Fri 10 Jan 2014
A Movie Review by David Vineyard: SOMEWHERE IN THE NIGHT (1946).
Posted by Steve under Crime Films , Reviews[18] Comments
SOMEWHERE IN THE NIGHT. 20th Century Fox, 1946. John Hodiak, Nancy Guild, Lloyd Nolan, Richard Conte, Josephine Hutchinson, Fritz Kortner, Sheldon Leonard, Lou Nova, with Jeff Corey, Henry Morgan, Whit Bissell, and John Russell. Screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz & Howard Dimsdale; adapted by Lee Strasberg, based on a story by Marvin Borowsky. Directed by Joseph Mankiewicz.
The Red Scare of the post war era kept this terrific noir film from 20th Century Fox off television and forgotten for years thanks to the blacklist, and even today it is one of the harder major noir outings to find and one better known by genre historians than film fans.
That’s despite the fact this one has everything, including a private eye, a sympathetic cop, a nightclub chanteuse with a husky voice, an amoral fat man, his brutal henchman, a haunted woman with a failing mind, a sanitarium where a madman holds the clue to the mystery, and a hero with amnesia.
Perhaps because none of the iconic noir actors (other than Conte and to a lesser extent Nolan) are in it, and because Mankiewicz is better known for films like Gentlemans’ Agreement and Letter to Three Wives than this one, it is less appreciated. It often seems to be a forgotten noir despite the fact it is an A production with an A cast. It also has a smart script with more twists than Agatha Christie and direction by one of Hollywood’s best (Joseph L. Mankiewicz).
George Taylor (John Hodiak) fell on a grenade to save his buddies in the South Pacific and now he has amnesia, a new face, and more than a little paranoia about it, enough so he doesn’t let the Marines know he doesn’t know who he is. Back in the states and about to be released by the service he finds a letter to a man named Larry Cravat from an angry woman that leads him to Los Angeles to find Cravat, who may know who he is.
Following Cravat’s trail isn’t as easy as he thinks though. No one seems to know Cravat or George Taylor, and when he discovers Cravat left him a bag in unclaimed luggage he finds a gun and shoulder holster and a note that Larry Cravat left $5,000 in a bank account for him.
The trail leads to a club called the Cellar where a pair of thugs get on his trail and he meets chanteuse Chris (Nancy Guild) whose girl friend was the woman who wrote the letter to Cravat. When he is hijacked by the mysterious Anselmo (Fritz Kortner), who has him worked over trying to learn where Cravat is, he gets dumped on Chris doorstep because her address was in his pocket.
Chris is a sucker for a sob story (“You’re tough as a love song.â€), and calls in her charming boss Max Phillips (Richard Conte) who suggests Taylor talk to cop Lt. Kendall (Lloyd Nolan), a sympathetic homicide detective who hates the movie cliche of cops always having their hats on.
From Kendall they learn Cravat was a small time private eye who somehow got involved in a scheme to launder two million dollars in Nazi loot. The loot and Cravat both disappeared three years earlier leaving a dead body, the Nazi trying to launder the money.
There was another man with Cravat that night, and Taylor begins to suspect it was him — but which of them killed the mysterious Steel?
Taylor finds there was a witness to the shooting, Conway, but he was the victim of a hit and run and went insane, and is now in a sanitarium where no one is allowed to see him. Taylor gets to him, but not before Conway is stabbed by a small bespectacled man who has been following Taylor.
The twists and surprises are too good to ruin with even a spoiler warning, so I won’t go any farther with the plot. I will say there are fewer holes in the plot than most noir films, and the twists my well surprise you the first time you see it. Certainly there are at least two good red herrings that don’t pay off the way you expect, but they do pay off. You may well be suspecting a Third Man payoff and get something much different.
One thing to note is that most of the characters are well developed, and far from the cliches you expect. Fritz Kortner’s Anselmo is a former big time crook making a last desperate bid for the big time, and resigned to the fact he probably won’t get the brass ring. He’s almost sympathetic, and his last line is delivered with a sort of sad irony and a resigned shrug (“The jig is up.â€).
