Watch Night Has a Thousand Eyes For Free

Expected more

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Edward G. Robinson (John Triton), Gail Russell (Jean Courtland), John Lund (Elliott Carson), William Demarest (Shawn), Virginia Bruce (Jenny), Jerome Cowan (Whitney Courtland), Richard Webb (Peter Vinson), Onslow Stevens (Dr Walters), Luis Van Rooten (Myers), John Alexander (Golman), Roman Bohnen (Weston).Director: JOHN FARROW. Screenplay: Jonathan Latimer, Barré Lyndon from the 1945 novel by Cornell Woolrich. Photography: John F. Seitz. Film editor: Eda Warren. Music: Victor Young. Art director: Hans Dreier and Franz Bachelin. Costumes: Edith Head. Producer: Endre Bohem. Copyright and U.S. release 22 October 1948 by Paramount. Released 4 October 1948 (U.K.), 4 November 1948 (Australia). 7,307 feet. 81 minutes.COMMENT: The film noir revival has brought some of John Farrow's films back into focus. Due to a somewhat hokey script (the killer's identity is not only obvious but motives did not convince me) and a discordantly "comic" performance by William Demarest, this one is not half as interesting as The Big Clock, Alias Nick Beal or Plunder of the Sun.But nonetheless, the movie does present Edward G. Robinson, perfectly cast as the troubled Triton who could foretell the future but had neither the power to forestall it nor "change evil into good." Gail Russell is also immaculately cast and, aside from William Demarest (who is usually quite good but misses the bus here), the rest of the players do solid work.

File the case under "X". In this rather well done film, Edward G. Robinson is one of those night club "mind readers" who tells the audience things about themselves with the help of an associate who plays clues at the piano. By the way, one of the customers that he stuns with his amazing but phony powers is a pretty young lady named Agnes. Agnes has only one line but she became the mother of Sally Field, the flying nun. Few people are aware of this portentous datum (outside the Field family) but I pass it on to you as an act of personal generosity. That will be fifteen cents.The first half is kind of interesting. Robinson is wheeling through his fakery when he's interrupted by a sudden vision. He urgently sends an audience member home because her house is on fire. After the show his puzzled assistants ask what it was all about and Robinson dismisses it as a passing thought he'd had, and after all what difference does it make? Later they find that the house really WAS on fire and a child was barely saved. Robinson is troubled but his partners aren't.Eventually he leaves the act, holes up for twenty years, and reappears in time to save a girl who might well have been his own daughter except for an act of self sacrifice. The girl is Gail Russell and she's well worth saving. Russell was plucked out of a local high school because of her looks, hurriedly given a few acting lessons and thrust before the cameras. But she was self conscious and terrified of appearing in the movies, took to drinking to steady her nerves, wrecked her life, and died in her mid-30s, desolate. Any wrecked life is a misfortune but in her case it was a little more than that because she was almost infinitely appealing -- not gorgeous by Hollywood standards, but, with her tentative girlish voice, her mane of curly black hair, and her pale blue eyes, she radiated a combination of vulnerability and sex appeal. In this film she winds up with John Lund, which may have been a milestone along her downward trajectory -- or maybe the cause of it.Robinson turns in a competent and thoroughly professional performance as the showman who changes from a free-wheeling bankrupt into a man genuinely tormented by the possibility that he himself -- through his visions -- is somehow CAUSING the disasters he predicts.I'm not going through the plot because, if the first half is simple and neat, the second half has a loopy logic and turns into a high-budget Charlie Chan mystery. Well, I'll give one example. Robinson has had a vision of Russell being murdered under the stars (the titular "thousand eyes") at eleven o'clock at night. He's taken seriously enough that the police have guards all around her mansion. She's also attended by some skeptical business managers of her estate. The rooms are guarded, the doors locked, and all that. The tension increases as eleven o'clock approaches. At about fifteen minutes before eleven, a hand reaches slowly from behind a curtain and moves the time on the grandfather clock ahead by ten minutes. When the clock strikes eleven, everyone breathes a sigh of relief. Whew. It's now past eleven and Russell still breathes. Of course the REAL eleven o'clock hasn't yet got here. So when the relaxed Russell wanders out alone into the garden a few minutes later, she's attacked by the murderer, who is a person of no significance whatever to the plot and who is just trying to stop a business deal from going through.Okay. So why did the murderer move the hands of the clock ahead? Why didn't he wait until the REAL eleven o'clock had come and gone. After all, what the hell does HE care about what time he murders Russell? This is Charlie Chan territory.But I enjoyed it. The hint of the supernatural is always fascinating. As Robinson observes, we've all felt something similar at one time or another -- we know who's on the phone before we pick it up, or we enter a strange room and we're certain we've been there before. And Robinson may be right about it. It was about twenty years ago that the American Association for the Advancement of Science finally added a Section H, covering paranormal phenomena. Who knows?

