NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 493, 3 December 1948, Page 24

NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES

(Paramount) NE can’t eat one’s cake and have it, so while most Wellington filmgoers were crowding in this past week to sample Hamlet, or Gentleman's Agreement, or Naked City, I had perforce to content myself with a couple of bread-rolls in the shape of a new Edward G. Robinson thriller and an inconsequential little romance (q.v.) which introduced Dana Andrews as a Maine lobsterman. Neither of these films could be regarded as better than average B-grade entertainment, but neither pretends to be more than that and I am bound to concede that on many occasions | have passed an evening less agreeably. Night Has a Thousand Eyes tells the story of a small-time vaudeville mindreader (Robinson) who becomes subject to occasional brainstorms in which he can foresee the future. So long as this involves him in nothing more serious than the prediction of the winner in the 3.30, it is quite a pleasant form of aberration-particularly when the winner is a 50-to-1 outsider-but that portion of his subconscious which does the second-seeing is uncomfortably unselective (and uncontrollable) in its previsions. He foresees too much calamity for his own peace of mind and on top of that he can’t be sure whether future events inspire his predictions or whether his prophecies shape the future events. After one particularly bad attack in which he foresees the death in childbirth of his fiancée (Virginia Bruce), he runs away and hides first in Arizona and later in a Los Angeles slum, Flight really avails him nothing. His former partner becomes rich (as a result of one of MRobinson’s_ earlier prophecies), marries the girl, and she dies in childbirth as foreseen. Thus far the story is told by flashbacks. When the film opens little Mr. Robinson is despairingly trying to save the partner’s daughter from the consequences of his latest bout of second-sight, in which he has reluctantly prophesied her death"at might, under the stars’-with a wealth of circumstantial detail. From’ this point, the story develops as a sort of inverted whodunit, in which the in‘terest centres on Robinson’s frantic efforts to convince the girl’s fiancé, and the police, of his bona fides-or at least of the bona fides of his intuitions. No one is prepared to take the shabby little man seriously until some of the events which he has foretold will pre- cede her death actually take place. Then, of course, it is nearly too late. The climax develops to the accompaniment of thunder without, slow-ticking clocks within, eerily bulging curtains and creaking clichés, and not even the undoubted ability of Mr. Robinson or the slickness of the direction can conceal its artificiality.

Enjoyment of a film of this kind, of course, demands certain intellectual concessions, and a corresponding relaxation of one’s critical standards-and if the effort is worth it, I am prepared to concede and relax as. comfortably as my neighbour. In the present instance, the story hardly warrants such readjustments, but what really put me off were the bursts of eerie discordant music which heralded Mr. Robinson's brainstorms. They sounded too much like bats in the belfry.