Josephine Hutchinson has a good role as the witness sister who has wasted her youth and beauty on her sick father and seems to know Taylor when no one else does. Hodiak plays well in this scene, at once hopeful and compassionate.
Conte proves a tough good-hearted sort, a far cry from his usual bad guys, and it’s only at the end you may recognize the Conte you know. Finally there’s Lloyd Nolan as Lt. Kendall, a cop with a brain and a heart, who lets the players act out the drama while he waits to sort out the survivors, but can’t help having his favorites. He has little screen time, but makes the most of it, and the running gag about his lack of a hat is all the funnier if you recall his Michael Shayne almost never shed his chapeau. Henry Morgan, Whit Bissell, Jeff Corey, and John Russell all have bits.
Hodiak is very good as the haunted man who can trust no one, not even himself. He is much more victim than tough guy, paranoid with good reason, and not certain he really wants to know the truth even if it has $2 million tied to it.
It’s a role that could easily be played over the top or as a cliche, but Hodiak is believable and sympathetic as a man uncertain if he wants to know the truth.
Nancy Guild is doing a road-show Lauren Bacall, down to the hairdo, but she does it well, and makes a satisfying substitute for Bacall or Lisbeth Scott, well worth looking at, and playing a woman who is leading with her chin going to bat for a man who may not be as nice as he seems.
It’s not a particularly good part and probably the least well written in the film, but she makes up for that by managing to embody her character with strength and intelligence, and a kind of understated teasing sexuality.
Somewhere in the Night is a slick well done studio noir and well worth seeing if you have missed it.
The film’s last line is Lt. Kendall’s and a good one:
January 10th, 2014 at 2:56 pm
What has the black list to do with this film…? And what has Mankiewicz to do with Gentleman’s Agreement? An interesting, if pretentious/naïve project. Worthwhile despite its failings.
January 10th, 2014 at 5:56 pm
Screenwriter Howard Dimsdale was blacklisted on the second 1950 list, keeping this film off of television for a long period. I didn’t see it on television until the 1980’s and it was well into the cable era before it showed up, odd considering it’s cast and director.
You are quite right about GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT — I was thinking about two other films — and I agree with your assessment of it. CROSSFIRE is a much better treatment of the subject with a top notch script, cast, and direction. GA is pretentious and over dramatized while CROSSFIRE is a gritty and suspenseful film that asks hard questions and examines the subject at the street level among real people and not idealized hobby horses like most of the characters in GA (with the exception of Celeste Holm. June Havoc, and John Garfield).
January 11th, 2014 at 8:08 am
If I had to say why this film never seems to hit the big-noir, I’d have to say it’s because of its star, John Hodiak, a capable enough performer, but without the gritty charisma of Bogart, Mitchum or Garfield.
January 11th, 2014 at 1:01 pm
Dan, You are clearly on to something with your comment regarding Hodiak. A nice looking and competent leading man often used at his home studio in secondary parts. And it doesn’t matter where the name comes in billing, you know a star when you see one. And add Nancy Guild to that, although I thought her effective, she did not connect. The tone of Somewhere in The Night works and the secondary players. As for screenwriter Howard Dimsdale being blacklisted, I didn’t even know he existed but for a few fun, but undistinguished credits. I think lots of blacklisted people, and their films, were shown on broadcast television, but not low keyed John Hodiak pictures.
January 12th, 2014 at 9:14 pm
Can’t disagree about Hodiak, but when you aren’t seen it’s hard to be a hit.
Barry
Actually a lot of blacklisted films like this that they could get away with keeping off television were kept off. Many stations checked the credits of films — usually for stars — and didn’t play those too commie — like TENDER COMRADE — or too contaminated.
As for the film it’s a good example of the slick studio noir, and in a film genre where Tom Neal is a major star Hodiak is Oscar worthy. But horseraces and all that.
