Night Has a Thousand Eyes (John Farrow, 1948)

Fans of Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947) or the new Guillermo del Toro remake should check out Night Has a Thousand Eyes. Both films feature a phony mentalist act. But where Tyrone Power's Stan in Alley is a loser swindling vaudeville patrons out of their ducats, Edward G. Robinson's John Triton ("The Mental Wizard") suffers from accurate premonitions and strives to save people from the dangers that await them. The typical noir sense of fate thus works both ways here; the first third is dominated by a flashback but the remainder gets pressed down by a future-oriented inevitability, especially since all of Triton's visions appear to become true.

And it's a genuinely frightening film. Triton predicts that a lion somehow works into the Jean Courtland's (Gail Russell) future peril. And indeed, we learn that a lion has escaped from the zoo! As Jean chats with her intended Elliott Carson (John Lund), Farrow tracks back slowly to reveal an undulating curtain. I won't spoil what's behind it but aaaaaiiiiieeeeee! At least close some of those ginormous damn windows!

William Demarest is on hand as a barky cop injecting humor into the proceedings without throwing off the menacing noir balance. So is hunky Richard Webb. Story not being my strong point, I have no clue what he's doing here. But he would go on to play the dad in one of my very favorite gay films, The Gay Deceivers (Bruce Kessler, 1969). Screenplay co-written by one Barré Lyndon [sic!] based on a 1945 novel by Cornell Woolrich.

Grade: A-minus