Night Has a Thousand Eyes is directed by John Farrow and adapted to screenplay by Barre Lyndon and Jonathan Latimer from the novel of the same name written by Cornell Woolrich. It stars Edward G. Robinson, Gail Russell, John Lund, Virginia Bruce, William Demarest, Richard Webb and Jerome Cowan. Music is scored by Victor Young and cinematography by John F. Seitz.John Triton (Robinson) is a nightclub fortune teller who suddenly finds he really does posses psychic ability. As his predictions become more bleaker, Triton struggles with what was once a gift but now is very much a curse.During a visually sumptuous beginning to the film, a girl is saved from suicide, it's an attention grabbing start and sets the tone for what will follow. Mood and strangulated atmosphere born out by photographic styles, craft of acting and Young's spine tingling score are the keys to the film's success, with the pervading sense of doom ensuring the narrative never falls into mawkish hell. It's a film that shares thematic similarities with a 1934 Claude Rains picture titled The Clairvoyant, only here we enter noir territory for Triton's cursed journey, where as the Rains movie was ultimately leading us to the savage idiocy of mob justice.Farrow's (The Big Clock/Where Danger Lives) film falls into a small quasi supernatural group of black and whites that are formed around a carnival/psychic act. It's a situation for film that film noir makers sadly didn't explore more often, making the likes of Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Nightmare Alley and The Spiritualist little treasures to be cherished. Farrow gets as much suspense out of the story as he can, of which he is helped enormously by the great work of Robinson. At a time when the HUAC was breathing down his neck, Robinson turns in a definitive portrayal of a man caught in a trap, his fate sealed. His face haunted and haggard, his spoken words sorrowful and hushed, Robinson is simply terrific.The world of prognostication gets a film noir make-over, death under the stars indeed. 8/10

Cornell Woolrich is best recalled (in movies) for the film version of one of his best tales, REAR WINDOW. However other stories of his, written under his real name or as "William Irish", became film. THE LEOPARD MAN, one of the first of Val Lewton's B-feature productions, was based on one of his stories. So is THE NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES.Edward G. Robinson is a clairvoyant who worked with Jerome Cowan in a mentalist act. Only one problem - Robinson discovers he actually can predict the future. Unfortunately, in Woolrich's realistic view of the seen and unseen world, having a psychic power is not necessarily good. Robinson can foresee good things (he forsees that Cowan's buying into a potential oil field operation will make millions), but he also sees tragedy frequently. The woman he loves (the third person in the act) wants to marry him, but he suddenly refuses - he sees problems about her pregnancy. She marries Cowan - and dies giving birth to the daughter who becomes Gail Russell. Robinson soon discovers he cannot stop tragedy. When he warns a newsboy to be careful going home, he tries to reassure the boy by giving him a large tip. The boy starts running home, and gets hit (and presumably killed) by a car. Robinson has contacted Cowan to warn him that he should not go flying. Cowan's plane crashes and he is killed. Robinson than contacts Russell to try to help her. Her boyfriend John Lund, at first, rejects Robinson's warnings, but as they uncannily come true becomes increasingly convinced that Robinson not a faker. But Detective William Demerest (in a curious mixed role, half serious and half comic) is not sure - it seems somebody tampered with the wiring of Cowan's plane. So the movie progresses - is Robinson legitimately psychic, and trying to help Russell, or is he the evil genius in some plan to get control of the fortune. And as Cowan was in the middle of a major oil merger when he died, many others are interested in knowing the truth...or hiding it.This film, for some reason, always gets mediocre reviews in the New York Times movie reviews. Actually it's quite compelling, and far more inviting a story about sixth sense powers than many more important, and expensive productions. I feel that it is close to Robinson's most sympathetic role, and the conclusion of the film certainly makes it almost Shakespearean in it's tragic denouement.