Hodiak works here because he isn’t Bogart — we would know Bogie would turn out to be a good guy in this type of story, but there is a genuine question about Hodiak — even in his own mind. This may have been studio imposed, but it might also be a conscious choice since the character is supposed to be someone a lot of people wouldn’t remember. You can’t do that with Bogie or Garfield, not believably.
January 12th, 2014 at 11:06 pm
David,
There may have been some neurotic station managers who functioned that way, but not the rule. Blacklisted people may, and probably di, have a hard time securing work, but even films with scripts by John Howard Lawson played television. If they were deemed worthy as entertainment. These pictures, and for that matter just about all of them, were sold in packages. The stations bought them all, like it or not. I saw this thing on commercial television in the fifties, I think. In the larger markets, they played what could capture an audience. I don’t think it’s a big deal. And, I think the Tom Neal reference is glib. Major noir stars are Bogart, Dick Powell, Robert Mitchum, maybe Ryan. I recently bought a collection of-so-called noir from TCM. Johnny O’clock was part of that, a true noir, the other police or FBI procedurals: Walk A Crooked Mile, Between Midnight And Dawn (with a clever billing switch), Walk East On Beacon, So Dark The Night. Not only did I not think four of five weren’t noir, there were written comments by Eddie Muller that made me dislike the pictures even more. I already did not think much of him. That continues. In spades.
January 13th, 2014 at 5:34 pm
Barry
The effect of the Blacklist was real and chilling, and well into the early eighties many films were being shown on television for the first time since the early 50’s because of that. Films such as TENDER COMRADE and MISSION TO MOSCOW didn’t show up until the nineties and featured major stars (MISSION kept off more for its wartime pro Soviet tone than the Blacklist).
You may have lived in a more tolerant part of the country, but I was getting my signal out of Dallas, then home of the John Birch Society, and nothing vaguely pink got on the air.
Re Neal it was meant to be glib, a wise crack to lighten the mood, but not all noir names are that big. Many cult noir films feature actors like Steve Cochran, Charles McGraw, Mark Stevens (two outstanding noir films, THE STREET WITH NO NAME for one , Gig Young, John Payne (a couple of the best small films in the genre), Dennis O’Keefe
( two of the best in the genre and a major actor in noir), Richard Basehart, Ralph Meeker, George Murphy, Louis Hayward — most of whom did fewer major films over all than Hodiak (LIFEBOAT, A BELL FOR ADANO, BATTLEGROUND to name a few). Deanna Durbin is in a noir film with Dan Duryea.
As for Hodik, his career was still strong when he died at 41 with major roles in films like ACROSS THE WIDE MISSOURI.
Police procedurals like HE WALKED BY NIGHT and ARMORED CAR ROBBERY are usually listed as noir as are THE KILLERS and WHITE HEAT. Noir is pretty broad since it includes LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN and THE RECKLESS MOMENT, MYSTERY STREET and GILDA. I grant some films seem a stretch to me, but the umbrella covers a lot of films. ON THE WATERFRONT isn’t listed as noir because it is a serious drama, but contains many noir elements.
Film genres aren’t always set in stone, even ones that seem as easy to define as noir. Westerns like RAWHIDE, STATION WEST,PURSUIT, and BLOOD ON THE MOON aren’t noir either despite having most of the tropes of the genre and with stars like noir staples Powell and Mitchum. Change a film like SO EVIL MY LOVE from the 19th to the 20th century and the setting from London to a big American city and it would certainly be noir, but as it stands it’s not.
But just in general all the books on noir list the films you mention as noir, several fit the sub genre I call docu noir pioneered by Henry Hathaway in THE HOUSE ON 92nd STREET. I consider MURDER MY SWEET the first true noir in 1946, but almost no one agrees with that.
January 13th, 2014 at 6:39 pm
This conversation re Hodiak can’t go on forever — and it is far more attention than he has gotten in decades. I suppose one could accept him as the lead in A Bell For Adano, and the leading man in Lifeboat, although clearly overshadowed by Slezak, Bendix and Bankhead. In Battleground and Across The Wide Missouri he is in support. Missouri is a Clark Gable picture. And, is it ever. I think you are right that Mission To Moscow was kept off screen due to subject matter. The other blacklist points I am not nearly as sure of as you are, but I do know that I don’t like anyone’s definitions of noir other than my own. And, I do not believe Murder, My Sweet fits the bill. In 1944, not 1946, or any other year.
