The Night Runner

Ray Danton is in a psychiatric asylum; under pressure, he had cracked and tried to kill some one. His psychiatrist thinks he is getting better, but not yet ready to be released. The supervisors point out the overcrowding, the fact he is carrying more than three times his recommended patient load, and asks how much good he can do Danton or his other patients. And so Danton is released. He tries to get a job as a draftsman, but when asked about the two-year gap since his last employment, he runs. At a bus stop near the ocean, he finds the people friendly, so he moves into a motel run by Willis Bouchey and his daughter, Colleen Miller. He starts to feel better, and falls in love with Miss Miller, and perhaps she with him. But how long can this return to normalcy last?

Abner Biberman's last movie as director -- he continued to work on episodic television until the early 1970s -- is a well-meaning study with a plea for better psychiatric funding. It's directed in a dry fashion, and Danton is pretty good in the lead role, aided by George Robinson's subtle lighting changes and a score that well reflects the moods of the lead.

I always thought it was Stephen Mc Nally playing the lead in this film. Maybe because I have always thought that Stephen McNally looked like Ray Danton too. And mc Nally was under Universal contract; so he could have perfectly been in this picture. That said, the Hitchcockian story is really unusual and the Danton's character so ambivalent. For me, the best movie from director Abner Biberman and a movie to watch at all cost. I have arely seen a so ambivalent character, for whom you may hesitate between atraction - empathy - and repulsion. Yes, a true interesting little gem that proves once more that Universal studios was for me the most interesting studio from the fifties. It provided all kinds of good films: westerns, science fiction, crime movies, dramas, comedies, adventure. All kinds. And not juicy, fancy as MGM for instance, or even Twentieth Century Fox.

The course traversed by The Night Runner careens from the mildly impressive to the disappointing. On the one hand, there are a few strikingly shot night scenes, a tight story line, and an able performance by its handsome but less than mesmerizing star, Ray Danton (later to star as the `Aspirin Kid' in The Beat Generation and in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond). On the other, there's a budget of about $699, a forgettable supporting cast, and a self-sabotaging way of not following through on its strengths but settling for narrative clichés instead.

Owing to economic pressures, Danton gains release, against the better judgement of his doctor, from the mental institution where he's been confined - there was a vague, violent incident in his past. But he's unequipped for the outside world. In Los Angeles, he bolts from a job interview when asked to fill in the holes in his resumé and starts to assault a man in the street he bumps into. Trying a geographic cure, he gets aboard a Greyhound, takes a liking to a little coastal town during a rest stop, and decides to stay.

He books a room in an off-season motel where he raises suspicions in the owner (Willis Bouchey) but falls for his daughter (Colleen Miller). The salt air, a new job in the aerospace industry and the prospect of romance do wonders until Bouchey, having ferreted out the dark secret, locks Danton out of his room and bids him hit the road. Whereupon Danton kills him, making it look like a robbery, and carries on his courtship with the bereaved Miller as if nothing had happened. But when evidence that he played a part in the slaying starts surfacing (even though one character observes that `A lot of people spill nail polish on money'), his false façade of stability starts to topple....

The man behind The Night Runner, Abner Biberman, was a minor actor (often playing Asian roles!) from the mid-1930s until he turned to directing in the mid-1950s. Frustratingly, he shows glimmers of talent, even sensitivity, but ultimately chooses a facile, melodramatic path (though Universal International Pictures may have forced his hand). The script is prescient about the too-early release from institutions of psychiatric patients not yet ready to cope with the stresses and responsibilities of daily living, an enlightened view underscored by Danton's largely restrained performance. But then the inexorable machinery of the suspense plot demands that he erupt as a psycho-killer. Still, the movie's end unmasks Danton as not quite a monster but rather a misfit with some sad insight into why the `normal' life he craves can never be his.

I don't recall seeing much of Ray Danton before, and certainly not in the lead role but I have to say I kind of enjoyed him. He has a great voice and I'm wondering why he never made more of a name for himself in the movies. The story is kind of basic but I guess this is a circumstantially unique telling of it. There are a few moments of mild suspense but mostly of curiosity. The story does develop and has some momentum but not as much perhaps as everyone involved was hoping for. The pacing is even which is good but it didn't quite build to the degree I was expecting. Despite some reservations with The Night Runner it did provide me with some easy, relaxed entertainment and as such think it's one worth checking out.

This is psychologically interesting, since it delves into the mind of a recently released mental hospital patient, who was reluctantly released by his psychiatrist who didn't consider him cured well enough, but his colleagues insisted on the release, so our man got his chance. Did he succeed in becoming a normal person again? He probably would have if the jealousy of a blundering father hadn't interfered, when he fell in love with his daughter. A case like this needs some delicacy in handling, which the father was incapable of. He didn't get what he deserved, but our over-sensitive nervous patient of some liability might have cured himself in taking responsibility for his consequences. It is a beautiful low-budget film with a booming sea and exquisite music all along, so it deserves being considered as something more than just a B-melodrama.