The First Film That Frightened Me
The cackling horror of Some Will, Some Won’t
The first film that horrified me was not a horror film. It wasn’t intended to be disturbing, but it did disturb me. It ought to have been forgettable, but I remembered it for almost 40 years.
I can tell you the fateful day exactly thanks to the BBC Genome project, an archive of everything ever broadcast by the BBC between 1923 and 2009. It was Saturday, 9 January 1982, so I was six. A winter afternoon, I was alone and had been watching the children’s programme Play Away. In those days, in the UK, there were only three television channels, and not many shows for kids, so you watched them when they were on.
Either before Play Away or immediately afterwards, the announcer described a film that was showing next. Genome tells me that it was the second of two films in a “Saturday Cinema” double-bill (the other was No Kidding), with Play Away for some reason sandwiched in the middle. The actor connecting the two films was Leslie Phillips, but the name the announcer mentioned that caught my attention was Ronnie Corbett.
I knew that name. Corbett was one half of The Two Ronnies, a comedy duo (the other Ronnie was Ronnie Barker) with a hugely popular sketch show that played on the BBC at the weekend. It was the sort of big family show that, if you were a little kid, you were allowed to stay up a bit later than usual to watch. I liked The Two Ronnies. I was up for a film starring one of them. I stayed in my seat.
What happened next was not the piece of easygoing whimsy I was expecting. The film opened in London at night, with a cackling old man with a shock of white hair clinging to the hands of Big Ben. As the clock began to chime, he clung on, trapping the minute hand in place and causing the bells to strike for a count of at least 17. And then he fell to his death.
I didn’t watch any more.
I didn’t run screaming from the room. I think I, reasonably calmly, decided that this film was not for me, turned off the television and went off to do something else. But that terrifying old man on the clock face haunted me for days.
I didn’t tell my parents that I’d seen something that frightened me. I don’t think I was that sort of kid, and I also possibly reasoned that, if I admitted I had been upset by something, my solo television watching activities might be more carefully monitored in future. But for a considerable time I didn’t like being on my own, to an extent my parents must have noticed. At dinner time, rather than asking to be excused, I would stay at the table reading the same reassuring Wombles comic over and over until my parents got up to do the washing up. I don’t remember having nightmares, but I remember lying awake at night, thinking about the mad white haired old man on the clock.
Michael Foot was the leader of the Labour Party at the time, and I didn’t like it when he appeared on the news.
Over time the impact faded and I got over it. But I never forgot it. Occasionally over the years, that afternoon and the few days afterwards would pop into my head, and I’d wonder what the film had been. It didn’t seem that it was famous enough to be easily identifiable. I’d mention it to people, but it wouldn’t ring any bells.
When the internet arrived, it occurred to me at some point to ask a “can you name this film” question on the message boards of the IMDb. I described what I could from memory: definitely a British film; almost certainly from the 1960s or the early 1970s at the latest; featuring either Ronnie Corbett or Ronnie Barker (I didn’t recall which at this point); shown on British television one afternoon in the very early 1980s; opens on London at night; white-haired old man falls, laughing, to his death from the face of Big Ben.
The number of people who confidently responded telling me that it was probably Back to the Future was truly bloody depressing.
IMDb did eventually give me the answer though. By process of elimination, trawling through both Ronnies, I figured out that the film must have been Some Will, Some Won’t: a British comedy released in 1970. The beneficiaries of a prankster’s will have to act out of character to inherit. A lothario has to get married; a timid man has to rob a bank; a snob has to work as a maid; a respectable gent has to get arrested. With hilarious consequences.
The Clock Man was Wilfrid Brambell, famous as Albert Steptoe in the classic sit-com Steptoe and Son (for American readers, that was the show remade for you guys as Sanford and Son, so this was the UK equivalent of finding out that I’d been traumatised in childhood by Redd Foxx). Along with Ronnie Corbett and Leslie Phillips, the none-more-British-comedy cast also included Thora Hird, Michael Hordern and Arthur Lowe. The director was Duncan Wood, who worked a lot with Tony Hancock. The film was a remake of a 1951 Alastair Sim comedy called Laughter in Paradise.
Genome tells me that that 1982 afternoon was the third time Some Will, Some Won’t had been shown on British television, and it has never been shown since (at least by the BBC). I found VHS copies listed on eBay, but VHS was already obsolete, so I still didn’t get as far as actually being able to see the thing.
And then, suddenly, in early 2014, there was a DVD, courtesy of the always excellent Network Distribution. Network had previously furnished me with much-enjoyed box sets of The Prisoner, The Saint, Robin of Sherwood, Dick Turpin and Catweazle. Now, for some inexplicable reason, they’d revived and restored Some Will, Some Won’t and were going to plunge me back into my personal childhood heart of darkness. I ordered the DVD online. It arrived in the post.
When I was 12, only six years after that Saturday afternoon, I saw my first Hammer film (The Evil of Frankenstein, if you’re interested) and was hooked. I scoured the Radio Times for Hammer and Amicus. I got into horror. In my teens I loved Evil Dead 2 and Hellraiser. As an adult, horror became part of what I do professionally: I’ve written for Fangoria and Rue Morgue and Scream and Shock Till You Drop; I’ve interviewed Freddy Krueger and the Candyman; I’ve compered at horror festivals; I’ve been on horror film sets from London to New York to Transylvania. Horror is my jam, man. But I was properly apprehensive about sitting down to watch bloody Some Will, Some Won’t. As the opening credits rolled on midnight London, and Wilfrid Brambell jabbered and raved on the face of Big Ben, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I was a quivering six-year-old again. I had remembered it exactly. It was burned into my brain.
The rest of it? Well… it passed a mildly amusing hour and a half.
