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Very well executed

Perfect cast and a good story

One of my all time favorites.

Admirable film.

The film is drenched in atmospheric touches. It hits like a heavy stick that is thick on the outside and somewhat hollow in the center. Reagan's character is in most of the scenes, but this is not a man's picture, it's a woman's picture, so ultimately everything that happens to him has to affect Lindfors' character. He will sacrifice himself in the end for her own good.The supporting characters, played by Brod Crawford and Rosemary DeCamp, are more balanced and finely played. But some of Crawford's speechifying gets too heavy-handed and the philosophical pontificating doesn't stop with him, because the screenwriter sees fit to insert the same ponderous thoughts in the dialogue of others. Some films need a philosophical slant and a slight bit of preachiness the audience may need to hear, but it shouldn't come from all sides, bombarding the viewer to the point where it overtakes one's enjoyment of the story.There are some good scenes with children and another good scene with a barking dog that give the whole affair added extra layers. The actress who plays the Negro maid is excellent, bringing her part vibrantly to life with her realness offsetting the clichés. It's easy to understand why some of the improvisation which occurs between her and Crawford was left in the movie. Some of the hurricane shots seemed to resemble ones the studio used in KEY LARGO, but they were edited in wisely, and the storm simulated in the studio, complete with palm tree branches banging against the windows was for the most part convincingly staged. There's another scene, earlier on the beach, where we are given a vital piece of information concerning something that happened in the past, which is intercut with horses' hooves. This suggests a symbolism that might have been more detailed in the novel and was only casually alluded to in the script.Yet it's the storm sequence that has the most impact. Everything builds to it. After the elongated speeches and gradual revelations, the picture ends dramatically, just short of the main character's death. But we are told earlier death is not an end, and it seems interesting to watch performers who are long dead now, talking about life after death.

I was a young teenager when this film came out. I couldn't recognize a set from the real outdoors and, of course, knew nothing about plot and character development, pacing, conflict resolution, etc. But now, viewing it with a more critical eye I can see its weaknesses. Still I need to make one comment. In the film there is a romantic interlude that takes place at night on the beach. It culminates in a long, lingering kiss. For some reason the technicians, especially the lighting technicians, took a great deal of time setting up the scene. The amount of time and effort even became part of what little lore remains about the picture. Well, to a young, impressionable lad, that was my first sense of the warmth of romance in films. Before this, my only interest were comedies and adventures. Now I sensed their potential for romance--and I liked it.

The best thing to come out of Night Unto Night, a rather dull melodrama that none of the cast can bring any life to is the fact that the director, Don Siegel married leading Viveca Lindfors and the two of them contributed Kristoffer Tabori for our entertainment pleasure a generation later. When a film is held up for two years before being released you know it has some problems.The story is about a reclusive and sensitive scientist who has developed epilepsy played by Ronald Reagan who rents a house on a then lonely stretch of Florida beach to be alone and do his research without people's gossip. He rents from Viveca Lindfors who is a widow and who's husband was lost at sea years ago. Being Swedish Lindfors had another Hollywood Scandinavian cast as her sister with Osa Massen. They are completely unalike, they remind me of the Sternwood sisters in The Big Sleep.Broderick Crawford is also around as an artist and neighbor and Reagan's doctors are played by Art Baker and Erskine Sanford. The film plods on and on without you developing any real interest in the story or the characters.Don Siegel had scored great success with the Warner Brothers B film, The Verdict and this was his second film. He left Warner Brothers for RKO after this where he went on to great acclaim and bigger budgets even at RKO. His wife had the good fortune to get two American films released including the Errol Flynn spectacular Adventures of Don Juan where Lindfors played Queen Margaret. If this had been released first poor Viveca might have caught the first plane back to Sweden.I don't think Reagan's biggest political and acting fans could sit through this one without falling asleep.

A curious, brooding drama with metaphysical airs, Night Unto Night holds interest by its very oddity (and to some extent as an early directorial effort by Don Siegel). It's set in pre-boom, primitive Florida near the Everglades and takes its redemptive close during a purging hurricane, along the way touching on transcendent themes - though it seems to confuse spirituality with spiritualism. These are its dramatis personae:. Ronald Reagan plays a biochemist (!) come to coastal Florida seeking a simple, reclusive life; he's been diagnosed with epilepsy and, man of science or not, he views his condition as a mysterious and terrible curse. So he rents a gloomy old pile of a house from a young widow where he sets up a laboratory to fiddle with his molds and spores. He's a disturbed, perhaps suicidal man, but, Kings Row notwithstanding, Reagan is an actor who leaves the impression of never having been troubled a day in his life. . Viveca Lindfors is the widow, who must vacate the house because in it she keeps hearing the voice of her dead husband, whose boat was torpedoed just offshore. Lindfors was imported to Hollywood in an attempt to recreate the mystique of Ingrid Bergman, whom she resembled in voice and visage, but the imposture never quite worked. Still, she's as good here as she ever was and gives a glimpse into the thinking that brought her from Sweden.. Broderick Crawford is a friend and neighbor. In a drastic stretch, he plays a painter who earns his living doing commercial art but saves his talent for vast murals in what looks like the Socialist-realism school. Nonetheless, he serves as the spokesman for faith, which he carries like a chip on his shoulder, waylaying the scientists and psychiatrists he meets with harangues about their puny rationalism.. Osa Mussen, though a Dane not a Swede, plays Lindfors' twisted sister, a spiteful hedonist who throws herself at Reagan and does not suffer rebuff kindly. She drinks too much and ignites the volatile gases of the plot's alchemy.The story, from a novel by Philip Wylie (whose 15 minutes of notoriety would come in the mid-1950s with his book Generation of Vipers), has a reach which far exceeds its grasp. While it does hold interest - thanks chiefly to Siegel's shifting but steady pace - it raises questions which it does not bother to (or cannot) resolve. Too many of its strands (the spirit of the dead man, the murderous enmity between the sisters, Crawford's ill-packed intellectual baggage) start to flap in the winds of the concluding hurricane and fly off, never to be seen again. At the end, all that we're left with of the ineffable is plain old guy-meets-gal chemistry.