In Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), Edward G. Robinson plays something you don’t often see in film noir: a spiritualist who is not a con man.
It opens in a rush, the desperate search for a young woman in the throes of panic rushing through a busy trainyard at night to throw herself into the path of a speeding train. It’s the tone very nicely before the film settles into lengthy exposition.
Robinson is the weary Triton, once a showman with a hit mindreading act. “It was phony, like all spiritualist acts,” he explains, “but it was a first-class phony.” Then his life is upended when he’s suddenly struck with precognition, a “gift” that is reallyo a curse. Tormented by visions he’s powerless to change, he’s a modern Cassandra and becomes a recluse, dropping out of the world in a crummy Bunker Hill apartment.
He emerges from his self-imposed exile in one last attempt to defy fate and protect haunted young heiress Jean Courtland (Gail Russell) from death. Not that anyone except believes him except for Jean and her fiancée Elliot (John Lund), a skeptic ready to try almost anything to protect the woman he loves, even if it’s from her own fears.
Directed by John Farrow and based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich, the dark saint of film noir paranoia, it’s a curious thriller built on awkward contrivances and a lot of suspension of disbelief. Woolrich was great for ideas but a little weak on narrative and the screenplay by Barré Lyndon and Jonathan Latimer isn’t able to overcome the story’s B-movie machinations.
What Farrow brings is a palpable sense of the ominous. He invests himself fully in Triton and Jean, two people who act as if they’re not fully in the material world. It gives them a powerful connection—she’s the daughter he might have had in another life. Russell is quite moving as the fragile innocent who seems to be losing her sense of self and Robinson embraces the Triton’s resignation. His quiet melancholy suggests a man who gave up a long time ago and has roused himself for one last chance to change fate.
There are some great location scenes in Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles, complete with the iconic Angel’s Flight funicular and canyons of walkways between crowded wooden apartment buildings on the hill. It’s a terrific time capsule of a bygone time and place, and DP John F. Seitz helps Farrow cast a shadow of impending doom over the film in the studio sequences.
William Demarest plays the skeptical Lieutenant assigned to protect the heiress and Virginia Bruce, Jerome Cowan, and Richard Webb costar.
Black and white
Also on Blu-ray and DVD and on SVOD through Amazon Video and/or other services. Availability may vary by service.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes [Blu-ray]
Night Has a Thousand Eyes [DVD]
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The Kino Blu-ray comes from a gorgeous 2K master sourced from studio vault materials and features excellent commentary by Imogen Sara Smith, who delivers a well-researched track that weaves critical observation and production backstory through the film at an easy, natural pace.
