Flick Friday: Friday The Thirteenth 1933

Posted on October 13, 2023

I got lucky, today and found a Friday The 13th movie that had nothing to do with Jason or Camp Crystal Lake. Ninety years, ago, Friday The Thirteenth was released in the UK, at some point in November of 1933. The movie opened in New York on May 14, 1934. Curiously, this movie seems more science-fiction than spook. ~Vic

Directed by Victor Saville, produced by Michael Balcon and written by Sidney Gilliat, George Moresby-White, & Emlyn Williams, it starred Jessie Matthews, Sonnie Hale, Muriel Aked, Cyril Smith, Richard Hulton, Max Miller and, Alfred Drayton.

It is pouring with rain at one minute to midnight on Friday the thirteenth and the driver of a London bus is peering through his blurred windshield as his vehicle sails down an empty road. Suddenly, lightning strikes and a vast crane above topples into the path of the oncoming bus. Then, Big Ben begins to wind backwards. Time recedes and we discover the lives of all of the passengers, and the events that brought them to that late-night bus journey, from the con man with a hundred pound cheque to the businessman’s distraught elderly wife. Time flows on, inevitably, to the crash and past it, as some live and some die.

IMDb Storyline

The complicated lives of twelve people travelling on a bus are traced up to the point when the bus crashes into a shop, killing two of the passengers.

BFI Screen Online

In London, near midnight, as a rain storm rages, several people travel across the city on a bus. Of the passengers, one elderly woman seems anxious and upset, a young man who has just been robbed by a pickpocket gratefully accepts money for his fare from another passenger, another man boasts of his knowledge of art, and a young woman angrily destroys a photo of a man. When a lightning strike causes the bus to crash, each passenger recalls what brought them on the ill-fated journey.

Rotten Tomatoes Movie Info

After a London bus crash leaves two people dead and several injured, the clock is turned back twenty-four hours to show the lives of the bus passengers, how they happened to be on that bus at that time, and the effect of the crash upon their lives.

TCM/AFI Synopsis

♦ AllMovie Synopsis (Hal Erickson)
♦ Review: Friday The Thirteenth (1933) (Comet Over Hollywood/Jessica Pickens/April 13, 2018)

You can watch the entire movie on the Internet Archive HERE.