The Night My Number Came Up

The Night My Number Came Up, a thriller with metaphysical aspirations, gleefully battles out the old question of free will versus predetermination. Although the process appears highly contrived and the final answer somewhat foggy, the theatrical tricks involved in arriving at the answer are frequently interesting and sometimes moderately exciting.

The excitement centers about a tidy, well constructed, and, on the surface of it, quite unbelievable plot. It all starts plausibly enough with a dream related at a party given in Hong Kong in honor of a departing British Air Marshall. The dreamer clearly describes a plane crash in which he saw the death of the officer and the seven other passengers on board. Next day, when the Air Marshall makes his flight, the unlikely happens as the dream slowly starts to come true. Everything checks out as predicted: the plane runs into a snowstorm, the radio breaks down, and the pilot gets lost somewhere over the coast of Japan.

Director Leslie Norman creates tension by drawing out the time required for these events to fall into the preordained pattern. The delayed-action technique works well while the plane is in the air, but much of the excitement is dissipated in long intervals on the ground. The characters then indulge in some vague philosophising, ("Perhaps nothing happens unless somebody dreams it first.") while a phonograph blares out with heavy-handed irony, "Everything in the dream was lovely." A somewhat stiff performance by Michael Redgrave as the officer does not help much either. He is overshadowed by Alexander Knox, who performs convincingly as one of the passengers, a civil servant caught between intellectual disbelief and emotional fear of superstition. In the end, the picture leaves the impression that it is laboring hard to appear profound rather than merely entertaining.

And yet, contrived and fumbling as it often seems, The Night My Number Came Up still has one big point--it is quite true. Based on a book written by Air Marshall Sir Victor Goddard, the story recounts an incident which actually happened. This fact is never mentioned in the film, although it gives the story more meaning than all the spurious philosophical conversations manage to contribute. They only becloud and reduce the picture to a mildly successful thriller.