I suspect Fear in the Night (1947) of being dopey, but I had never before seen DeForest Kelley in a film noir rather than Starfleet and I just can't bring myself to care.
To be less flippant about it, it is a kind of dopiness I don't mind, because it's absolutely pulp-honest: noir is a genre of fantasies and nightmares, anxieties and instabilities, and I appreciate that Fear in the Night doesn't even feint at making us wait for the expressionism. As soon as the titles fade, the shifting scrim of lights that swam behind them ripples queasily over a cold open of ominous, oneiric images, a woman's face, an eight-sided room of mirrors, a man watching from the shadows, two men fighting for their lives. The killing is done almost before we understand who's done it. The woman flees. A doorknob turns. Whirling to make his own escape, the survivor falls down a spiraling, flame-starred abyss of the mind—and wakes in his own bed, sweaty and unnerved, but very definitely not a murderer for reasons he can't recall in a house he's never been inside. Except that his throat is bruised where his victim's dream-hands gripped it. And there's blood on his wrist where it dripped from the dream-stabbing. And when he reaches into his pants pocket, his hand brings out a button from a dead man's coat and the trefoil key with which he locked away his rival's corpse, like Bluebeard, behind a mirrored dream-door. And from that moment until the credits come up on the sunlit steps of a courthouse, Vince Grayson (Kelley)'s waking life will behave indistinguishably from the worst and most febrile of nightmares, the kind where you can't hang on even to yourself. Don't bother stopping to ask if it all makes sense. Dreams don't, especially not nightmares, and it wouldn't help Vince either way.
I have said before that film noir was one of the few post-Code genres where a man could really fall apart and Vince feels like a prime illustration: in his film debut and his only starring feature, Kelley is playing a man whose sole defense against a rather squalid double slaying rests on being the suggestible catspaw of a hypnotist with a grudge. It's better than being a sniveling weasel who tried to cadge his way into an insanity plea, which is the interpretation currently favored by homicide detective Cliff Herlihy (Paul Kelly) who sympathetically brushed off his nervous brother-in-law's latest hang-up as the product of "Welsh rarebit or one drink too many" and then found himself taking shelter from a thunderstorm in the very house of Vince's dream, complete with mirrors and bodies and a police investigation already in progress. "I can respect a guy, no matter how rotten a crime he's committed, who'll own up to it," Cliff seethes to the frantically protesting relative he's cornered downstairs in the kitchen like he's going to beat a confession out of him right there next to a stranger's refrigerator. "I can understand a guy who'll deny it flatly. But a guy that'd come to someone, trading on the fact he's married to his sister, abuse his common sense, and make a fool out of him like you did to me—I got no use for him." Vince gulps and stammers, his face folding over desperately even before the inevitable slap snaps it backward; he looks guilty, cringing, unconvincing, light-years from the irascible, steadfast doctor I'm used to inhabiting that wry-browed face. Then again, it isn't quite the same face. Having only seen him from 1966 onward, I had not understood that Kelley in his twenties was not just good-looking, from the right angles his cat's mouth and his neat-curved cheekbones and his easily rumpled dark hair were pretty and prettiness is suspect in men, it's not quite trustworthy, it can mean too many different things. It might be an assurance of bewildered innocence, or it might be the tell of a sociopath who trades in helplessness, not charm. It may well denote any one of a number of failures of American masculinity, some of which we have already gathered Vince is prone to. He has the not exactly macho job of bank teller and when he calls in sick after his frightening night, the shrug his boss gives in answer to the question of what's wrong with him suggests it's not the first time. He has a girl, sort of, in the person of supportive coworker Betty Winters (Kay Scott), but after one brief, gasping embrace he pushes her bitterly away: "Don't call me up. Don't pay any attention to me. Get somebody else—get anybody! Be better for you." Even under ordinary circumstances, his brother-in-law greets him with the affectionately ragging "You're all in pieces, aren't you?" and finishes their conversation by warning, "And look—not a word of this to Lil, do you understand? She's been worrying about you enough already." He's the perfect stooge if he is one, a nice but neurotic little nobody, already a little unreliable in his own life. Oh, you can imagine acquaintances saying as they read the papers, poor Vince, so he cracked up at last. He faints like a Gothic heroine. He has to be wrestled down from a window ledge. It is not in any way thematically developed, so I can't tell if it's just spillover from all the mid-century anxiety or if the film actually intended him to be read as potentially-closetedly queer, but every now and then he pings even my legendarily dense gaydar. The important thing is that he's a flotsam protagonist, curiously passive in the currents of nightmare. The film does seem to recognize his courage in submitting to a situation where, in a darker re-run of the climax of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868), Vince knows his will could be scooped right out of his skull with nothing more than a moving point of light and a few soft words, but all the two-fisted, car-chasing, CPR-administering action is left to Cliff, the tough-minded cop who never seems to have suffered an existential qualm in his life. What can I say? Fear in the Night gets away with it. Kelley is sympathetic even when he's "scared stiff" of his own thoughts. Noir is a good genre for just happening to people.
