In simplest terms, on one of Paul Carver’s (William Sylvester) shoulders sits an angel, Chantal (Diane Clare), and on the other sits a devil, Marisa (Aliza Gur.) Chantal encourages him to look on the bright side of life after his wife and child are killed in a car accident. Marisa encourages him to come to the dark side where he can revel in his misery. What I can’t quite decide is if The Hand of Night (1967) is more substantial than just this.
Make no doubt, the film wants you to believe it’s more than a simple good vs. evil story, but is it all done through the use of sometimes literal smoke and mirrors? There’s some mystery to it, I suppose, and it never flat-out states what it’s about. However, neither does it really become more than that. After working kind of hard to “figure it out,” there’s just not much there. It does keep one thing uncertain: which road Paul will ultimately choose to travel.
After some spooky-fun opening credits with pink smoke emitting from a skull, we land in a foggy cemetery with a parade of coffins leading us into a tomb where they’re set into place for… a wedding? The bride and groom enter, then suddenly the bride screams. Paul opens a coffin where a woman lies dead. A bat distracts him and when he turns back, the woman has become a skeleton. There are flashes of a car crash and someone yelling, “Jump out!”
No surprise, this is a dream. Paul wakes up on a plane in flight from Lisbon to Morocco and meets fellow passenger, Otto Gunther (Edward Underdown), a friendly archeologist who offers him his card and any assistance he might need during his trip. Although overly accommodating, I never suspected Otto as a bad guy. To me, his only crime through the entire movie would be not leaving me alone on a flight. (That’s why I take a window seat and hope the middle seat stays empty.)
When Paul learns that the doctor he came to see had died suddenly the day before and he has no place to go, he ends up at Otto’s during a party celebrating his latest archeological dig. There he meets the angel and the devil. Chantal is Otto’s lovely assistant and Marisa is a mysterious woman who appears and disappears throughout the film. Most of the time, Paul searches for Marisa while Chantal tells him he shouldn’t.
Frankly, I don’t know what Chantal sees in Paul. He’s miserable. I can imagine her wanting to save him, but I don’t see her falling in love with him. In a way, she’s not really falling in love with him but a version of him that doesn’t exist. She’s got her work cut out for her! On the other hand, he’s a magnet for Marisa and her evil. With his attitude, he belongs with her. You’re not supposed to cheer for Luke Skywalker to go to the Dark Side, though.
The action, a term I use loosely, centers around Otto’s dig site and what it’s uncovered. The details are murky and probably best not explained. It involves another mysterious character, Omar (Terence de Marney), who follows Paul and leads him on his wild goose chases for Marisa, and a cast of probably undead and unnamed characters. My best guess is they’re vampires, but as one review I read claimed, it’s a “new kind of vampire.”
None of this is to say the movie doesn’t maintain a sense of dreamlike atmosphere and dread. I wouldn’t call it “artsy,” but neither is it told in a completely conventional manner. Honestly, I don’t know what to make of it. I’m glad I watched it, but I didn’t particularly enjoy it. It was somewhat of a chore. It lands firmly in the middle for me and, all things considered, was merely average.
The Hand of Night (aka The Beast of Morocco) opened in the U.K. (Bath, Somerset) on Sept. 15, 1968, and was released by Associated British-Pathe. The Blu-ray is available from Vinegar Syndrome.
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