Somewhere in the Night

Mankiewicz could really turn out good product and this neglected film is absolutely worth a look! An unusual hybrid of THE MALTESE FALCON and TOTAL RECALL, SOMEWHERE IN THE NIGHT was ahead of its time and has aged better than most amnesiac fare. One could argue that TOTAL RECALL owes quite a debt to this movie regarding its twist bad guy identity revelation. There's some excellent dialogue and once you overlook some whopper implausibilities, the plot works well, as does the oddball cast of supporting characters, including the opportunist police lieutenant and the rogues gallery of ne'er do wells hoping to cash in on the amnesiac's memories. The movie doesn't hold up to close scrutiny (how did the money hanging under a pier not rot from three years' worth of salt water for one) but it is highly entertaining and noir fans should definitely take a look. Hodiak, Nolan and Conte are all solid in their respective roles. Enjoy!

Borrowed as the title of Nicholas Christopher's study of film noir and the American city, Somewhere In The Night remains a movie less familiar than Laura or The Big Sleep or Out of the Past. But it's almost in their class – an atmospheric and at times archetypal noir, the first directorial effort of Joseph L. Mankiewicz and the first major post-war feature to use the device of amnesia-as-metaphor: How vets survived global cataclysm only to have to construct new lives in a homeland that had, in their absence, turned into alien territory.

Drifting up out of coma in a military hospital, John Hodiak can't figure out why everybody calls him George Taylor. Only two letters offer clues to who he is, one from a vindictive girl he ditched, the other apparently from an old pal, Larry Cravat. Without much to go on, he heads to Los Angeles to track down Cravat and thus himself. But as he skulks though the city's dark demimonde (Turkish baths, mobbed-up nightclubs, phony spiritualist parlors, insane asylums), he's quick to learn that other people don't want Cravat found. Yet he finds allies in club canary Nancy Guild, her boss Richard Conte, and police detective Lloyd Nolan. He also finds that the reason for all the violence unleashed against and around him is $2-million in Nazi money (which disappeared in 1942, the year he joined the Marines). Cravat proves both elusive and uncomfortably close....

Somewhere In The Night boasts a strong cast in supporting (Conte, Nolan, Fritz Kortner) and even tertiary roles (Sheldon Leonard, Whit Bissell, Henry Morgan, with special mention to Josephine Hutchinson, who plays a poignant largo midway though the movie). Where it offers scant measure is in its principals. 20th-Century Fox was grooming Guild as its answer to Warners' sultry sensation Lauren Bacall, failing to grasp that Guild's appeal was less romantic than matey – the gal pal (like a couple of other Nancys from that era, Olson and Davis).

Hodiak's more problematic. He enjoyed a few years in the Hollywood limelight (Lifeboat, Marriage Is A Private Affair, Desert Fury, Command Decision) before his untimely death in 1955. But he never brought the illumination – the star quality – to his work that would elevate it from the competent to the classic. So he stays generic through his picaresque ordeals, without the specific anguish that distinguished, for example, John Payne or even Gordon MacRae and Edmond O'Brien as they underwent theirs (in, respectively, The Crooked Way, Backfire and D.O.A.).

Mankiewicz' first go as director comes as a surprise. Most vividly remembered as writer/director of A Letter To Three Wives and the immortal All About Eve (movies whose sparkling scripts camouflaged their lack of visual interest), he generates a menacing look in his nightscapes for the City of Angels, camping out in Bunker Hill walk-ups and on Skid Row. The storyline's almost as complicated as The Big Sleep's, and as murky, but then clockwork plots never sat well in film noir – the universe it dwells in stays random, volatile, unfathomable.

Mankiewicz does it again. With a small cast of generally B actors, he makes a nifty film-noir. John Hodiak has his best role, IMHO, and the mostly night-time settings have a great look. Strange to see Fritz Kortner, from the Louise Brooks "Pandora's Box", as a slimy fortune-teller.

I'm a bit disappointed that I don't find myself liking this more than I do. See, it has one of those dreamy film noir openings, a man emerges from the war unable to remember who he is. Bandaged up in a hospital bed in Hawaii, it's still the Pacific Theater with the war in its closing days, he discovers a letter in his wallet but instead of kind words from a loved one anxiously awaiting for him to come back, it tells him he's loathed and despised. Deciding he doesn't want to find out who he was in that past life, he checks out of hospital without a word.

It's the stuff noir heaven is made of, the notion of a previous life and being karmically reborn into a next one, night in the big city rife with hidden knowledge, demanding we investigate. Coming back to a Los Angeles hotel that was his last known residence before the war, he discovers a satchel he had checked in, and lo, there's a note inside, and one that tells him he was paid a hefty amount of money.

At so many points sparks threaten to fly, evocative places are visited in the middle of the night, portentous characters are looking for him around town. He's beaten up, nearly run over, framed for murder. In the docks he meets with a wily narrator - a pretend spiritualist - who openly tells him he should not trust a word he says. There is another house where a spinster daughter makes as if she knows him but does she? A visit in a sanatorium reveals someone else who is locked up, unable to remember.

So much ought to have been just right here, making this worthy of other entries in my list of top noirs, and yet the best quality of films like Crossfire or Out of the Past is that they are able to ski on the edges of semiconscious knowledge, of self unexpectedly slipping into a world he gives rise to. Here we have a self-conscious filmmaker in control, who, it gradually becomes apparent, is trying to construct that noir sense. Instead of spontaneously slipping out through back roads, we're taken places that someone has just finished renovating for us.

It's the difference between detective fiction of the Sherlock Holmes kind and film noir where a narrator is not fully in control. So of course it all ends with the bad guy finally unmasking himself and making a big fuss of explaining things to us. Of course it's timed just right for the cop to make the arrest.

It's all a bit cleverly here, self-conscious, and you'll see it in the self-referential nod to movies. The same filmmaker would go on to do All About Eve.

The more tantalizing notion in all this for me is that the note professing such hatred for him really was from a loved one he stood up one day, or was it a last letter that he wrote and was planning to send but never got around to?

The trademark of any Joseph L. Mankiewicz film is screenplay. It is often sharp and crackling as in his award winning "A Letter To Three Wives" and "All About Eve". In this Mankiewicz's second directoral effort the seeds of his future successes are sown.

John Hodiak plays a wounded marine who wakes up in a hospital not knowing who he is, but finding among his possessions 2 letters, one from a woman telling him what a cad he is and another from a friend of his that will lead him down a path lined with several murders, 2 million dollars and a couple of good looking women.

While "Somewhere In The Night" sounds like any one of the many detective thrillers of the 40s, it is lifted from the routine is the script which has a distinct Mankiewicz ring to it

His touch is evident in several places, including meetings with a seedy fortune teller, superbly played by Fritz Kortner, an atypical cop played by Lloyd Nolan who doesn't understand why "movie cops" always "have their hats on", and a spinster played by Josephine Hutchinson who gives Hodiak a hope when she says she recognizes him.

You may or may not figure out the plot. It matters not. The film is an enjoyable one.