Dead of Night

An architect arrives at a country house and recognises everybody from a recurring dream. Each guest tells a story. The framing device closes in a loop that is still one of the boldest endings in British film.

Ealing made it with four directors. The golf-course episode is a comedy and is the weakest. The mirror story is truly unsettling. And Cavalcanti's ventriloquist segment, with Michael Redgrave as a man whose dummy is dismantling him, is the single most influential twenty minutes in horror anthology history: Magic, Child's Play and a great deal else run through it.

It was made while London was still being bombed and released the year the war ended, which is visible in its interest in men whose minds have gone somewhere they cannot come back from.

Two astronomers watching it in 1945 were reportedly so struck by the circular structure that it contributed to their thinking on the steady-state model of the universe.