As improbable as it may sound to modern audiences, the Rank Organisation emerged in the 1930s from the flour milling business of the Rank family with the self-declared aim of producing wholesome entertainment initially for a domestic market awash with unwholesome American imports.
When best-selling South African writer Joy Packer published her latest, much anticipated, romance novel in the summer of 1957, Rank – looking for spectacular yet wholesome family entertainment – jumped at the opportunity and acquired the rights even before most booksellers had stocked their shelves. A film script was drafted, and by the autumn locations had been explored in preparation for the arrival of cast and crew. To build anticipation at home, a flurry of positive press releases chronicled the travails of the film team while it waited for the weather to improve and hospitalized photographers, continuity girls, and camera operators to be released or replaced.
By Christmas work had all but ground to a halt, and what little was left of the cheerful charade evaporated in January when two of the leading players became abruptly incapacitated in separate but similarly self-inflicted circumstances. With Rank unwilling to abandon the project, and key participants no longer interested in its continuation, February saw frantic attempts to tie up the remaining loose ends.
The long-lost safari party finally returned to London in mid-March of 1958, where their employer put them to work while they still remained the property of Rank. The technical term for Rank actors was contract artist, and for them it meant yet more torturous sessions with the studio photographer and promotional interviews about the making of the film; on a higher plane, the director was assigned to extol the educational benefits of starting a bushfire or harassing a herd of elephants.
The three essays to which Ken Annakin lent his name are perfectly happy to follow up anecdotes about the "local" wildlife with the purely pragmatic decision not to show them being mown down by machine guns because “it would be impracticable to get permission … to film such brutality.” Burning down part of the reserve was deemed more practical instead. When after weeks of bad weather two days of sun caused the undergrowth to become “very dry,” the film makers, being wholly dedicated to their art, proceeded to “pump over 800 gallons of paraffin on the scrub in order to make our flames realistic.”
Realism and authenticity clearly motivated Ken Annakin when he personally dropped a live cobra into the heroic game warden’s Land Rover before said game warden crashes said Land Rover (the exercise took seven heroic attempts, we learn) and is then attacked by not just one but an entire pride of lions. Indeed, so engrossed did the director become in this “very exciting true-life adventure,” the story of how the "poor game warden” who had “just sufficient strength to remember that he had a knife" could easily have filled the allotted 90 minutes in Ken Annakin’s version of the film.
Lions, snakes, and rogue elephants are expertly handled by the eminently capable and eminently eligible young men whose job it is to risk their lives in defence of, yes, the wildlife but more importantly, British interests at the outskirts of the Empire: the Rank Organisation by now viewed itself as a key player of the post-war industrial expansion at home and abroad, eagerly looking to forge partnerships with market leaders in other sectors of the British economy.
Ironically, this is where the question of authenticity in a work of art becomes one of life imitating art, as cast and crew bravely faced down death on more than one occasion in the course of their ordeal. Torrential rain caused the entire film to be shot in authentic locations, but it also forced the editor to come up with a new fairy-tale ending to accommodate for changed realities: an instance of art imitating life’s essential unpredictability?
Once again, the boundaries begin to blur: Nor the Moon by Night stands out perhaps not as the artistic masterpiece Rank never attempted to make but as a milestone of a different kind - marking the passage of an era of film-making that relied on a studio system steeped in the traditions of the theatre, and the artificiality associated with it. The “vertical integration” strategy of the Rank Organisation in the post-war period was coming under pressure from two directions at once, television delivering its product directly into people’s homes, and the growing taste for independent film-making, with its own brand of emotional authenticity-for-its-own-sake, in stark contrast to Ken Annakin's highly selective kind, which serves a clear purpose.
Annakin would have seen no conflict between the message of the film and its making, between art (in the widest sense) and commerce; indeed, Nor the Moon by Night was explicitly designed not only to fill Rank-owned theatres but also to sell other commodities, from South African holidays to British-made off-road vehicles. Implicit in this fantasy is the reassurance that everything will be exactly as advertised. Potential visitors need not fear any change in the status quo. The idyllic picture of life in the South African wilderness is exotic enough to be exciting and static enough to be reassuring.
In one final ironic twist, Annakin’s boastful summary actually highlights the gap between truth and fiction, fantasy and reality, life and art: “It turned out to be the most difficult and trouble-ridden film which I have ever made.” The profundity and prescience of his own words may well have escaped him.