Fear in the Night was directed and adapted by Maxwell Shane from Cornell Woolrich's "Nightmare" (1941), a title that could have applied to most of the author's noir fictions: he specialized in clammy collapses of reality, existential dreads taken suddenly, horrifically concrete form. In any other setting, Vince might sound hysterical when he starts his day by sticking his head out the window of his residential hotel "to see if the outside world was still there," but for a Woolrich character it's a reasonable precaution. I don't really care that hypnotism in this movie is basically magic or that even for magic its application is preposterous. It's all woozy mood and clinging ironies and the cinematography by Jack Greenhalgh obligingly goes to eleven with seasick dissolves and self-shattering reflections and even a reenactment of murder playing in the mask-holes of the murderer's eyes. It is a little weird to hear Kelley with so much of his natural Georgia drawl suppressed to American everyman, but he carries off prime pulp lines like "But my brain was handcuffed—and I was walking through another nightmare" and I consider him otherwise a very strong contender for the Van Heflin Memorial Award for Losing One's Shit. (Lifetime achievement goes to David Collings.) The film was the responsibility of Pine-Thomas Productions, the B-picture unit of Paramount, and probably in consequence has fallen into the public domain; I watched it off Tubi because we get it on the Roku, but I suspect it could be found for free on the internet in varying states of generation loss for no effort at all.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch says that I should warn you about the exclamation point in their one-line summary. I still say it's worth it. This suggestion brought to you by my strong-willed backers at Patreon.
To be less flippant about it, it is a kind of dopiness I don't mind, because it's absolutely pulp-honest: noir is a genre of fantasies and nightmares, anxieties and instabilities, and I appreciate that Fear in the Night doesn't even feint at making us wait for the expressionism. As soon as the titles fade, the shifting scrim of lights that swam behind them ripples queasily over a cold open of ominous, oneiric images, a woman's face, an eight-sided room of mirrors, a man watching from the shadows, two men fighting for their lives. The killing is done almost before we understand who's done it. The woman flees. A doorknob turns. Whirling to make his own escape, the survivor falls down a spiraling, flame-starred abyss of the mind—and wakes in his own bed, sweaty and unnerved, but very definitely not a murderer for reasons he can't recall in a house he's never been inside. Except that his throat is bruised where his victim's dream-hands gripped it. And there's blood on his wrist where it dripped from the dream-stabbing. And when he reaches into his pants pocket, his hand brings out a button from a dead man's coat and the trefoil key with which he locked away his rival's corpse, like Bluebeard, behind a mirrored dream-door. And from that moment until the credits come up on the sunlit steps of a courthouse, Vince Grayson (Kelley)'s waking life will behave indistinguishably from the worst and most febrile of nightmares, the kind where you can't hang on even to yourself. Don't bother stopping to ask if it all makes sense. Dreams don't, especially not nightmares, and it wouldn't help Vince either way.