January 13th, 2014 at 9:01 pm
I didn’t mean to infer that the Blacklist was some draconian law repressing freedom of speech, it was more subtle than that. In the case of Mission to Moscow, Tender Comrade, and several others it was the studios themselves who repressed the films or withdrew them from circulation.
Tender Comrade was written by one of the best known figures on the blacklist, Dalton Trumbo and repressed by the studio both for that and for fear it would somehow hurt the career of a major star, Ginger Rogers. It’s big leftish message is that a group of women whose husbands are at war form a cooperative to take care of themselves.
Other than many false accusations, the real harm was how subtle the repression was. It wasn’t imposed by television stations or the government, but by the studios fearing there might be government action and revenue loss from an angry public.
Somewhere in the Night certainly isn’t important enough to feature in this (Barry may well have seen it on television, the repression didn’t really start until the mid fifties), but because of Howard Dimsdale in the credits the studio held it back to protect the stars and the important director. Add to that the fact it wasn’t all that successful or critically accepted and it was easy for it to get lost in the shuffle, but because the film played less often it didn’t build that audience that many films seen more often did.
No one said it out loud, no one sent a memo that could be traced, no one issued an edict. It was done in more subtle ways, loss of sponsors, films being withdrawn from circulation, actors directors and writers not getting work.
Murder My Sweet appeared in 1946, if you have reference that says otherwise it is wrong. The Big Sleep would be the film that defined noir but while it was made in 1945 it wasn’t released until 1946 after the other film.
Murder My Sweet isn’t noir? Well okay, I agree that opinions on this can be personal, and perhaps should be. I’d like to hear the argument for how it isn’t noir, sometimes minority opinions give new insights into familiar subjects.
January 13th, 2014 at 9:55 pm
Let someone else chime in on the year of Murder My Sweet.
January 13th, 2014 at 10:51 pm
Most sources say it premiered in December of 1944. The NEW YORK TIMES review of it appeared on March 9, 1945.
http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?_r=1&res=9F04EEDF163BEE3BBC4153DFB566838E659EDE&oref=slogin
January 14th, 2014 at 12:16 am
In February and March 2009, five years ago!, we all had a very interesting discussion about “What is Film Noir”. In fact it was a three part post which generated 65 comments. I just revisited the discussion and recommend it for those readers who want to explore the subject in depth.
I consider Murder My Sweet to be film noir and it is mentioned in just about every noir reference guide. I just about buy all of them as they are published and it’s one of my favorite subjects. The style of Murder My Sweet just reeks of film noir. The subject may be about a private eye and solving a murder but the atmosphere and dark style is noir. By the way, my reference books list the date as 1944.
January 14th, 2014 at 12:58 am
Fair enough.
January 14th, 2014 at 1:20 am
I grant everything says 1944, but then the story every genre historian tells about holding The Big Sleep back a year until the box office started coming in for Sweet makes no sense, and just about every noir historian tells it that way. I can see other reasons Warner’s might have held Sleep back in 1945, but that’s not the story told. And most credit 1946 as a watershed year for the genre proper.
There are some loopholes though, release dates and general release dates aren’t always the same. I can’t believe with a hit Philip Marlowe movie out in general release in 44 early 45 Warner’s would hold back their own until 46. Studios weren’t generally that slow on the uptake.
December 1944 is likely an early limited release date for Oscar eligibility and the holiday audience and general availability may have been later across the country. The story remains that Sleep was held back until Sweet’s box office came in, and I find it hard to believe Sweet took a year to make a profit and become a hit. Sleep was made in and due to be released in 45 and held back until 46 for some reason.
