This one is a suspenseful little mystery-thriller - a crime noir. For me, this is one of the better, more mysterious mystery-thrillers I've seen from the 1940s. Worth watching if you like these types of films.Vince Grayson (Kelly) is a young man who is easily hypnotized and he's had a horrible nightmare that he murdered someone and a mirrored room but it seemed all to real to him. "It was dream, no it's real" - he kept debating himself, yet he knew it had to be real so he enlisted the help of his detective brother-in-law Cliff to find out the answers.The questions are: Did Vince really kill someone? Is Vince making all this up as reality when it was only a dream? Is Vince having premonitions? If Vince didn't kill anyone then who did? 8.5/10

As I prepare to launch another film noir marathon, I thought I'd get back into groove with something small, offbeat and quickly sketched, but authored by a guy who was one of the preeminent creators of noir: Cornell Woolrich.His Deadline by Dawn would make my list of 10 favorites in the genre, it captures the chimeric noir world on the deepest level. Noir is all about the hallucination, the anxious narration causally tied to the world of the film. This structure is probably more explicit here than in any other noir film, including Lang's: the film starts with the narrator having a nightmare where he kills a woman in a mysterious octagonal room with mirrors, but when he wakes up in his room he finds traces of the murder. Over the course of the film, bit by bit memory seeps back into his narration. A storm leads him back to the fateful house. A cop brother- in-law and his girlfriend act as conscience, escorting him on the journey of atonement. It's all about guilt, memory and mishaps of fate. But the execution is slapdash, the actor doesn't have any tragicool charisma. It's off.But how about this as explication of noir dynamics? What we see and the protagonist experiences in the opening scene as the noir nightmare was very much real, but at the same time illusory for him in the moment of experience—double perspective. And how about this as the deeper cosmic joke of the prankster gods of noir? There would be no problem for our guy if only he didn't wake up that morning with the memory. So it wasn't the killing, but memory that causes stuff—being conscious of the nightmare, it acquires reality. Superb Woolrich.So this is a miss, but right off the bat we have some expert delineation of the noir universe.Noir Meter: 3/4

OK, this is a little film noir from 1947. You can stream this one for free on Netflix or for free at Archive.org. Fear in the Night is about a man (Vince) who has a terrible nightmare in which, he kills a man in a strange mirrored room.When he wakes up he discovers that he has blood on his wrist on bruises on his neck just like in his dream. Slowly Vince begins to realize that he may have actually committed the murder that he dreamed about. In a panic Vince enlists the aid of his brother in law Cliff and the two of them try to figure out what happened before Vince is arrested for murder.You can tell right away that this was made on a modest budget and some of the acting is pretty atrocious but, it's an interesting crime drama and was an enjoyable watch.This movie was re-made with the same director in 1956 with Edward G. Robinson. This time it was called Nightmare.This is the feature film debut of DeForest Kelley who later went on to play "Bones" on Star Trek.

Spoilers.DeForrest Kelley narrates the opening and, intermittently, much of the rest of the story. He begins with something like, "A glowing face seemed to come towards me out of the darkness." On the screen, we see a glowing face seem to come towards us out of the darkness. A bit later the narrator tells us, "The room began spinning." On the screen, the room begins spinning. I guess the director, Maxwell Shane, must have given up at about the point at which the narrator tells us, "My heart was beating like a jackhammer." There isn't an abundance of imagination on display in this rather interesting story of an innocent nobody who is hypnotized into taking part in a burglary during which he's forced to kill a man. He wakes up the next morning believing it to have been a nightmare, except that there are some strange objects in his pockets and a smear of blood on his wrist. He explains his unease to his brother-in-law who is an officer in the homicide department. That would be Paul Kelly. Kelly dismisses it irritably and tells Kelley to pull himself together. But Kelley is unable to do that and fills the rest of the film with the pungent odor of sweaty fear. This was his film debut and he's neither good nor bad, just another actor with ordinary talent. You could probably find someone at about his level in any play, maybe "Our Town," produced at a community college in some sleepy town somewhere in Arkansas.The story is from Cornell Woolrich, a strange guy -- homosexual, boozer, recluse, and amputee. He wrote a lot of pulp stuff that was adapted into radio plays and films -- "Rear Window," "The Bride Wore Black." Well, it's a living, or at least it was when people still read books. He may have been the equal of James M. Cain when it came to prose style, in the sense that neither had any. Reading either of them will remind you of reading a newspaper. Raymond Chandler at least tried for some insane poetry, no matter how idiosyncratic it was. You know Chandler's oft-parodied line: "Her hair was the color of gold in old paintings"? You won't find anything resembling that in Cornell Woolrich or in this adaptation.The budget must have been very low. Aside from Paul Kelly, there are only one or two recognizable faces, such as Charles Victor's and Ann Doran's. There is little outdoor shooting. The sets are mostly skimpy. But the director sometimes goes ape over on-screen effects. The ancient iris is replaced by an expanding star, for instance. And the nightmare sequences -- wow. By the way, this guy's nightmares make a lot more sense than mine do. No glowing faces seem to come towards me out of the darkness. Aside from the sex elements, which I don't mind as long as they don't involve those funny animals, they often seem to involve my running away from some horrifying manticore or something, intent on eating me alive, while I try to flail my way through a vast swamp of molasses. I'm told that dreams of appearing naked in public are common but I've never been bothered by them, and as far as this movie goes, I'd prefer seeing DeForrest Kelley stabbing someone with an awl to watching him run through Port Authority with no clothes on. In fact, that's a pretty disgusting image.The musical score is perfunctory and the direction is functional, no more than that, with one or two exceptions. Here's one of them. Kelley calls in sick and his teller's window at the bank is filled by the young lady who loves him. The director shows her replacing his name plate with hers at the window and for a moment she holds the two names side by side and smiles down at them. It's a small moment but someone had to think of it. More like it would have helped.The element of hypnosis is not new but still fascinating because, even now, no one knows exactly what's going on in the hypnotic state. I studied the subject in graduate school and I've used it as an adjunct to therapy and it works fine in certain limited contexts. But it remains a mystery. Surgery has been performed using no anesthetic other than hypnosis. What we see of hypnosis on the screen is possible, but barely.