Jonathan Miller’s precursor to the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas cycle proves unsettling all year round
Though I heard “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” probably ten thousand times throughout the first 20 years of my life, Andy Wiliams’ decision to rhyme “scary ghost stories” with “tales of the glories” always puzzled me. I don’t expect I was alone in that. Through that period, A Christmas Carol and its scores of adaptations were the only Yuletide ghost stories I could think of. It was in college that I finally learned how Dickens’ yarn was just the most famous entry in a long history of stories much like it, that ghost stories were long a Christmas tradition across Great Britain. Discovering the stories of M.R. James, written expressly for fireside readings around the holidays, was like answering a question that had plagued me most of my life. Even better was the revelation that the BBC adapted many of James’ stories (along with a Dickens story and some originals) throughout the 1970s for its A Ghost Story for Christmas series. The cycle got its unofficial start in 1968 with Jonathan Miller’s spare adaptation of M.R. James’ best-known story, “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (1904).
Miller opens the film with narration that offers some background on James, perhaps a concession to Omnibus’ typical non-fiction format. He makes a subtle and foundational change when he abbreviates the title of the source story to just Whistle and I’ll Come to You. Already, he subverts Omnibus’ commitment to the facts. Miller then blurs the distinction between the two versions of the story when he describes what James accomplishes. “[The story] has a moral too,” he narrates. “It hints at the dangers of intellectual pride.” This much is most definitely true. The story and the film do far more than hint at these dangers. Like so many skeptics before and after him, Professor Parkin/Parkins1 falls victim to supernatural forces that seem goaded on by his disbelief. As the narrator continues, however, Miller’s liberties with the text become clearer. The suggestion that forces inside Parkin are behind this bedevilment sets Miller’s reading apart. Though he may mean to show us the ways in which an addled mind can torment itself, James leaves little ambiguity as to whether his story’s spirits are genuine. At least all the characters involved seem to believe.
On the page, Parkins shows more than just skepticism on the subject of ghosts. He takes their very mention as a personal affront, an insult to the hard work of scholars like himself who toil to stake out the limits of human understanding. A joke from a colleague at Cambridge sends Parkins into a rage. “A man in my position,” he nearly shouts, his face reddening, “cannot, I find, be too careful about appearing to sanction the current beliefs on such subjects.” Following an interruption, he continues, growing ever more grandiose, “I hold that any semblance, any appearance of concession to the view that such things might exist is equivalent to a renunciation of all that I hold most sacred.” Parkins believes his personal and professional honor is at stake. He is the picture of intellectual pride. We’ve seen similar scenes in countless horror movies, watching as self-assured non-believers seal their fates.
An equivalent scene doesn’t arrive until around halfway through Miller’s adaptation. Though the eerie opening sequence foreshadows scares with its grim narration, backdrop, and framing, the rest of Whistle and I’ll Come to You’s first act stretches out with an almost comic lack of incident. Miller’s languid pace suits the holiday setting and our bland, contented protagonist. As if to dubiously confirm Parkin’s skeptical worldview, Miller takes his time in introducing anything potentially supernatural. Only viewers familiar with James’ story will recognize that the hotel employees who efficiently make a bed just after the opening credits are setting the stage for terror. Parkin’s subsequent cab journey from the train station to the hotel shows us how far he’s traveling from the comfort and surety of his academic cloister. With just a lightly anguished expression, Michael Hordern tells us what to expect from his take on James’ academic. He looks vaguely haunted already, nothing like a man about to go on vacation. It’s no surprise that he’s not chatting with his driver in the next shot. The shot, which places Parkin deep in the background and on the opposite end of the frame from the driver, establishes what will become a visual motif. Whether Parkin trudges alone along the beach or sits amongst his fellow vacationers, Miller and cinematographer Dick Bush continually isolate him. Depending on the sequence, the staging can suggest vulnerability against an immense world, a world beyond the scope of Parkin’s understanding or his awkward disconnection from everyone around him. Miller’s next shot, the car making its way down a country road and toward the frame, could strike impatient viewers as one scene-setting shot too many. It additionally suggests how long the Professor has been sitting in silence during his ride.
