Captain Clegg [Night Creatures] **** (1962, Peter Cushing, Yvonne Romain, Patrick Allen, Oliver Reed, Michael Ripper, Martin Benson) – Classic Movie Review 6626

Director Peter Graham Scott’s 1962 Hammer Films period adventure is a generally very welcome reworking of novel writer Russell Thorndike’s Dr Syn, with the odd extra Hammer-style horror shock and fright to spruce up the old plot about the 18th-century English vicar of the Kent coastal town of Dymchurch who is smuggling at night as bootlegger Captain Clegg disguised as a ghost (why not as a scarecrow?).

The Crown sends in Royal Navy Captain Collier (Patrick Allen) and his crew to investigate the outbreak of smuggling and bootlegging. Does Collier have the ghost of a chance of catching Dr Blyss?

Peter Cushing, impeccable and admirable as always as the Reverend Dr Blyss (not Dr Syn as in the original novel), leads a rock solid British cast in this agreeable adventure hokum that does not try to push too hard, keeping the entertainment likeable and agreeable. Also in that solid cast are Yvonne Romain, Oliver Reed, Michael Ripper, Martin Benson, Derek Francis, Milton Reid, David Lodge, Daphne Anderson, Jack MacGowran, Peter Halliday, Terry Scully, Sydney Bromley and Rupert Osborne.

It is written by Anthony Hinds (billed as John Elder), with additional dialogue by Barbara S Harper, shot in Eastmancolor by Arthur Grant, produced by John Temple-Smith, scored by Don Banks and designed by Bernard Robinson and Don Mingaye.

The US title of Night Creatures – supposedly the Marsh Phantoms that the superstitious locals believe in – misleadingly makes Captain Clegg sound much too like a Hammer horror film. But there is a reason for this! Hammer had promised its US distributors Universal a film called Night Creatures based on  Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend but had to abandon it after the BBFC said they would not pass the film. So Hammer simply moved the title over to the already completed Captain Clegg.

It was filmed at Denham, Buckinghamshire, England; All Saints Church, Oakley Green Road, Bray, Berkshire, England; St Mary the Virgin, Denham, Buckinghamshire; Ibstone windmill, Turville, Buckinghamshire; and at Bray Studios, Down Place, Oakley Green, Berkshire.

It is a remake of a previous version, Dr Syn (1937) with George Arliss (Dr Syn), and it was remade the same year by Disney as Dr Syn, Alias the Scarecrow (1963).

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 6626

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