The Night Runner

"The Night Runner" is a confusing movie. It's not sure if it should be a nice film about mental health with a positive message or if it should be a story inspired by "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"! I personally think it should have taken one path or the other...but unfortunately it tried to be a little of both and the results are only okay at best.

Roy (Ray Danton) has been hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital for a couple years. After all, he is moody and has fits of anger that make him dangerous. However, the hospital is over capacity and needs the beds and Roy is discharged sooner than his therapist wishes.

What follows is Roy's moving to the Los Angeles area and his trying to adjust to life on the outside. He seems like he's trying hard to make it and you want to see him succeed. He has a lovely girlfriend and a job. However, about midway through the film, he goes berserk and murders someone with only moderate provocation...and here's where it seems that the film is no longer about mental illness and rehabilitation but is more a horror-suspense movie.

As I mentioned above, the film tries to work both sides and the overall story is sadly impacted. It could have worked either way, with him being a dangerous menace or him getting his life together...but not as it was. It forgets realism and just goes for thrills and frights...complete with 'looney' sound effects! As a result, the film is just okay when it could have been so much more.

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.

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.

Tell me what comes to your mind when you hear these several circumstances: 1. A remote motel, 2. A serious head case 3. A clever cover for murder and 4. A tall, good-looking young man who is in the middle of all these situations. That's right; you will almost certainly recall that Psycho and Norman Bates (played by Anthony Perkins) fits those situations to a tee.

Was the Night Runner the inspiration for the creation of Psycho? Only the writer of that screenplay, Joseph Stefano would be able to tell you if there were any connection. Whether or not there was, you will easily see the parallels for yourself during the film. Although not as polished as Psycho, or as well-directed, or with an A cast, the film still holds its own with an interesting story. It could have easily have been the model for that later film; or maybe it was just a wild coincidence. You be the judge.

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.