Fear in the Night (1947)

Editor's note: This review is written by Thomas C. Renzi. Tom has written a book on noir writer Cornell Woolrich called Cornell Woolrich from Pulp Noir to Film Noir.

He compares the Woolrich book or short story to the films that were made based on them. Being a big Woolrich fan I found the study compelling. In this article he writes about Fear in the Night. Renzi mentions that this particular film has a homosexual subtext. Honestly, I never noticed it in the half-dozen times I've seen it. His book also goes into detail about the 1956 remake Nightmare with Edward G. Robinson. It's a bigger budget film but I find Fear in the Night a darker, grittier and therefore a truer film noir.

By Thomas C. Renzi

1947, Paramount. D: Maxwell Shane. P: William H. Pine, William C. Thomas (Pine-Thomas). Cin: Jack Greenhalgh. Sc: Maxwell Shane. Ed: Howard Smith. Mus: Rudy Schrager.

Cast: Paul Kelly (Cliff Herlihy), DeForest Kelley (Vince Grayson), Ann Doran (Lil Herlihy), Kay Scott (Betty Winters), Robert Emmett Keane (Harry Burg/Lewis Belnap) 71 min.

A steady contributor to filmmaking from 1937 to 1956, Maxwell Shane penned screenplays for nearly sixty films, but sat in the director’s chair for only five, which, according to Spencer Selby Dark City: The Film Noir, can all be classified as noirs: Fear in the Night (1947), City Across the River (1949), The Glass Wall (1953), The Naked Street (1955), and Nightmare (1956, a remake of his own Fear in the Night). Evidently, Shane appreciated Woolrich's conception for the novelette “Nightmare” because he not only scripted and directed two versions of it, but in adapting it to film, he retained most of the original material and captured much of the author’s atmospheric style and thematic intent.

DeForest Kelley, commendable in his first screen role and later famous as Bones McCoy in the Star Trek series, plays the confused protagonist, Vince Grayson, who wakes from a disturbing nightmare in which he stabs a man with an awl and stuffs his body in a closet. Although the gory crime seemed an imaginative invention, Vince finds in his pocket a button and key he saw in the dream, and notices bruises on his neck, all of which suggest that the event really happened. He seeks help from his detective brother-in-law, Cliff Herlihy (Paul Kelly), who scoffs at Vince’s imagined fears, but as evidence grows (following Woolrich’s chain of events), he gradually comes to believe his brother-in-law did commit the murder. After Vince attempts suicide (by leaping from his hotel room window, not by slitting his wrists as in Woolrich’s version), Cliff begins to investigate the facts more minutely. He locates the cuckolded husband Lewis Belnap (Robert Emmett Keane, renamed from the original’s Joel Fleming) and guesses how he turned Vince into a hypnotized assassin to murder his wife and her lover Bob Clune (replacing Woolrich’s Dan Ayers).

To clear Vince of murder, Cliff sets a trap for Belnap, getting him to repeat his ability to place Vince under a hypnotic spell. Belnap succeeds in re-hypnotizing Vince, but eludes the police, driving Vince to a lake where he orders him to drown himself. Cliff arrives in time to pull Vince from the water while his men pursue Belnap. One cop shoots the tire of the fleeing auto. Belnap loses control and dies in a violent crash.

At his arraignment, Cliff tells Vince that, based on self-defense, he should be cleared of criminal charges. Smiling, Vince walks up the steps of the courthouse with girlfriend Betty at his side.

As a faithful adaptation, Shane’s film works extremely well. An able cast delivers convincing performances. DeForest Kelley’s portrayal of a meek yet high-strung, emotionally suppressed individual perfectly captures the honest Everyman, who, struggling to uphold his moral principles in a corrupt and deceitful world, suffers psychological convulsions because of his sensitive conscience.

Paul Kelly, chisel-faced and square-jawed, gives his reliably convincing depiction of the rough-edged, no-nonsense cop, a role he plays often in his career. Notably, Robert Emmett Keane stands out as the villain. His quietly confident demeanor makes his villainy seem all the more insidious and deadly.

Like Woolrich’s novelette, Shane’s film operates ambiguously on two planes at once with its text and subtext mirroring the two realms of reality and imagination. Shane retains the two equivocal sources of Grayson’s guilt, committing a murder and entertaining homosexual fantasies.

The film’s explicit text parallels that of Woolrich’s story. A guilt-infected individual is struck nearly impotent with fear because he may have committed a reprehensible murder. The same questions emerge as to whether human action is the product of free will or the automatic gestures dictated by some all-controlling external force. Interestingly, when Grayson refers to “the power [that] watches over us when we’re unconscious,” he changes the original “God” to “the Almighty,” de-emphasizing the Divine and suggesting that the outcome to human endeavor can be held sway by some secular entity.

Shane faithfully adheres to Woolrich’s homosexual subtext as the implied reason for Vince’s troubled conscience. His relationships with Clune, Herlihy, and Belnap are confusing to his sensitive nature, a psyche stringently molded by social proprieties and religious orthodoxy. The only way he can cope with his “improper” behavior is by suppressing it as fragmented memories from dreams or a hypnotic trance or some black-out state.