The Lux Radio version of Sweet appeared in June 1945 which suggests a later general release date than either Dec. 44 or March 1945. The Lux productions were designed to boost the films box office in wide release, and bankrupt RKO would not have waited seven months for the publicity though it is possible the films hit status was the reason Lux did the adaptation. It is possible then that Sleep could have been completed and shelved and then it took until 1946 for it to be scheduled to go into theaters for release. That comes closer to the story most noir historians tell, and it is within the realm of possibility that Sweet’s profits didn’t take off until later in 45.
But again the historians all say that if Warner’s hadn’t held back Sleep in 45 the year it was filmed it would have preceded Sweet in release which is hard to make sense of with these dates. If Sleep was made in 45 there is only a one or two month period it could have beaten Sweet out in general release, and 46 is usually given as the year noir as we know it became noir.
I suppose we fall back on John Ford’s maxim from Liberty Valence about facts and legends because the dates don’t tell the same story the historians do. To further stir the pot it was named best picture by the Edgar Awards in 1946 not 1945. There is something to do with general wide release dates in play here and possibly the way studios figured profits because it doesn’t generally take a year — even in 1945 — to know if a film is a hit.
There are two factors here I didn’t consider. Both films could easily still have been in theaters in 1946 which would still make that the watershed year, and it may well have been 1946 before either film reached France where the term film noir and the concept behind it were first expressed by film critics and film makers. Prior to that, while the French had long commented on American films of that style, the term film noir either didn’t exist of wasn’t generally well known — certainly not over here. It would have been at least 1946 before they could have seen Sweet, written about it, and gotten the writing into print and to these shores. Sweet was far from the only film they credited in this new genre, but because of its unique visual style it was the one generally given credit as the first official film noir if only for how much and how often it was imitated.
January 14th, 2014 at 11:21 am
Look, David — Your facts and interpretation are incorrect. Leave it alone.
January 14th, 2014 at 9:27 pm
Is it true that most noir fans feel that the “Maltese Falcon” with Bogart Is the first noir? If so, My opinion would be “Stranger On the Third Floor” from 1940. (If someone tells me it’s really 1941 or 1939, I’ll shoot myself!!!)
Any comments?
January 15th, 2014 at 1:09 am
Many critics claim that the classic film noir period is 1941-1959 with THE MALTESE FALCON being the first noir. Frankly I no longer believe this strict interpretation of film noir because I have viewed many examples of film noir that have appeared earlier than 1941 and later than 1959.
I agree that STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR is film noir but I would not say that it is the first one. I’ve even viewed silent films that some critics say are in the film noir canon and certainly many films in the 1930’s. It’s a subject that can drive you crazy because as soon as you pick one film, someone else presents another candidate.
It appears that film noir first had expression with the German films and it definitely is not just an American style. There are plenty of excellent British and French film noir. Yesterday I just watched a great Mexican film noir, IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND.
Paul and I have even discussed one of the more unusual and unknown film noirs, WICKED WOMAN starring Beverly Michaels and Percy Helton. It doesn’t follow the dark style of noir and has no murders, in fact almost no crime. But it is definitely a nice sleazy film noir full of desperate characters on their way to hell.
Film noir is a fascinating and complicated subject. Some critics are very strict and say the noir years are *only* 1941-1959 and number two or three hundred films. But then again, John Grant has recently published A COMPREHENSIVE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM NOIR. Over 700 large size pages and listing over 3,000 movies from many nations.
I lean toward the more liberal interpretation, maybe not as extreme as John Grant but certainly not as restrictive as 1941-1959.
January 15th, 2014 at 1:55 pm
What an example of any sub-genre from film noir to screwball comedy, from hardboiled to puzzle mystery, from men’s adventure to romantic suspense really means little. It is a simple way for viewers and readers to understand what to expect from the story.
When I read a review I look for key words (to get me interested it needs “wit” or “humor”). Words like noir and thriller can mean almost anything the critic or reader/viewer wants. It is how the descriptions are used that means more to me than definitions or dates.
Creative people hate the limitations of genres and often take a little of this and a little of that reducing the number of pure any genre to a few.