Angoisse dans la nuit

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.

Fear in the Night (1947)

This is one surprising film. It's not "great" for several reasons (it's not even very good), but it has great, bizarre, creative, daring aspects for a commercial film. In fact, its brilliance is only the more tragic relative to its drawbacks (a clumsy plot and some mediocre acting, unfortunately). But the special effects, dream sequences, and just plain surreal imagery are all worth the look.

There are a couple of deep flaws in the plot--like a group of four people drive up to a house they've never been to and because it's raining they go inside and make tea and take a nap. And the characters are kind of just going through the motions sometimes to get to the next step. Decidedly low budget. But you know how a low budget can inspire makeshift solutions--here we have room of mirrors, some hypnosis, a murder that the murderer can't remember, crazy dreams, and a brother-in-law who is a tough detective.

The two leads are Paul Kelley (rather good, the strength of the cast) and DeForest Kelley (solid, too, and later to be Dr. McCoy in Star Trek, yes!).

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!

Very decent noir thriller that is just that little bit different. Difficult to describe without giving everything away and I have to say that at a certain point about two thirds into the movie, I guessed what was going on. I doubt views in the 40s did though and this remains a most unusual movie with some very real scary moments. Not a lot or tearaway action but plenty of mind games and surreal goings on. The opening is spellbinding and an absolute thrill, the acting with DeForest Kelley and Paul Kelly is fine, even if the latter struggles now and again in what is a very difficult role. Clearly made for nothing, written and directed by Shane, this is a great example of what can be done in cinema with just a bit of imagination and a decent story.

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