After the opening hypnotic episode, Vince suffers unconsciousness a second time when he blacks out at his brother-in-law’s house. After a fade out and in, we see him lying in bed in the dark, while his voiceover tells us he had a hazy recollection waking and then falling back to sleep until after midnight when “something” woke him. A light goes on and the camera pans Cliff’s figure, from his legs to his face, as he stands alongside Vince’s bed in a garish robe patterned in circular starbursts.

This blackout, adapted from the novelette where Vince sleeps overnight at Cliff’s house, makes it even more evident that Shane is trying to capture Woolrich’s homosexual connotations. Like the opening dream sequence with Clune, Vince finds himself in another scene where Cliff appears as the instigator of an ambiguous homosexual encounter with him. Throughout the film, Cliff calls Vince “kid,” a term of endearment perhaps, but also one male’s subtle claim to superiority over another. Woolrich’s story handles this a little differently: at one point Cliff tells Vince, “You’re twenty-six years old, you’re not a kid”, but at the end, when Vince has to go through the legal process for his role in the murder, Cliff asks him, “Are you scared, kid?” (“Kid” evokes the same ambiguities as “gunsel” in The Maltese Falcon, where Gutman has an equally equivocal relationship with his gunman Wilmer as adopted son and implied lover.) Here, the camera’s pan of Cliff presents him as an imposing figure standing at the meek Vince’s bedside, the two characters taking the male and female roles respectively. His gaudy robe contrasted with his stern, hard-boiled visage is laughable, but the scene is played seriously, and the insinuation is that Cliff, coming for a romantic tryst, is outfitted to impress the object of his affection.

As in Woolrich’s story, the scene between Cliff and Vince in the kitchen of the Belnap mansion is filled with homosexual innuendo. Cliff’s anger originates ambiguously from pride (repugnance at being used) and jealousy (possessiveness for his lover). Vince experiences his next blackout at the police station when he is shown the morbid photographs of the two dead bodies. The scene fades out and when it fades in, he lies on the floor. Cliff picks him up, cradles him in a pietà-like pose, and administers to him. Vince starts to speak: “It’s only since I started—“ but Cliff cuts him off so as not to alert the other police of his knowledge of the murders.

Again, the subtextual implication is that Vince faints from the shock of seeing his former lover dead. Cliff silences Vince to keep him from incriminating himself, but once they return to Vince’s apartment, Cliff announces he is going to arrest him the next day. If Cliff were sure of Vince’s guilt and intended to turn him in, why not let him speak at the police station? He was afraid his brother-in-law would expose their homosexual relationship, that he might have said he blacks outs “only since I started” to have these homosexual affairs.

The film follows Woolrich very closely at the climax. Cliff has set a trap for Belnap with his recording equipment while Vince confronts the hypnotist. Vince brandishes a gun and thinks he’s in control, but Belnap distracts him with his pocket watch, reflecting light in his eyes and hypnotizing him once more. Vince’s gun is a phallic symbol, and Belnap’s request that Vince give “it” to him suggests another homosexual encounter. Hypnotized, Vince is defenseless and vulnerable—that is, the urge to consummate the homosexual sex act is too great to resist. His hypnotic trances and blackouts are excuses, defense mechanisms, to assuage his guilt for submitting to these urges.

We see Vince’s face inside the circle of Belnap’s watch cover. Black lines criss-cross the image, giving it a shattered, fragmented look. Vince’s self-control dwindles into oblivion. Belnap leads his hypnotized subject from the house and drives him to a nearby lake where he suggests that he find peace by drowning himself. Vince slips into the water, the symbol of the unconscious. The police, not far behind, close in. Belnap flees. The police shoot out one tire, causing the car to jump the road and crash, killing the hypnotist. Meanwhile, Cliff, left at the lakeside, has pulled Vince from the water. In administering artificial respiration, he has Vince’s inert body prostrate, face down, on the dock while he straddles him. Then he turns him over, and remains straddling him. Vince regains consciousness. Cliff, looking down on him, asks, “Are you all right, kid?” Vince takes his time, but finally smiles and answers, “Yeah…yeah…all of a sudden, I’m all right.”

This final image of Cliff astride Vince seals the homosexual implications. “All of a sudden I’m all right” can mean several things, one of which is that submission to and acceptance of his homosexuality has enabled him to feel at peace with himself.

The image of Cliff behind Vince in a front-to-back embrace, the so-called “spoon” position, had occurred earlier when Cliff rescued his brother-in-law from his suicide leap. Before Vince slipped from the window ledge, Cliff pulled him inside. In itself, the incident does not suggest a homosexual act, but coupled with the later scene on the dock, it signifies the nature of their sexual entanglement.

The ordeal over, true blame for the murder has been determined and Vince is absolved of his guilt. His plunge into the water had a cathartic effect that erased all sins, original and otherwise. At the film’s conclusion, when Betty walks with Vince up the steps of the courthouse, she says, “I’ll be right there with you all the time.” She usurps the words of Cliff Dodge at the end of Woolrich’s story, thus replacing him and what he stands for. The implication is that Vince’s “fear in the night,” his fear of being homosexual, is over, that his love for a woman redeems him through a “normal” heterosexual relationship.