell’s own yacht. The couple tempted by the unbelievable price are actual husband and wife Dermot Walsh and Hazel Court. He sports interestingly garish neckware and she embodies the chic 50s wife who is a credit to him. Ian Carmichael has a cameo as a drunken party guest trying to do a Highland Fling.

We have increasingly bizarre events, first noticed by the wife, then only at last the husband, and rather than lose all the sunk cost, they write the very proper association of psychic investigators who of course look very normal and not at all like cult figures (another trope, which suggests some genuine interest from Sewell). I’m always interested in how ‘the spook racket’ is portrayed on film. Sewell seems at pains to show both the reasonableness but also the necessary strangeness of exploring these phenomena. He wrote and directed these works, and while he’s not a skilled dramatist (how many times I muttered, ‘oh god, they’re going to just stand there and listen as he tells this’) he is sincere. Likewise, his frequent references to ‘more things in heaven and earth, Horatio’ in the scripts. He wants to believe.

Also he loves mirror shots.

I’m going to keep looking for The Medium, and probably for the play, too. It’s been a pleasant little rabbit hole. Trying to relax a little this week before the great migration and while I have things to do not yet has held sway. Meanwhile the world mourns Dolly, we fight fascists, and try to find little bits of wonder to sustain us. And follow our obsessions, like Sewell.

Here’s a long interview with him where he talks about the early years of British cinema and how he ended up there. I’m hoping he talks about these films but I haven’t got very far yet.