Les yeux dans les ténèbres

Happened on this movie entirely by chance, while skipping through the limited offers on local daytime TV. Decided to sit it out (I'm a sucker for 1930s and 40s black-and-white films) and was very pleased I did. This movie is a thriller of sorts, and it has a major twist: it features a blind detective - quite convincingly, I must add, since he has a very smart (scene-stealing) seeing-eye dog to help him. The story has enough action, suspense, and surprises to keep the viewer interested until the very end. It isn't Hitchcock, but it's very nicely done. Recommended.

Although Edward Arnold did play some other good guys in his career, it's one that's normally associated with villainy. So he must have looked on with gratitude to MGM for allowing him to play Baynard Kendrick's fictional blind detective Duncan MacLain in two films of which Eyes In The Night is the first. My guess is that if Arnold were an MGM contract player the screen might have seen more of the resourceful Duncan MacLain.

Blindness as it has in a lot of people has forced Duncan MacLain to rely on those remaining senses and has honed his intelligence to a fine edge. He thinks pretty fast on his feet, especially after being hired by Ann Harding gains entrance to her household while she's away by convincing her servants that he's a long lost blind uncle. It's from there he finds out what's going on.

Harding hires Arnold because she's concerned that her step daughter Donna Reed is getting in way over her head with actor John Emery. When Emery turns up dead later that's an understatement.

But when Arnold gets into the household and sees what an interesting group of servants Harding and husband Reginald Denny have, he's thinking that romance might not just be at the bottom of this mystery.

Aided by filmdom's most remarkable dog since Rin Tin Tin in the canine of Friday, MacLain is also aided for strong arm stuff by his driver Allen Jenkins. Although as you will see in the film, Arnold when he gets in close is every bit up to the rough house aspect of the gumshoe profession.

The cast is excellent, especially butler Stanley Ridges who becomes Arnold's opposite number in terms of wit and intelligence. A worthy Moriarty type to Arnold's Holmes.

It's too bad that film never saw more of Duncan MacLain.

Edward Arnold plays blind detective Duncan Maclain in "Eyes in the Night," a 1942 MGM film directed by Fred Zinnemann that has a lot of other familiar faces.

Ann Harding made her return to the screen after a few years in this small film, playing the stepmother, Norma Lawry, of a young actress, Barbara (Donna Reed at 21), who's fallen in love with an older actor with whom Harding was once involved.

Norma wants Mac to help her convince the actor it's best to steer clear of Barbara. Norma's husband is in Washington presenting a formula to the government that is critical to the war effort.

Unfortunately, the actor turns up dead, and Barbara sees not only his dead body, but her stepmother, when she arrives at the man's apartment. Norma goes running to Mac for help. He sets out to find the killer, and it leads him into a web of espionage.

Nice job by Zinnemann, who was just starting out, though he didn't like doing the film except for working with Ann Harding and Donna Reed. As others have mentioned, his pitch black gun battle with the only light coming from the fired shots is most effective and portends the great things to come from him. Overall, it's an okay story, well done.

Edward Arnold does an excellent job (though Zinnemann said he kept blowing his lines) as the smart and likable blind detective, who is aided by an assistant (Allen Jenkins) and his dog Friday, who looks to be a German shepherd mix.

Friday is unbelievable - what an actor and athlete! That dog had some training. Zimmemann didn't agree. Friday, who was descended from a silent dog star named Flash, apparently was only good for one take, becoming bored easily. In fact, Friday's only film appearances are in the two Duncan Maclain films.

Besides Reed, one can spot Rosemary DeCamp as Vera the maid, Stanley Ridges as the butler, Stephen McNally as Vera's husband Gabriel, Mantan Moreland as Mac's butler, and I honestly thought Katherine Emery WAS Mercedes MacCambridge. Wow! Even the speaking voice.

This was intended as a series for MGM, but the studio only made one other. Universal took the fat man detective series from the radio and made a film with J. Scott Smart with an early appearance by Rock Hudson directed by William Castle, but never followed it up. Nevertheless, there's something about these fat detectives, going back to Nero Wolfe, I guess, that's appealing.

Enjoyable. Glad Friday was able to keep his date after all.

What a gem of a movie! A blind detective, a Nazi plot and the smartest dog I've ever seen all make this a very enjoyable mystery/thriller. Young Donna Reed really is stunning and Mr. Arnold nails it as the blind detective. Great acting all the way around and some plot twists keep you watching. Enjoy it.

I'd never heard of this film, but discovered it bundled in with a lot of other 30s/40s B-movies in the "Mystery Classics" collection from Platinum Video. It's a surprisingly good film, really a near-great film that's hobbled a bit by it's middle act.

The first part of the film is really the only part that's a straight-forward detective romp, w/ a blind detective and his seeing-eye-dog and his hired muscle simpleton helping him sleuth out a fairly typical wrongfully-accused-murder plot. This part of the film is all golden, partially, I think, because the Detective's characters (All intended to be recurring characters in an ongoing film franchise that never quite got off the ground after this really good first chapter) feel like they have a past together, they feel like they know who they are, which is unusual for a potboiler of this era.

The second act resolves the murder a bit too quickly - in fact, it's never exactly resolved, the film merely abruptly changes focus from the detective et al to the murderers themselves discussing why they did it. This robs the film of most of it's dramatic strength, and essentially the middle act becomes little more than filler. It's entertaining enough filler - a sort of World War II version of "Wait Until Dark" - but it doesn't really advance the plot much.

The third act is the somewhat-rushed climax/resolution, though it features an unexpectedly cool shootout filmed in a very unusual style, and extended sequence with the detective's amazingly-well-trained dog. (Seriously, this dog is great! He could easily do his own taxes. He makes any other trained film dog - and really most trained film monkeys - look like idiots by comparison). On the whole, the film ends well, but it never fully recovers the momentum it lost by shifting focus in the middle, and as a result the final wrap up just comes across as slightly unsatisfying. It is, however, a more than satisfying introduction to what no doubt would have been a great detective series which, sadly, never really took off. I'm very surprised the concept was never revisited on TV or Radio, since the central character is endlessly entertaining.

One odd note: the ending feels a bit truncated, with some of the action happening off-camera. For instance, early on one of the bad guys is captured and held by the detective's men. Later on, we're shown the detective's men bound and gagged, the bad guy having evidently escaped. Later the bad guy reunites with his own people, but the transition is so abrupt that it feels like we're missing a scene or two. Also, there's a subplot in which the bad guys are hiding family information from one of their own people. This sets up what is obviously intended to be a major plot point, but, in the end absolutely nothing comes of it. Again, is this a missing scene, or simply bad writing? I can't tell.

Still and all, this is a near-classic film with a great character and some fantastic performances that unfortunately hobbles itself. Well worth a viewing, however.