Miller isolates Parkin again once he’s arrived at the hotel. This time, he stands in the foreground while an empty hall extends into the background. It opens off into a number of doors left provocatively ajar. Though we’re back indoors, the inn projects the same sense of not-so-subtle menace as that first empty beach. Parkin calls out and it’s an uncomfortable few seconds before he’s greeted by the proprietor. His bearing is anything but inviting and his mumbled, only fitfully intelligible dialogue prepares us for the Professor’s own vocal patterns. Like his counterpart, this Parkins sets about putting his room in “apple pie order.” I mention this only because a fondness for organization is about all he has in common with James’ Professor Parkins, introduced as “young, neat, and precise of speech.” The middle-aged and mumbling Parkin also lacks the original character’s fondness for golf, who sets out on a working vacation with hopes to spend time improving his game. Parkin’s first conversation upon arriving consists primarily of his characteristically rambling answer to the question, “Come here for the golf, I suppose?” He appears to forget he’s engaging another person, let alone someone expecting an answer to a question. “No, I don’t play golf,” he trails off, “much,” another pause, “if at all.” He begins to sign his name in the registry and mumbles that final line under his breath several times. Later, at dinner, Parkin chooses a table of his own. He sits close to the viewer but far from fellow vacationers, dominating one half of the foreground. It suggests the uneasy headspace of someone who fears that, in trying to avoid attention, they’ve drawn it while also making Parkin look a bit like he’s an overgrown diner at the kid’s table. When a roll arrives and gives him something to do with his fumbling hands and murmuring mouth, it’s like he’d been starving.
The subject of golf returns the next morning at breakfast along with the first intimations of horror. Parkin turns down an invitation to hit the links with the Colonel (Ambrose Coghill), opting to visit various sights — “dunes, beach, cemetery” — which he lists almost robotically. When the Colonel dismisses the idea as “too spooky” for his taste, Parkin doesn’t bother hiding his thoughts on the supernatural. Without getting as apoplectic as his inspiration (after all, the Colonel didn’t mention ghosts), the Professor shows his disdain. “Is it,” he asks, gaze never leaving his breakfast plate, “spooky, spooky?” He practically trembles and bugs out his eyes in mock horror before we dissolve to his solitary walk along what looks like the same desolate beach as before. As in James’ story, wooden groynes stretch out into the surf which seeps lazily toward the gray shore. Parkin ambles into the distance of multiple shots before heading toward us to settle atop a hill to eat his lunch. He next makes his way through overgrowth to the crumbling cemetery where, just at the end of a rocky escarpment, he spies a mysterious cylindrical object. “Finders keepers,” he says to himself. As he makes his way back to the hotel, something seems amiss. A solitary figure looms in the distance. They’re too far for us to recognize any movement, but close enough to unsettle. That Parkin doesn’t seem perturbed, that he wears the same mildly pained expression as always, only underlines his obliviousness. During the night, in a scene both versions of the story share, Parkin’s hubris reaches its peak. He cleans off the whistle and discovers a Latin inscription translating to, Who is this. Who is coming? “We shall blow it and see,” he says, almost taunting in his plea to the spirits he doesn’t believe in. A sudden gust of wind seems to call out an answer and we dissolve into the familiar image of a distant figure on the beach. Even the professor looks mildly spooked after the next dissolve. This one finds him in bed and zooms out from his face as if pulling us out of his harrowing dream.
“Do you believe in ghosts, Professor?” A question from the Colonel welcomes us back to the breakfast table and Parkin quickly makes it clear how unwelcome he finds the question. This time he can’t avoid an argument. He presses the Colonel on what precisely he means by ghosts. He’s comically imprecise in his insistence on getting to the heart of the issue, a parody of pseudointellectual self-satisfaction. It’s the film’s closest answer to the opening squabble from James’ story. James also presents a disagreement between Parkins and the Colonel on matters of the supernatural. Their golf-course discussion proves much more congenial. It opens with a reference to the previous night’s surprising weather. “In my old home,” the Colonel remarks, “we would have said someone had been whistling for it.” Though the Professor bristles at the Colonel’s references to spirits and second sight, and his dismissal of the idea that such things equate to superstition, the work of improving their respective golf games keeps them both from getting too invested in arguing. The film’s Colonel makes an honest attempt to give a more detailed definition of ghost. “Let’s think now,” he offers a guess, “the spirits of the dead, the survival of the human personality.” That only encourages the Professor to probe at whether these definitions really mean anything. Seated in his usual spot, a table away, he continues on a diatribe about whether anything can really survive death. A remarkably good sport, the Colonel responds with a line from Hamlet: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth than in your philosophy.” Whether or not the Colonel betrays an undue interest or any ill will toward Parkin, it’s clear the Professor takes the remarks personally. “Your philosophy” sounds like an attack on his own personal convictions. Immediately, he responds, “I prefer to put it another way.” He deigns to rewrite Shakespeare, saying, “there are more things in philosophy than are dreamt of in Heaven and Earth.” He proceeds to close out the sequence with more than half a minute of laughter at his own witticism.
