Beast was independently produced by B-movie specialist Jack Dietz, who had made his name cranking out East Side Kids programmers with Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall on Poverty Row in the ’40s. Ray Harryhausen says the negative cost was $200,000 — neither lavish nor shoestring in those days, just a decent, respectable B budget. (“Today,” Harryhausen says, “you can hardly buy a costume for $200,000.”) Dietz stretched his budget by hiring Eugene Lourie to direct. The IMDb says Lourie also served as production designer, though on screen he’s credited only as director. If Lourie did do double duty, it would make sense; the bulk of his career was as an art director, first in France, then in Hollywood (his last credit was Clint Eastwood’s Broncho Billy). This would also explain how Dietz, between Lourie’s design sense and the deft use of stock footage, managed to get an A-picture look on a B-picture budget.

The picture begins literally with a bang: an atomic test north of the Arctic Circle that frees the creature from suspended animation in the polar ice (audiences never tire of these stock shots of atomic explosions; they’re as fascinating now as they were half a century ago). The first man to see the beast is one of the attending scientists (Ross Elliott, in the designated role of First Expendable Victim). The second witness is the other scientist, our hero Tom Nesbitt (Swiss actor Paul Hubschmid, under the anglicized name of Paul Christian), and the movie’s first act follows Nesbitt’s crusade to prove to the skeptics around him — his military pal Col. Jack Evans (The Thing from Another World‘s Kenneth Tobey), paleontologist Dr. Thurgood Elson (Cecil Kellaway) and Elson’s assistant Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond) — that he saw what he saw. Meanwhile there are a number of unexplained occurences, including the sinking of a fishing boat whose sole survivor is dismissed as a deranged crackpot when he claims it was the work of a “sea serpent” (the sailor is played by John Ford regular Jack Pennick, his grotesque teeth either straightened or, more likely, replace by dentures).

Another of these occurences is the destruction of a lighthouse on the coast of Maine, an episode straight from the Ray Bradbury short story that (according to the credits) “suggested” Lou Morheim and Fred Freiberger’s screenplay. And this is as good a place as any to discuss the movie’s origins.

The story first appeared in the June 23, 1951 issue of the Saturday Evening Post as “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms”. It was later antholgized in Bradbury’s collection The Golden Apples of the Sun, its title changed to “The Fog Horn”, and it is by that name that it’s been known ever since. My guess is that “The Fog Horn” was Bradbury’s original title and that the Post editors gave it the other one; it sounds about like the magazine’s style in those days. Since the movie’s original working title was Monster from the Deep, I’m also guessing that Dietz first hired Harryhausen for the project, then came across Bradbury’s story and decided to incorporate it, and to appropriate its title, as an afterthought. If so, then it must have been a pretty early afterthought, because the movie adopted not only the title…

 

…but, with modifications, the look of the monster itself, as you can see by comparing the frame from the movie above with this illustration from the magazine. In the movie the beast is identified as a “rhedosaurus”, a species that does not exist in the annals of paleontology. It’s fun to believe that the first two letters of the beast’s name stand for the “RH” of Ray Harryhausen (Harryhausen denies it, but I think perhaps he doth protest too much).

 

And doesn’t the title The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms have a great ring to it? Much better than Monster from the Deep. Scientifically, it’s nonsense; a fathom is a measure of nautical depth, six feet — or, at the rate of 20,000, 22.7 miles. The beast from 22.7 miles down, in an ocean (the Arctic) that never gets deeper than 3.4 miles? Even the deepest spot on earth, the Mariana Trench in the Pacific, is only 6.9 miles. But never mind, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms sounds awe-inspiring, primeval, almost Shakespearean; kudos to that Saturday Evening Post editor for coming up with it. 

 

The Beast‘s money scene is the monster’s invasion of New York (not far, Kellaway’s Dr. Elson tells us, from where the only rhedosaurus fossils have ever been found), and the Big Apple hasn’t had it so bad since King Kong came to town. In fact, compared to the rhedosaurus, Kong’s rampage looks comparatively benign: a quick shot of newspaper headlines tells us there are 180 known dead, 1,500 injured, and damages estimated at $300,000,000 (and that’s in Eisenhower dollars; add a zero or two to get a current equivalent). “The worst disaster in New York’s history!” shouts a radio newsman, as the National Guard is trucked into town, hospital emergency rooms are overwhelmed, and New Yorkers cower behind their doors, afraid even to look out the window.

 

 

This sequence includes a moment that nobody who saw it in the 1950s has ever forgotten. An unbilled Steve Mitchell, playing an NYPD patrolman, bravely stands his ground, even advances on the beast, using nothing but his .38 caliber police revolver…

 

 

 

 

…only to be plucked screaming off his feet in the monster’s teeth and downed in one quick gulp. It’s a grisly death Harryhausen had practiced on a classmate in one of his experimental films as a teenager, and I’m sure Steven Spielberg had it in mind 40 years later when he had that T-rex snatch the cowering lawyer off the toilet in Jurassic Park. But in Beast it’s a moment of noble sacrifice (the cop is not made to look reckless or foolish), and our sad knowledge of September 11 makes it even more poignant when viewed today.

 

 

 

 

As the rhedosaurus wreaks its havoc on Manhattan, Harryhausen manages to fit in a nice little tribute to his mentor Willis O’Brien. As the beast claws at this building, ultimately reducing it to rubble (and annihilating an unlucky group of extras in the alley beyond)…

 

 

 

…the shot mirrors this one from The Lost World (’25), in which O’Brien’s brontosaurus deals out the same fate to a building in London (albeit with less explicit loss of life).

