Rent Night Train for Inverness (1960)

AN ICE-CREAM RIDE - Night Train for Inverness review by CH

Who knew much about diabetes in 1960? It is now a familiar subject, but Night Tain for Inverness opens in a ward in the, er, Longford Children's Hospital near London; disaster is averted there, just in time, when a nurse prevents another boy's mother from giving Dennis Waterman a chocolate.

He has been there some while but is recovering, and due to go home with his mother (Silvia Francis) to the flat they share with her positive Gorgon of a mother (played superbly by Irene Arnold, her spectacles adding to the domineering horror of her regular egotistical cry of “I was only trying to help”).

In neat symmetry, Waterman's father (Norman Wooland) is returning home. That is, he has been released from gaol after six months for a theft which he had hoped would ease the domestic pressure wrought by life with the mother-in-law. It was not to be, and he has a Court order to stay away, something with which his wife has gone along - she did not realise that his weekly heartfelt letters had been intercepted and destroyed by her mother. This is a tragic situation, if not quite on the level of Hamlet, in which Wooland had been Horatio beside Olivier.

Obliged to hole up in a Euston boarding house, he comes up with a plan to take the boy (whom he meets outside the Hawtrey Prep. School) on a trip as far away as possible, in which he is aided by an old flame (the great Jane Hylton). And so, much of these sixty-five minutes is given to some twelve hours - illustrated by diverse clocks and announcements - of real time as the boy, who does not reveal any need for painful injections, takes the opportunity to gorge upon ice cream and chocolates,. With copious use of the telephone, the police try to discover his whereabouts while, beyond the briefly-glimpsed Euston Arch, the vigorous wheels of a billowing and bellowing steam train head northwards, the restaurant car allowing another form of smoke before diners head back along a side corridor to those wide seats of which passengers can now only dream.

All this is handled well by that proficient director Ernest Morris. Some might pick holes in it - but, then again, one can question Hamlet's construction. And, well, this was the first appearance by Dennis Waterman, who soon became widely known on television as prankster schoolboy William. (The film also briefly includes John Moulder Brown who, a decade and an era later, appeared alongside Jane Asher in the tremendous swimming-pool tale Deep End.) It is an accomplished performance, not least because, for much of it (and far from William), he has to sleep and indeed go into a coma, limp in his father's arms.

Here was work for those on the rise and the decline - and modest but rewarding entertainment for us six decades on.