Later, Parkin goes off on another walk, disappearing into the distance of back-to-back shots before settling atop another grassy hill. Here, the Professor mentally repeats his quips back to himself. One perspective on his lunch emphasizes the empty beach around him, a potential runway for spirits to make their way across. Cuts to an alternate perspective communicate the peaceful, skeptical headspace of a man who has no idea what he’s already invited. The sequence closes on a zoom into one of the beach’s groynes, perhaps confirming which perspective we should have taken seriously. Subsequent dissolves heighten our sense of unease. We first transition to the empty bed in the professor’s room before tilting left and watching him aggressively wash himself with water from a basin. “Who is this, who is coming?” echoes in his head, in a voice sounding much like the Colonel’s. Next, we see what looks like the same shot of the professor waking from nightmares. The camera zooms out to the foot of the bed before a new shot settles on Parkin’s face as he tries to force himself into sleep. We’re then taken into the same dreams that plagued the literary Parkins a night earlier. Miller manages a remarkably faithful (both in content and in spirit) evocation of James’ scenes. Parkin runs desperately across the beach, climbing and crouching behind groynes as if hiding from an assailant. The cutting thwarts all sense of progress by reversing Parkin’s course, sending him the opposite way across the frame before cutting back to a shot from the original position. By this time, it’s too late. A ragged scrap of fabric hangs in mid-air behind Parkin, somehow both walking and slithering toward him. Despite its elemental, childishly simple form, this spirit terrifies. Its strange animalistic grunts belie its ethereality, calling to mind the very real bodily harm it may inflict. Parkin ultimately decides to sleep with the lights on.
Upon waking, the professor grows ever more isolated. We don’t see any other hotel guests throughout the entire day. Parkin eats breakfast and dinner alone, pores over a tome on spiritualism in solitude, and draws his own bath. Just as soon as his head hits the pillow, however, the Professor learns he’s not alone. We hear a rustling from the other side of the room while staying fixed on Parkin. As the sound grows louder, he rises and we watch his confusion turn to dread as the camera zooms out from his face. Across the room, the sheets of the unoccupied bed move on their own and begin to take an almost human form. The tortured groans and slow-motion photography from Parkin’s dream returns as he crumbles into childish fright, whimpering and sucking his thumb. We only catch a brief glimpse of the spirit. Miller opts instead to stay on Parkin. We’re left to rely on our own imaginations and left wondering, perhaps, if it’s just Parkin’s imagination at work on screen. Hordern evokes bone-deep terror so believably that we have little doubt that something is very wrong. The Colonel can’t deny this either once he intrudes upon the scene. He offers little consolation though, looking at the Professor with a kind of pity. He picks up the haunted sheets, now sapped of life, with the resignation of a parent whose child has wet the bed in fright. Parkin’s Larry Fine-like haircut adds an absurd comic quality to the sequence. We can only wonder at what the Colonel thinks of it all.
James wraps up his story with a droll “where are they now” sequence. The Colonel throws the whistle into the sea and helps dispel rumors that the Professor was suffering from delirium tremens. The final paragraph brings Parkins’ story to a humorous close by making him an object of fun, somewhat like Ichabod Crane after his encounter with the Headless Horseman. “As you may imagine,” James writes, “the Professor’s views on certain points are less clear cut than they used to be.” The ordeal has frayed his nerves and caused him to conjure frightful images from “a surplice hanging on a door” or “the spectacle of a scarecrow.” There is nothing comic or conciliatory about the conclusion to Miller’s adaptation. The distraught Parkin can scarcely speak. He repeats, “oh no,” to himself again and again. His tone changes from one of fright alone to one of grave resignation. Whether this was a genuine spirit or the imaginings of a solitary mind, the Professor is destroyed. An abrupt cut to the closing credits leaves us without any sort of resolution. Miller doesn’t let Parkin finish uttering the final, “no.” A freeze frame pauses Parkin before he can get the words out. “Oh yes,” the writer-director seems to conclude as the credits roll over the professor’s face.
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