Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968)

Mumbling and muttering academic Professor Parkins (Michael Hordern) checks into a hotel on the Norfolk coast for his vacation, which he mostly seems to have planned – in so far as he does any planning – to spend writing and on surprisingly vigorous coastal walks (unlike in the original story, golfing is out).

On one of said walks, Parkins finds an ancient whistle half-buried in the sand. Taking it home to the hotel, he discovers a Latin inscription on it, carrying the not at all concerning words “Who is this who is coming”. For reasons best known to himself, Parkins blows the whistle and is afterwards plagued by nightmares of some shadowy, deeply disturbing figure on the beach, as well as a feeling of being followed in real life, until things climax in something very disturbing happening in his hotel bedroom.

This short TV movie directed and adapted by Jonathan Miller (and based on one of the greatest ghost stories ever written) is of course the model that would some years later create one of the BBC’s great achievements in horror and supernatural television, the annual Ghost Story for Christmas, often based, as is this one, on the father of the modern ghost story, M.R. James.

For many a viewer, this proto-Ghost Story for Christmas is one of, if not the greatest of them all, and really, it’s not difficult to see why: the calm and slow beginning and the stark and effective black and white photography create a sense of place and a mood of something ineffably dreadful lurking just beyond the borders of the very quotidian; the handful of effects are used so cleverly, they are actually Jamesian in affect and method as well as in an eventual ruthlessness typical of the endings of Monty’s tales that’s not at all sanded down for television; and the sound design does much to add to all this.

For something that was really meant to be shown once and then thrown away (long-suffering friends of vintage British television do of course still have fits of anger about the BBC’s nightmarish decision to just overwrite the tapes of some of their old programs), there’s an astonishing amount of art and thoughtfulness on display. The filmmakers of this – like of a lot of other BBC productions – work on a Hollywood Poverty Row budget with the love, care, and effort of proper artists, and so Miller’s editing rhythm’s and staging decisions provide the film with a nearly hypnotic quality, something ineffable that turns a slow and theoretically straightforward tale into something very special indeed.

Now, I’ve gone on record somewhere that I don’t actually love this particular James adaptation as much as many others do mostly because of the much-praised performance of Michael Hordern, who portrays the somewhat obtuse but basically sensible Parkins of the story as a mumbling, brabbling absent-minded horror of a man barely able to communicate. I can’t say I’ve grown to love the performance over the years. I still believe Hordern is just too much here, but I’ve grown less irritated by it, and therefore less distracted by it also, and now find myself disagreeing with his acting decisions without finding them ruining the filmmaking for me anymore, finally – after a decade or so – leaving me just as much in love with the filmmaking and mood of Whistle and I’ll Come to You as everyone else who cares about these wonders of British television is.