Night Without Sleep

Gary Merrill, Linda Darnell, Hildegarde Knef, and June Vincent star in "Night Without Sleep," a noir from 1952.

Merrill is an alcoholic composer who wakes up one morning thinking he's killed someone. In flashbacks, we see him go back over his experiences - his wife (Vincent) going on a trip, meeting a gorgeous film star (Darnell) at a party, seeing a sometime girlfriend (Knef) - he knows there was violence during one of these encounters, but which one?

Not a great film. I always enjoy seeing Darnell and Knef. The film kind of creaked along until the denouement.

What was fascinating about this film is a look at how people lived back then - theater started at 8:30, you went to a club after for a late supper, you sat around drinking and smoking cigarettes and probably ran into someone you knew. And everyone was dressed to the nines. Worth seeing for some of those aspects.

1952's "Night Without Sleep" is an obscure Fox 'B' that popped up on Pittsburgh's Chiller Theater on February 28 1976, followed by second feature "Beginning of the End," the Bert I. Gordon cheapie about giant grasshoppers. The prospect of sitting through this snoozefest does indeed chill the blood, basically a feature length exposition centering on a once famous musician, now an unhappily married alcoholic who finds more camaraderie with his dog than with the numerous females in the cast. Star Gary Merrill made a career out of roles like this, especially on the Hitchcock teleseries, but never once raises the scale on the dramatic meter. Earlier on Chiller Theater was the even more obscure "Run Psycho Run," a 1965 melodrama that Merrill did in Italy, even tougher to find. In 1974, he and June Vincent would be reunited, again as husband and wife, on an episode of KUNG FU, "The Way of Violence Has No Mind." Any audience that braves "Night Without Sleep" may have trouble avoiding 90 minutes of boredom.

Six years ago, Gary Merrill was a rising composer whose career was about to be cut short because his Broadway show had run out of money before opening. Joyce Mackenzie came up with the money and now they are married and thoroughly miserable. Merrill can't write and drinks. After a blank night he wanders down to New York City to see his occasional girlfriend Hildegard Knef. He runs into Linda Darnell, who had been an unnoticed chorus girl in the show. Now she is a big Hollywood star, and still in love with Merrill.

It's an exercise in self pity, with everyone reciting overblown, self-pitying lines while Cyril Mockridge's ludicrously lush score plays in the background, and a terrible forgotten memory will destroy everything. It's complete tripe.

I'm thanking my lucky stars that I only had to endure 77 minutes of this dreck-fest. Poor Hildegard Knef wastes an hour and forty minutes of her life waiting for Gary Merrill to make an appearance......and then he has the gall to turn up drunk!

Moody, menacing and mysterious at the outset; Bemused and confused Merrill hasn't a clue whether it's 5 A. M. or P. M. and the speaking clock has no intention of enlightening him on the issue. As Merrill desperately tries to unscramble his brain and fill in the Blankety Blanks from the previous few hours, deeply perturbed by the prospect that something horrific has occurred, there are flashbacks to his unhappy marriage with domineering June Vincent and his life as a writer and musician in the world of theatre.

The movie attempts to go through the gears, with Merrill slowly finding the missing pieces of the jigsaw, his fractious encounter with Knef and a more protracted, romantic one with Linda Darnell, all propelled by a succession of dry martinis (on an empty stomach). As suspense builders go, this is more likely to produce twiddling thumbs than a pounding heart.

By the end it appears that Merrill's ship has sailed. Indeed, the whole film seems to miss the boat.

MERRILL: 'Like Grimm's fairy tales, gruesome and wonderful.' 'Night Without Sleep' is no fairy tale........It's just GRIM!

This is one of those obscure minor masterpieces that get sorted out for being not very sensational, but it is a highly developed psychological drama and thriller, Gary Merrill makes the most of it, and it is probably his best film. He wakes up five in the morning with a weird feeling of having killed somebody, but he can't remember whom. He tries to reconstruct what happened, he remembers his wife, who went away to Boston for her father's birthday, he remembers his meeting with Linda Darnell, whom he hadn't seen for six years, and he remembers his upsets with his other dame, Lisa Mueller (Hildegard Knef), who scolded him and had every reason to. But it was the Linda Darnell episode that made an impression on him, and it does indeed on the audience as well - this is romance at the highest possible level and the main charm and lasting impact of the film, which will make you want to go over it again, almost immediately, because it is so beautiful and well made, with the composer Gary playing for her his own music and all. It is very noir and hopeless, but the impression of its love affair will leave as lasting an impression on you as it does on poor Gary and Linda Darnell, who was never lovelier.