It’s another week here at BCB After Dark: the coolest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come on in and sit with us for a while. There’s no cover charge. The dress code is casual. We still have a few tables available. Bring your own beverage.
BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
The Cubs were off today. The start their final series of the year with the mighty Dodgers tomorrow. They need to sweep the two-game series to win the overall season series.
Last week, I asked you if you thought Pete Crow-Armstrong would hit twenty home runs this season. A majority of 61 percent of you think that he will.
Here’s the part where we listen to music and talk movies. You’re free to skip that part if you want. You won’t hurt my feelings.
It’s Jazz Appreciation Month and International Jazz Day is coming up on the last day of the month. (And if you’re wondering who decides when it’s International Jazz Day, it’s the United Nations.) So here’s a performance from International Jazz Day in 2022 featuring vocalist Lizz Wright performing “Smile.” She’s got a heck of a backing band with Joey Alexander on piano, Terri Lyne Carrington on drums, Linda Oh on bass and Mark Whitfield on guitar.
I had high hopes for the 1948 film Night Has a Thousand Eyes, directed by John Farrow and starring Edward G. Robinson, Gail Russell and John Lund. It’s also based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich, who was one of the great crime writers of the era and whose story It Had to be Murder was adapted into Rear Window. And to tell you the truth, I did enjoy the movie, but only because of the winning star performance by Robinson. The rest of the movie was just OK with a unsatisfying plot and subpar performances from actors not named Edward G. Robinson.
Russell plays Jean Courtland, a rich oil heiress, and the film begins by her attempting suicide by jumping onto a moving train, only be be saved by her fiancé Elliot (John Lund) at the last minute.
We discover that Jean was driven to attempt to kill herself after hearing a premonition of her death by John Triton (Robinson). Elliot accuses Triton of being a con man trying to steal her fortune, but Triton has a explanation for all of this.
The film then goes to a flashback from twenty years earlier when Triton, along with his fiancée Jenny (Virginia Bruce) and his best friend Whitney (Jerome Cowan) are running a fake vaudeville psychic act. While the act was a scam and Triton readily admits it was a fake, in the middle of one performance, he suddenly has a vision of the future. At this point, Triton begins to have real psychic visions at random times—most of them foretelling doom.
This flashback sequence is the best part of the film, as Robinson, Bruce and Cowan are all an enjoyable trio. Whitney begins to invest in an oil company, asking Triton if he has any visions of it being successful. (He does, and Whitney’s investments will make him a very rich oil tycoon.) On the other hand, Triton also has a vision of Jenny dying in childbirth. To prevent that from ever happening, Triton breaks off his engagement with Jenny as well as the fake psychic act. He disappears and tries to avoid any situation where he might have a vision that would endanger anyone he cares about.
Meanwhile, Jenny ends up marrying Whitney instead and dies in childbirth anyway. Jean was that child. While Triton maintains no contact with his former friend and the daughter of his fiancée for twenty years, he still has one of his psychic visions of Jean’s demise. He contacts her in an attempt to try to save the daughter of the woman he loved.
The film tries to maintain an air of mystery over whether Triton is really having these visions or whether he’s just a con man, but it’s Edward G. Robinson. I guess Robinson was still playing villains in 1948—he made Key Largo with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall the same year—but his whole demeanor in this film is the honest, straightforward Edward G. of Double Indemnity and not the sadistic gangster of Key Largo, which was a throwback to his Little Caesar-type roles of the early-thirties. I didn’t buy that Triton was conning Jean for a second. Maybe he was mistaken, but he was definitely in earnest.
But as it turns out, there is a real plot to murder the Courtlands and steal their family millions. However, I found it poorly developed and its reveal to be unsatisfying. I also thought that Gail Russell’s performance was just fair and that Elliot, as played by John Lund, was weak and wooden.
The direction by Farrow is perfunctory. That’s not bad—sometime a film can get derailed by a director and cinematographer trying to get all fancy—but it also doesn’t bring anything extra to the table, nor does it elevate a script with a weak third act.
There is one other great element of the film and that is William Demarest in a supporting role as a policeman investigating all is going on. There was no film of this era that wasn’t improved by adding a great character actor like Demarest.
I do enjoy a great Edward G. Robinson performance and while this isn’t the best of his career, it certainly is a very good one. John Triton is a man cursed with a gift he never asked for and Robinson plays him with a good mix of matter-of-factness and fear. He also shows the right amount of affection of Jean—a woman he’s never met before this film but is the daughter of the two people who mean the most to him in the world. The stronger first act and Robinson’s overall performance save the movie.
Here’s the original trailer of Night Has a Thousand Eyes which inexplicably features John Lund more than Robinson. (OK, I know why they feature Lund, Paramount was trying to make a heartthrob out of him. But he lacked the charisma to really pull that off.)
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