Friday the Thirteenth

It is one minute to midnight. The date is the thirteenth and the day is a Friday. Rain is coming down over London. A bus is moving along an empty road. The driver can barely see through the glass. Lightning strikes. A crane above the road comes down into the bus’s path. Then the clock turns backwards. The film goes over everything that led to that moment, taking the passengers one at a time. One is a confidence man with a cheque in his pocket. One is a businessman’s elderly wife. Each of them had a different reason to be on that bus. Time runs forward again to the crash, and some live and some die. The film is an early example of the portmanteau form. Jessie Matthews, Ralph Richardson, Emlyn Williams and Edmund Gwenn appear in the eighty nine minute film, a British production Victor Saville finished in 1933.