Fear in the Night (1947)

Some things I liked some I did not.

Instant Favorite.

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Bank teller Vince Grayson (DeForest Kelly) wakes from a murderous nightmare that seems all too real with concrete evidence that it may well be true. Unable to shake the images from his mind his behavior at work becomes suspect as he irrationally bolts the job seeking to settle his confusion. He turns to his brother in law Cliff Herlihy (Paul Kelly) for help but even he has his suspicions.With it's intriguing nebulous opening Fear in the Night makes a decent effort at working noir tropes that evoke The Lady from Shanghai, DOA as well as masque the case building against Grayson well into the story. Even Grayson begins to believe he may be guilty and attempts suicide.As the confused Grayson, DeForest Kelly is an everyday benign working slob that in most circumstances seems harmless but director Max Shane saddles him with damning doubt early and Shane plays the character and the evidence to sustain suspense well into the film. Paul Kelly's cop brings balance to the story with his just the facts sobriety contrasting Grayson's free fall and incertitude. Left up to Grayson, he'd fry so it is left to Herlihy to advance the film.Jack Greenhalgh's cinematography remains strong most of the way after a bravura opening of strong expressionistic imagery that sets the stage. But overall the supporting cast remains weak and the shoestring budget glaring at times before a far-fetched denouement waters down matters even further. Still the artistry in this cheapskate makes it an interesting watch.

Bank teller Vince Grayson wakes from a nightmare in which he and an unknown woman murdered a man in a strange, mirrored room. Only a dream...but Vince finds that he has physical objects and bruises from his "dream." His cop brother-in-law dismisses his story...until the family, on a picnic, takes shelter from a thunderstorm in a deserted mansion containing that mirrored room. Is doom closing in on Vince?I wanted to like this movie, but I believe it's only claim to fame is the starring role for the Doctor on the original Star Trek series. The print I saw was horrible....like a 4th generation dupe that they underexposed. Maybe that drives my review. But it seemed to me the movie was sort of boring and not so interesting.

As I prepare to launch another film noir marathon, I thought I'd get back into groove with something small, offbeat and quickly sketched, but authored by a guy who was one of the preeminent creators of noir: Cornell Woolrich.His Deadline by Dawn would make my list of 10 favorites in the genre, it captures the chimeric noir world on the deepest level. Noir is all about the hallucination, the anxious narration causally tied to the world of the film. This structure is probably more explicit here than in any other noir film, including Lang's: the film starts with the narrator having a nightmare where he kills a woman in a mysterious octagonal room with mirrors, but when he wakes up in his room he finds traces of the murder. Over the course of the film, bit by bit memory seeps back into his narration. A storm leads him back to the fateful house. A cop brother- in-law and his girlfriend act as conscience, escorting him on the journey of atonement. It's all about guilt, memory and mishaps of fate. But the execution is slapdash, the actor doesn't have any tragicool charisma. It's off.But how about this as explication of noir dynamics? What we see and the protagonist experiences in the opening scene as the noir nightmare was very much real, but at the same time illusory for him in the moment of experience—double perspective. And how about this as the deeper cosmic joke of the prankster gods of noir? There would be no problem for our guy if only he didn't wake up that morning with the memory. So it wasn't the killing, but memory that causes stuff—being conscious of the nightmare, it acquires reality. Superb Woolrich.So this is a miss, but right off the bat we have some expert delineation of the noir universe.Noir Meter: 3/4

I know nothing about this film except my own opinion of it since I watched it by random and still have not read so much as a word about it anywhere – not even the TV guide! I saw it was a thriller noir and that was enough and very quickly the film gets into the genre device of the frenzied dream state with a calm narration by the person suffering it; it will be a device familiar to fans of the genre and it is one that the film embraces stylistically in order to open the film. The plot is that a normal guy who works in a bank has this dream where he murders a man in a small mirrored room while a woman looks on. He wakes the next day with some cuts and bruises and is unsure if it was real or not.The mystery goes from there but the film weakens itself from the very start and only hurts itself more from then on. By opening immediately in this way the film seeks to grab the attention but we have no context, no reason to care, no questions about what we see, all because we have no idea who anyone is or what they do. Once we get through this scene there is a little bit of background but mostly we stay in the feverish panic stage as Vince "remembers" stuff he can't possibly know, thus making the whole film essentially one of build as he realizes that, somehow, he really was where his dream had him. Problem is that, without context, this is something we know from the very start, because this device is so common and, if it isn't real then there really is no point to the whole film – so the reveals don't add clarity or drama, they simple continue to reinforce what we already know. Eventually we start to make progress but we do this off characters that are introduced as those involved so in terms of drama it is really very much a case of "here's Jim – he did it. Huh? Who's Jim – never worry about that, you got your solution".It isn't quite this bad but it is pretty close and at the end of the film I realized that I had never cared for or known any of the characters and thus it was only the device that made me curious about the outcome. There is at least one nice touch in the conclusion but that is all and otherwise it feels like a really hollow film where the original idea was the starting point but the structure and delivery never really got sorted out. The cast don't help this feeling – in particular DeForest Kelley can only mug melodramatically from the very start – which means this is the only character we know. The supporting cast are stiff but yet do the job I suppose – few of them have much to work with. The direction etc is by the numbers and feels like a lift from other, better films.Overall this is no more than a so-so film that uses a device that other films have used to better effect. The structure and delivery of this device is way off and left me really having no reason to care either for the characters or for the solution too much. Nothing really clever or of note here, just a by-the-numbers affair that doesn't have much of its own to do.