They Drive by Night **** (1938, Emlyn Williams, Ernest Thesiger, Anna Konstam, Allan Jeayes) – Classic Movie Review 8111

Director Arthur B Woods’s gritty, noirish 1938 vintage British black-and-white crime thriller They Drive by Night is taken from James Curtis’s 1938 novel, with the author as one of the screen-writers (screenplay and dialogue), along with Derek N Twist and Paul Gangelin. The film is still considered a classic British film noir.

Two magnetically quirky players Emlyn Williams and Ernest Thesiger greatly enliven a super Warner Bros British Teddington Studios production about a silk-stocking strangler and the lorry driver (Allan Jeayes) and young woman (Anna Konstam) who help the ex-con petty criminal suspect (Williams) on the run to track him down.

The Hitchcockian themes and obsessions – accused hero having to prove his innocence, the stocking strangler – are well handled in a tense, exciting film that would not have disgraced the master. Williams makes a fine hero as Shorty Matthews and Thesiger is deliciously camp and sinister as Walter Hoover, the ex-schoolmaster psychologist with a secret.

Freed from London’s Pentonville Prison, Shorty Mathews visits his girlfriend in Camden and finds her strangled. He flees the scene and the law by travelling by night with long distance lorry drivers across the country. Meanwhile, Lone-Wolf is trawling the West End of London for more female victims, and the cops are desperately searching for both Shorty Matthews and him.

It is a well set-up plot and situations. You just don’t get films about stocking stranglers any more.

Also in the cast Anthony Holles, Ronald Shiner, Yolande Terrell, Julie Barrie, Kitty de Legh, William Hartnell, Frederick Piper, George Merritt, Joe Cunningham, William John Davies, Edgar Driver, Jennie Hartley and Brenda Harvey.

It was shot at Warner Brothers First National Studios, Teddington Studios, Teddington, Middlesex, England.

It is no relation to the 1940 American film They Drive by Night based on the novel The Long Haul by A I Bezzerides and starring George Raft and Humphrey Bogart.

The victims in Curtis’s novel were prostitutes, and the themes of sex and prostitution had to be watered down for the screen to avoid censorship, and the book also featured scenes of police brutality that were cut out entirely, but the core murder remains unchanged. 

In the UK They Drive by Night was both commercially and critically successful. It did get a release certificate to be shown in the US but Warner Bros were unable to get a negative out of the UK and it did not get a US cinema release.

James Curtis’s 1938 novel They Drive by Night was reissued by London Books, with an introduction by Jonathan Meades, in 2008. The reissue of They Drive by Night was published by London Books as part of their London Classics series.

James Curtis (4 July 1907 – 1977) also wrote the novel There Ain’t No Justice, which was also made into a feature film, the 1939 There Ain’t No Justice, with him again helping to provide the screenplay. In 2014 London Books published There Ain’t No Justice as their tenth London Classic, with an introduction by Martin Knight.

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© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8111