I have said before that film noir was one of the few post-Code genres where a man could really fall apart and Vince feels like a prime illustration: in his film debut and his only starring feature, Kelley is playing a man whose sole defense against a rather squalid double slaying rests on being the suggestible catspaw of a hypnotist with a grudge. It's better than being a sniveling weasel who tried to cadge his way into an insanity plea, which is the interpretation currently favored by homicide detective Cliff Herlihy (Paul Kelly) who sympathetically brushed off his nervous brother-in-law's latest hang-up as the product of "Welsh rarebit or one drink too many" and then found himself taking shelter from a thunderstorm in the very house of Vince's dream, complete with mirrors and bodies and a police investigation already in progress. "I can respect a guy, no matter how rotten a crime he's committed, who'll own up to it," Cliff seethes to the frantically protesting relative he's cornered downstairs in the kitchen like he's going to beat a confession out of him right there next to a stranger's refrigerator. "I can understand a guy who'll deny it flatly. But a guy that'd come to someone, trading on the fact he's married to his sister, abuse his common sense, and make a fool out of him like you did to me—I got no use for him." Vince gulps and stammers, his face folding over desperately even before the inevitable slap snaps it backward; he looks guilty, cringing, unconvincing, light-years from the irascible, steadfast doctor I'm used to inhabiting that wry-browed face. Then again, it isn't quite the same face. Having only seen him from 1966 onward, I had not understood that Kelley in his twenties was not just good-looking, from the right angles his cat's mouth and his neat-curved cheekbones and his easily rumpled dark hair were pretty and prettiness is suspect in men, it's not quite trustworthy, it can mean too many different things. It might be an assurance of bewildered innocence, or it might be the tell of a sociopath who trades in helplessness, not charm. It may well denote any one of a number of failures of American masculinity, some of which we have already gathered Vince is prone to. He has the not exactly macho job of bank teller and when he calls in sick after his frightening night, the shrug his boss gives in answer to the question of what's wrong with him suggests it's not the first time. He has a girl, sort of, in the person of supportive coworker Betty Winters (Kay Scott), but after one brief, gasping embrace he pushes her bitterly away: "Don't call me up. Don't pay any attention to me. Get somebody else—get anybody! Be better for you." Even under ordinary circumstances, his brother-in-law greets him with the affectionately ragging "You're all in pieces, aren't you?" and finishes their conversation by warning, "And look—not a word of this to Lil, do you understand? She's been worrying about you enough already." He's the perfect stooge if he is one, a nice but neurotic little nobody, already a little unreliable in his own life. Oh, you can imagine acquaintances saying as they read the papers, poor Vince, so he cracked up at last. He faints like a Gothic heroine. He has to be wrestled down from a window ledge. It is not in any way thematically developed, so I can't tell if it's just spillover from all the mid-century anxiety or if the film actually intended him to be read as potentially-closetedly queer, but every now and then he pings even my legendarily dense gaydar. The important thing is that he's a flotsam protagonist, curiously passive in the currents of nightmare. The film does seem to recognize his courage in submitting to a situation where, in a darker re-run of the climax of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868), Vince knows his will could be scooped right out of his skull with nothing more than a moving point of light and a few soft words, but all the two-fisted, car-chasing, CPR-administering action is left to Cliff, the tough-minded cop who never seems to have suffered an existential qualm in his life. What can I say? Fear in the Night gets away with it. Kelley is sympathetic even when he's "scared stiff" of his own thoughts. Noir is a good genre for just happening to people.
Fear in the Night was directed and adapted by Maxwell Shane from Cornell Woolrich's "Nightmare" (1941), a title that could have applied to most of the author's noir fictions: he specialized in clammy collapses of reality, existential dreads taken suddenly, horrifically concrete form. In any other setting, Vince might sound hysterical when he starts his day by sticking his head out the window of his residential hotel "to see if the outside world was still there," but for a Woolrich character it's a reasonable precaution. I don't really care that hypnotism in this movie is basically magic or that even for magic its application is preposterous. It's all woozy mood and clinging ironies and the cinematography by Jack Greenhalgh obligingly goes to eleven with seasick dissolves and self-shattering reflections and even a reenactment of murder playing in the mask-holes of the murderer's eyes. It is a little weird to hear Kelley with so much of his natural Georgia drawl suppressed to American everyman, but he carries off prime pulp lines like "But my brain was handcuffed—and I was walking through another nightmare" and I consider him otherwise a very strong contender for the Van Heflin Memorial Award for Losing One's Shit. (Lifetime achievement goes to David Collings.) The film was the responsibility of Pine-Thomas Productions, the B-picture unit of Paramount, and probably in consequence has fallen into the public domain; I watched it off Tubi because we get it on the Roku, but I suspect it could be found for free on the internet in varying states of generation loss for no effort at all.
spatch says that I should warn you about the exclamation point in their one-line summary. I still say it's worth it. This suggestion brought to you by my strong-willed backers at Patreon.
