If you’ve looked at a calendar (or your phone, I suppose) today, you’re already aware that it’s Friday the 13th once more. And since this is MovieFanFare, “the movie collector’s blog,” you’re probably expecting us to run an article connected to the film Friday the Thirteenth. Well, we aim to please. Settle in and I’ll tell you about an intriguing little tale where it’s not clear until the end who will live and who will die. But if you’re expecting to meet a deranged killer named Voorhees, think again.
No, this Friday the Thirteenth is a 1933 anthology suspense/drama from Britain’s Gainsborough Pictures. “You hear of an accident,” an introductory title card declares. “There are victims. Strangers to one another. Supposing we could put back the clock and see how chance made these strangers share this appalling moment.” The action then opens on a rainy Friday the 13th evening, with a London double-decker bus carrying 13 passengers driving down the city streets. As the vehicle approaches the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben a minute before midnight, lightning strikes a neighboring construction site and sends a crane crashing down into its path. We next see a teletype machine and newspaper headlines declaring that two people–no details given–were killed in the ensuing collision.
And with that, the hands of Big Ben start moving in reverse, going back to the start of the fateful Friday. Now the audience gets a chance to follow some of the folks’ lives and how this was the final ride for two of them. We first meet bus driver Fred (Cyril Smith) and conductor Alf (Sonnie Hale), best friends and horseracing “enthusiasts” who are sure they’re going to clean up at the track by the end of the day. When Alf mentions that he’s been reading a book on the occult (to which Fred replies, “I had a brother that was an oculist”), it suggests that something supernatural is going to take place.
As for the passengers, slick-talking junk dealer/black marketeer “Slippery” Joe (Max Miller) does his best to stay one step ahead of the law. Shipping clerk Henry Jackson (Eliot Makeham) is eager to surprise his wife Eileen (Ursula Jeans) with an anniversary Mediterranean cruise, unaware that she has plans of her own with another man. Mr. Wakefield (Edmund Gwenn) is a City (central city region of London, you know) businessman who trusts his absent-minded wife Flora (Mary Jerrold) to deliver a letter for a big stock deal.
Elsewhere, “gentleman of fortune” Blake (Emlyn Williams) is a blackmailer whose next mark is an ex-con bank clerk (Frank Lawton). An outing with his wife’s dog in the park turns into an adventure for meek Ralph Lightfoot (Robinson Hare) when the canine ruins a girl’s (Leonora Cortbett) silk stockings. And showgirl Millie (Jessie Matthews) is seeing a schoolteacher (Ralph Richardson) whose classroom faces her apartment window, but he wants her to give up her dancing career.
Like Grand Hotel the previous year and Pulp Fiction some six decades later, Friday the Thirteenth goes back and forth from person to person to show their stories. There’s not a lot of time for characterization, but noteworthy in the cast are Matthews, Miller, and Williams. Matthews, one of Britain’s most popular musical stars of the ’30s, gets to show off some revealing stage costumes as she matter-of-factly explains to Richardson how she can take care herself (“Do you know I’ve slapped more gentlemen’s faces than any other chorus girl in the West End?”), Miller’s rapid Cockney patter puts American audiences in mind of the Three Stooges’ original boss, Ted Healy. And Williams, who went on to a second career as a playwright (Night Must Fall, The Corn Is Green) is deceptively charming as the grifter (he also contributed to this film’s script). When his target’s girlfriend says to him “Aren’t you very afraid of the police?,” Williams coolly replies “No, but I don’t care to meet them socially.”
There’s not a machete or hockey mask in sight, and frankly the scariest part of the film was when the lady in the Gainsborough logo suddenly turns to face the audience, but 1933’s Friday the Thirteenth is an intriguing little slice-of-life…and death…melodrama. It helped set the tone for such later British anthology films as Dead of Night and Quartet. and its theme of inevitability was a precursor of modern Hollywood’s Final Destination franchise. Sadly, it’s not currently available on home video on this side of the Atlantic, but it’s worth keeping an eye out for. Just don’t watch it on an actual Friday the 13th…no sense in tempting Fate.