oscaralbert Review of Night Mail

Night Mail (1936)

Around the time of King Arthur's Court and Robin Hood . . .

[7/10 · 11 March 2018]

. . . England ran a steam punk version of the Pony Express, NIGHT MAIL contends. An outrageous blend of the most impractical aspects of "Willie Wonka" and "Rube Goldberg," this alleged operation involved Snow White's Seven Dwarfs sorting 500 million letters into 336 pigeonholes, according to a breathless narrator, who winds up getting so wound up that he begins rapping Middle Earth-type place names that are probably only figments of J.R.R. Tolkien's imagination. Though most of the extras recruited to film NIGHT MAIL manage to keep a "straight face" during their ludicrous scenes, a few of them wink and smirk at the camera, confirming what all but the most naïve viewers will suspect after a few minutes on the NIGHT MAIL train: this vehicle is more of a hoax than Harry Potter's Night Bus. Not only are the procedures shown here hopelessly complicated, but it's also clear that they could never be duplicated on a daily (much less nightly) basis for even a week. Furthermore, covering a tiny island such as England with a beta version of SNOWPIERCER when the vast expanses of our USA are handily serviced by a few mail trucks will make sense only to the most deluded fringe element of Anglophiles.