Fear in the Night (1947)

This story starts like an episode of Dr Who with kaleidoscope images just like in the beginning credits. It's a blatant copy. The director was obviously a fan. It's a dream sequence from which Deforest Kelley (Vince) then wakes from and has to work out what the hell has just happened. He's dreamt that he killed someone and things pretty much point to the fact that he actually has gone ahead and killed someone as per dream. Paul Kelly (Cliff) is there to help him work things out.Deforest Kelley is Dr Leonard McCoy aka Bones from Star Trek. He looks young in this but he's recognisable. Hey Bones, what's going on in your head? There is one scene where Paul Kelly threatens to punch out Bones and you see that he has done this thing before. Actually, he has – he was sent to prison in real life for punching someone to death and got 10 years for manslaughter. This film is made after his release and so nobody really wants to mess with him.The film zips along and tells the straight narrative without any complications. It's not believable at all but go with it for some hypnotic enjoyment.

Today I watched DEFORREST KELLEY's movie debut. Not because of Star Trek, but because of the title of the movie. When I found out it was Kelley, my interest grew.The movie starts out eerily but not unlike a million other noirs. The mood, the music, the main character's narration. The object of the movie unfolds quickly. At first, you think the acting is prosaic. But as it unfolds, the rhythm of the story grabs you.One of the most inconsequential things also made it realistic for me. It was ANN DORAN. Her presence acts as a beautiful balance. She always portrayed a common-sense woman and somehow this made the noirish mood natural. So many times, the noir mood pervades an entire movie to point of suffocation and sometimes makes a noir maudlin. It seems that the writer and director Maxwell Shayne or maybe Cornell Woolrich's great sense of storytelling that made the mood evenly wrought."Fear In the Night" is a fine, interesting, suspenseful movie that I recommend not as a masterpiece but as a very fine example of a good idea very well made. Some would say as a great Saturday afternoon movie... which would be a slight misappreciation of this excellent noir!

I know nothing about this film except my own opinion of it since I watched it by random and still have not read so much as a word about it anywhere – not even the TV guide! I saw it was a thriller noir and that was enough and very quickly the film gets into the genre device of the frenzied dream state with a calm narration by the person suffering it; it will be a device familiar to fans of the genre and it is one that the film embraces stylistically in order to open the film. The plot is that a normal guy who works in a bank has this dream where he murders a man in a small mirrored room while a woman looks on. He wakes the next day with some cuts and bruises and is unsure if it was real or not.The mystery goes from there but the film weakens itself from the very start and only hurts itself more from then on. By opening immediately in this way the film seeks to grab the attention but we have no context, no reason to care, no questions about what we see, all because we have no idea who anyone is or what they do. Once we get through this scene there is a little bit of background but mostly we stay in the feverish panic stage as Vince "remembers" stuff he can't possibly know, thus making the whole film essentially one of build as he realizes that, somehow, he really was where his dream had him. Problem is that, without context, this is something we know from the very start, because this device is so common and, if it isn't real then there really is no point to the whole film – so the reveals don't add clarity or drama, they simple continue to reinforce what we already know. Eventually we start to make progress but we do this off characters that are introduced as those involved so in terms of drama it is really very much a case of "here's Jim – he did it. Huh? Who's Jim – never worry about that, you got your solution".It isn't quite this bad but it is pretty close and at the end of the film I realized that I had never cared for or known any of the characters and thus it was only the device that made me curious about the outcome. There is at least one nice touch in the conclusion but that is all and otherwise it feels like a really hollow film where the original idea was the starting point but the structure and delivery never really got sorted out. The cast don't help this feeling – in particular DeForest Kelley can only mug melodramatically from the very start – which means this is the only character we know. The supporting cast are stiff but yet do the job I suppose – few of them have much to work with. The direction etc is by the numbers and feels like a lift from other, better films.Overall this is no more than a so-so film that uses a device that other films have used to better effect. The structure and delivery of this device is way off and left me really having no reason to care either for the characters or for the solution too much. Nothing really clever or of note here, just a by-the-numbers affair that doesn't have much of its own to do.

This film starts out very intriguingly then goes quickly downhill when it gets bogged down in mumbo jumbo about hypnotism.I thought the director did a great job of creating a sense of horror and creepiness as Clif tries to figure out why his murderous dream seemed so lifelike. There are a number of scary scenes. How claustrophobic it felt in that car after Clif had broken up with his doormat-like girlfriend yet they were stuck in that backseat together.The hypnotism stuff was hackneyed, anticlimactic, and not believable.I liked the character of the tough-guy cop who's clearly in love with his wife. She doesn't quite seem interesting enough to balance out such unswerving loyalty and support, but that doesn't matter much.I'm surprised past reviewers have given this film such a high rating because the story doesn't quite add up.