Fear in the Night

Still more film noir - and quite a grabber it is. First of all - Kelly and Kelley are excellent. The story - short as it is - will have you paying attention from top to bottom..

This is a tight, well-scripted movie. It is, of course, small-budgeted, but it is big on excitement. This flick is well worth your time and, as is usual with these dark flicks, you have to pay constant attention - no wandering minds allowed. "Fear In the Night" is worth your time.

The gals are good - what little they have to do.

It is fascinating to watch DeForest Kelley when he was just getting started. He does well with his 'rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights" expressions.

Anyway, check this out. One more thing - the attempted suicide scene is almost Hitchcock-like.

DeForrest Kelley has "Fear in the Night" in this 1947 low-budget B film, also starring Paul Kelly and Ann Doran.

Kelley plays Vince Grayson, who has a vivid dream that he has committed murder. In fact, he wakes up and finds a key and a button, which were part of the dream, and also blood on his wrist. He tells his cop brother-in-law Cliff about the dream, but Cliff brushes it off as just that, a dream.

Later on, Vince goes on a picnic with his sister Lil (Ann Doran) and husband Cliff. When the rain starts coming down in buckets, they jump in the car and Vince directs them to a house, which turns out to be the murder house, down to the octagonal mirrored room that Vince described to Cliff. Cliff now believes that Vince committed murder and lied when he described the dream.

Very good story that makes use of hypnosis as part of the plot. It is very well done, but you can't help thinking of what someone like Hitchcock would have done with the story.

Instead, we have grainy film and footage of downtown Los Angeles, including, I think, the Commodore Hotel. The shots of old LA are wonderful - sometimes when films are done cheaply there is city shooting and use of the city in process shots, which always adds authenticity to the movie.

When I showed my sister one of the screen shots and announced it was DeForrest Kelley, I thought her eyes would bug out of her head. Yes, he was once that young. He does a very good job, too.

Well worth seeing, and if you're a fan of "Star Trek," it's a must!

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

What the movie lacks in believability it makes up for in sheer visual imagination. That opening sequence is a real grabber. Just what the heck is going on with the fuzzy focus and dreamlike images. People are going here and there in front of a bank of mirrors. Then, all of a sudden, someone hands Vince a drill. But Vince doesn't stick it into a chunk of wood. Instead he plunges it into a man's heart! Good thing Vince wakes up in bed, maybe sweaty, but at least inside a focused reality. Must have been a bad dream, but then why the bloody wrist and where did that weird key come from. From what we see, it's almost like he's come back from a strange parallel world.

So did Cliff actually kill someone or was it just a bizarre subconscious. Good thing he's got Mr. sober-sides Cliff as a cop brother-in-law. Maybe Cliff can figure it out since it's driving Vince nutty. Trouble is Cliff thinks his in-law really did kill someone, but in the interest of family harmony resists turning him in. So how will all this weirdness turn out, and what's suddenly the big deal about a candle.

Kelley really nails his part as the hapless Vince. Catch his many shaded expressions as he suffers through the nightmare. Paul Kelly too nails his part with a no-nonsense demeanor that keeps things anchored. But the real star is the production itself that manages to dangle us between two worlds with the many off-center effects. Sure, too much storyline stretches over the edge. Still, it's pretty gripping stuff, straddling the murky line between noir and horror. The premise was loaded enough to get re-made a few years later, Nightmare (1956). But this one, I think, is better. So don't let it slip by.

Okay, I admit it, a lot of the charm of this really low budget effort comes from Deforest "Bones" Kelley. Kelley's homely mugg was made for b-picture third bananas / villains and this rare, unlikely turn as the goodguy lead (his first credit) is as much the source of FEAR IN THE NIGHT's enjoyment as anything. Kelley gives a nice try in a role he wasn't really built to play, overcoming several overly melodramatic moments with generally naturalistic and believable reactions to the rather ridiculous and murky situation he finds himself in. Direction and other performances are unremarkable, though a little bit of stylistic cinematography in the flashbacks isn't bad.

NIGHTMARE was the slicker remake which came about nine years later with Edward G. Robinson, Kevin McCarthy, and slightly more money, but I would suggest that this earlier version has more suspense and rooting interest (Kelley is far more sympathetic than McCarthy.) More importantly, the flimsy plot holds together better in FEAR IN THE NIGHT, omitting the poorly motivated Edward G. Robinson character entirely. This is far from a great movie; it's not even really a good noir, but Kelley's rare lead performance is fascinating and he makes us care about what happens. Anyone who is into Star Trek classic will probably be as quickly hypnotized by his young non-baggy-eyed presence as Deforest is by the badguys.