"Classic Fantasists on Film": Lord Dunsany's Dean Spanley

It was a surprise for me to learn recently that a novel by Lord Dunsany had been newly filmed, and even more of a surprise to learn that of Dunsany’s dozen or so novels it was My Talks with Dean Spanley (1936) that had made it to the big screen. By no means Dunsany’s best novel, it is an enjoyable, minor work, in which a cleric, under the influence of a certain tokay, recollects his previous incarnation as a dog.

The film, titled more simply Dean Spanley, was scripted by Alan Sharp and directed by Toa Fraser. It boasts a first rate cast: Peter O’Toole, Sam Neill, Jeremy Northam, and Bryan Brown. An independent British production, the film was released in England in December 2008, and had a limited release in the US a few months afterwards. The film has a running time of 98 minutes. It is now out on DVD in England (I don’t know if a North American release has yet been scheduled).

What a delight! It is frankly a skilful deepening and slight expansion of Dunsany’s novel, rather than merely a screenplay based upon it. Dunsany’s book is the first-person narration of an unnamed man, a scientific writer, who uses the tokay on Dean Spanley in the hope of learning the answers to some of the mysteries of life. To this end, the narrator gets help from his friend Wrather, and late in the book, the Maharajah of Haikwar. The pleasure of Dunsany’s novel is primarily to be found in the Dean’s uncanny revelations about the inner life of a dog.

Alan Sharp names the narrator Fisk (he is played by Jeremy Northam), and centers the story upon Fisk’s relationship with a new character, Fisk’s elderly father (Peter O’Toole), bringing in a familial and emotional center that is nowhere to be found in Dunsany’s novel. Sam Neill plays the difficult part of Dean Spanley excellently, and the screenplay utilizes many of Dunsany’s own words in the Dean’s reminiscences. The character of Wrather is also slightly altered—he becomes Fisk’s supplier of the tokay, as well as a participant in the experiment. Northam and Neill give first-rate performances, but it is Peter O’Toole who steals the show as the elder Fisk. O’Toole has most of the best lines, too (all original to the screenplay, not lifted from the novel). It is not merely for sentimental reasons that I hope that the film garners some award nominations for O’Toole’s acting and for Alan Sharp’s screenplay.

Dean Spanley is one of those quiet, enchanting little films that come along too infrequently. Keep your eye out for it.

“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.