Nightmare (1956)

The greatest movie ever made..!

Sorry, this movie sucks

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Kevin McCarthy has a terrible nightmare one night, in which he finds himself inside a room with walls and doors covered in mirrors. He sees what looks like a burglary and tries to prevent it, but in the process kills the burglar. Panicking, he hides the body in one of the mirrored closets, before waking up in a cold sweat. When McCarthy finds a button and a key from his nightmare in his pocket the next day, he fears it might've been than a bad dream. Soon after, on a picnic with his girl Connie Russell, his sister Virginia Christine and brother-in-law Edward G. Robinson, they come across an abandoned house. In the house they find the mirrored room from McCarthy's dream, including a burned safe. And when they find out there's been a murder committed, the nightmare has truly come to life... Robinson, a homicide detective, is convinced McCarthy is guilty but after a failed suicide attempt by McCarthy and a crucial piece of information that he remembers, Robinson decides to look deeper into the matter.This is the 2nd film noir based on the Cornell Woolrich story 'And So To Death'. The first one, 'Fear In The Night', was made in 1947 and was directed by Maxwell Shane. And lo and behold, so is this one! Both movies are very alike and both are well worth watching. This one's set in New Orleans, and has the appropriate 50s jazzy soundtrack. McCarthy ('Invasion Of The Body Snatchers') gives a good if not great performance as a man who's possibly guilty of murder while Robinson ('Double Indemnity') almost phones it in here, which still means he's better than anybody else in the movie, hah... Russell and Christine have very little to do besides being 'the women', neither portray particularly strong women, altho Russell does some nice singing in this movie (if that's her real voice, I have no idea).Aside from fairly minor differences, the main ones being a difference in location and the climax in this one involves a lake and not a car chase, the movies are too alike really. I am not sure what Shane's idea was with this version, the original is a good noir as-is, and so is this one, but it doesn't improve or add anything really. He still does a decent job tho, but with the main story intact, it feels too much like a rehash. DoP Joseph Biroc ('Cry Danger', 'The Garment Jungle') does a good job, not just with the dream sequence but overall the movie is nicely shot. Unfortunately, and also like 'Fear...', this movie seems to be in public domain hell, the copy I saw is in better shape than the version I saw of 'Fear...' (which was really bad) but still washed out. I would love to see cleaned up copies of both, maybe on a 'double feature' DVD? Just don't watch them back-to-back. 7/10

It begins with Kevin McCarthy's nightmare. He murders a man with the help of a terrified woman, in a room full of mirrors, and then falls into a black hole before waking up in a sweat. It really doesn't look too promising. The print on YouTube is flat with high-key lighting, like "I Love Lucy." But at least McCarthy doesn't wake from his nightmare by shoving his face into the camera lens.Dreams are hard to describe in print and even on film because a fictional narrative has to impose some sort of logic on them. Here, McCarthy must step into a hole in order to fall into it. In real dreams, you just fall. There is no hole and no logic. Falling is statistically frequent in dreams. So are flying and being naked in public, but the most common dream is of being pursued. I'm especially fond of the ones where I'm being chased by some unseen ogre and find myself running in slow motion, as through a swamp of molasses. I speak to you as your psychologist. That will be ten cents.The literalness doesn't stop with the nightmare. McCarthy gets out of bed to find that he has bruises and blood from his dream fight. "All of a sudden the room started spinning" -- and the room spins and spins and resolves into the bell of a trumpet.McCarthy's semi hard-boiled narration carries us through an explanation of how he actually came to kill a stranger, which he did. There are a lot of interludes with Billy May and his band. McCarthy is his arranger and clarinetist. May was kept pretty busy on tours and in television during the big band era, in which he was associated with names like Les Brown and Ray Noble. Meade "Lux" Lewis shows up for a cameo, a pianist who more or less began boogie woogie. You can hear him on YouTube.I've seen the earlier version and wasn't especially impressed by it. I thought it might make a good Alfred Hitchcock hour. Except for its location shooting in New Orleans, this later version doesn't represent a vast improvement. It's not one of Kevin McCarthy's best performances. He's a weakling and a nervous wreck from beginning to end. I suppose, though, that he's as handsome as his sister was talented and sensual, the writer Mary McCarthy ("The Group", etc.). Mary had a way with words. Of Lillian Hellman, she noted that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."

In the role right before he made a comeback of sorts in The Ten Commandments, Edward G. Robinson stars in Nightmare where he solves both a crime and a particular nightmare that Kevin McCarthy is going through. You see McCarthy thinks he killed and Robinson is a New Orleans homicide detective.Kevin plays a mean jazz clarinet in Billy May's Orchestra where girlfriend Connie Russell sings. McCarthy who scored with the same kind of role in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers thinks he's killed someone in an old mansion in a room with a lot of mirrors. There's a man and a woman in the same recurring dream.Like his Body Snatchers part, McCarthy is trapped in a Nightmare and by circumstances he can't control. Of course the very cynical homicide detective Robinson doesn't really believe him, but he's going along for the sake of Virginia Christine, Robinson's wife and McCarthy's sister.In the end it becomes clear enough though the manipulator of the events is a character introduced after Robinson really begins an investigation. Nightmare is a decent enough noir thriller, but it really does look shot on the cheap with real New Orleans and country Louisiana locations. Not on the to 10 list of any of the principals.

Maxwell Shea remade his own film; the cheap Noir thriller "Fear in the Night" as 1956's "Nightmare" with a bigger budget and an A-list cast, yet the film follows the formers structure so closely you wonder what was the point. The two films are basically the same movie yet where they differ "Fear in the Night" comes out the superior, its hokey plot felt more at home with its low-budget and it was nicely complimented by an effective dark atmosphere, also the films conclusion and hallucination/dream scenes were sharper and more creatively shot . The one thing "Nightmare" has over the original is in the cast, 'Noir' staple and the always great Edward G Robinson, takes the role of the protagonist cop brother in-law (which was fairly flat in the original) and injects it with the warmth and vitality that is expected from him. Kevin Mcarthy has played the 'average man pushed to hysteria' role before but for good reason; he does it well, his performance is preferable to Deforrest Kelly's big eye-balled take on the same character. Even though its neck and neck with the original "Nightmare" comes out short, which doesn't make it a bad film, I just wouldn't recommend it if you've seen the original, but if you haven't there are some cheap B-movie thrills to be fond in the A-list surroundings.