The Night My Number Came Up (1955)

Directed by Leslie Norman; produced by Michael Balcon

When a Royal Air Force passenger aircraft disappears over Japan on a routine flight, a search is mounted, but with no success and decreasing hope. A naval commander (Michael Hordern) intercedes with a frantic plea - literally inexplicble - to look in a region the aeroplane was unlikely to have flown over. As the search continues, we learn the events leading the possible crash, and the people involved.

The Night My Number Came Up doesn’t really have a right to be an entertaining movie. What has happened to the aeroplane is not really much of a secret; it takes place in the present (1955) and therefore in peace-time, so there is no chance of it having been shot down; there is no international chicanery or sabotage. It’s not, therefore, a mystery. Most of the story is told in flashback, so there is a kind of pre-destination to the whole affair. Yet it still manages to be exciting and interesting.

The secret is, I think, in the acting and the script, the latter of which manages to make details significant, while the former keeps the viewer involved. The screenplay, by R C Sherriff (from a story by Victor Goddard), manages cleverly to create a number of crises without making them seem repetitious or tedious, or making the viewer believe that he’s been fooled. It also builds suspense in the collection of various events that combine to persuade various passengers of the aeroplane that danger is increasing.

This sense of danger is communicated to the audience through the fine acting of the cast. Hordern, despite his character’s significance, plays a relatively small part, the larger being given to Michael Redgrave as a senior air force officer, Alexander Knox as a middle-level colonial official, and Denholm Elliott as a young officer suffering from latent battle fatigue.

Mention must also be made of Sheila Sim, whose character is somewhat in ignorance of events, and Nigel Stock as a pilot. Each brings his or her own reaction to what is happening, or what might happen, and this leads both to conflict and interest. As well, none, except perhaps the brash businessman Bennett (George Rose), is a stereotype, most giving evidence of his humanity and limits.

This was the director’s second feature film after his debut (as co-director) sixteen years before, and he does a good job of it. Norman takes what might very well could have been a stage-play (perhaps Sherriff’s influence) and breaks up the claustrophobic scenes in the aeroplane with interludes on the ground. These serve as rests between the stretches of tension. Norman later directed Dunkirk (1958), which remains the best film about that battle.

For a movie that involves a missing air force aeroplane but isn’t a war film, that makes the fate of that aeroplane uncertain but isn’t a mystery, that is set largely in one location but isn’t stagey, The Night My Number Came Up is remarkably and, perhaps surprisingly, successful.