 

 

Ultimately, the rhedosaurus is cornered at Coney Island, wounded and enraged by a lucky shot earlier in the evening from a National Guard bazooka. Worse, the nuclear test that freed it from its icy tomb seems to have turned it into a carrier of some virulent radiation sickness; soldiers exposed to the manhole-size drops of blood falling from its wound have been keeling over without warning left and right. Tom Nesbitt announces that (for reasons the script doesn’t slow down to explain) the only way to stop the creature is to shoot a radioactive isotope into its wound “and destroy all that diseased tissue.” So Nesbitt and an Army marksman (an amazingly youthful Lee Van Cleef) don their haz-mat suits and ride to the top of the rollercoaster for a clear shot, and at last the monster’s number is up.

 

 

But not without a fight. Before the monster’s death throes have run their course, the rollercoaster becomes an inferno of flames (Nesbitt and the marksman make it safely to the ground), and the rhedosaurus gets a funeral pyre to match its gargantuan size. Harryhausen says that Eugene Lourie once accused him of having his monsters die “like a tenor in an opera”, and that’s what this one does:

 

 

Once The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was in the can, Jack Dietz tucked it under his arm and went shopping for a distributor. Eventually, he sold it to Warner Bros. for (according to Harryhausen) about $450,000. That represents a very tidy profit over his original investment, but with a fly in the ointment: Harryhausen says the picture went on to make “millions” for Warners — $5,000,000, as a matter of fact, at a time when that was real money; nearly twice as much, for example, as Bwana Devil, the surprise hit of ’53 that kicked off the first short-lived 3-D craze. More, too, than other 3-D hits of the year, like Charge at Feather River, It Came from Outer Space and Kiss Me, Kate (not quite as much as House of Wax, though, but pretty close, and without the novelty of 3-D).

 

Warner Bros. profited from Beast in another way as well. Barely a year (in fact, 371 days) later, the studio released its own homemade variation: Them! Warners knew a good thing when they had it, and they stuck close to the formula. Once again, nuclear testing unleashed a horrible freak of nature (this time, giant mutant ants), a major city came under attack (Los Angeles), and a beloved old character actor was along to play the movie’s senior scientist (Edmund Gwenn, in a role very much like Cecil Kellaway’s in The Beast). Other animals, insects, arachnids, even humans, would stumble into the atomic oven and thunder out their warnings of Things Man Was Not Meant to Meddle In, and plenty of them are on view in this blogathon. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms led the way, and proved there was gold in them thar radioactive hills.

 

 

After The Beast, Ray Harryhausen was on a roll:  It Came from Beneath the Sea, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. But in 1958 he, producer Charles Schneer and director Nathan Juran made a picture that represented an orders-of-magnitude leap forward on the keen-and-neat-o scale.

 

Partly because it was in georgeous, eye-popping Technicolor. But there was also the sheer volume of its visual effects. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms runs an economical 79 minutes, and its effects shots add up to (surprisingly) only 7 minutes 5 seconds — or 8.9 percent of the running time. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad runs 88 minutes, with 17 minutes 27 seconds of effects — 19.8 percent. More monster-time, but more monsters, too; more, in fact, thanall Harryhausen’s previous pictures put together. The Beast, It Came from Beneath the Sea and 20 Million Miles to Earth each had a single animated creature. But Sinbad had more than you could shake a scimitar at.

 

This one, for example. It’s the first beast we see, not seven minutes in — the collossal Cyclops, encountered when Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews) and his crew make an unscheduled stop at the uncharted island of (appropriately) Colossa.

 

Sinbad has been blown off his course as he sailed home to Bagdad after a diplomatic mission to the Sultan of Chandra. There he not only averted war between Bagdad and Chandra, but wooed and won the hand of Princess Parisa (Kathryn Grant), daughter of the Sultan.

 

As Sinbad and his crew come ashore seeking food and water, the Cyclops appears suddenly, pursuing a man in a black gown who is calling for help. This is the magician Sokurah (Torin Thatcher), a crafty and devious man who, once they are all safely back aboard the ship, arouses Sinbad’s suspicions.

 

Sokurah tries to bribe Sinbad to return at once to Colossa, to retrieve a magic lamp that the Cyclops has stolen from him. He appeals to Sinbad’s greed, telling him that the Cyclops is a hoarder of treasure, not only Sokurah’s lamp, and that Sinbad and his crew can claim any amount of the treasure as plunder — once Sokurah has his lamp back. But Sinbad’s first duty is to his Caliph, and to keep the Princess safe from harm — not only for the sake of his love for her, but for the sake of peace between Bagdad and Chandra.

 

 

In  Bagdad, Sokurah performs wonders for the Caliph and the visiting Sultan of Chandra, including (briefly) joining the Princess’s serving woman and a serpent into this amazing, sinuous creature before returning the servant (and presumably the snake) back to their original bodies. Sokurah attempts to wheedle the Caliph into fitting out an expedition to return him to Colossa, but the Caliph remains firm; his mind is not to be changed even by such clever tricks as these. Perhaps, Sokurah mutters ominously, an even greater demonstration of my powers is called for.

 

The next morning, Sokurah has done his work. Princess Parisa is discovered in her bedchamber, alive and well but shrunken to the size of a tiny doll. The Sultan, outraged and grieving, vows to reduce Bagdad to ashes to avenge this insult to his daughter. His hand is stayed only when Sinbad seeks out Sokurah and gets the sorcerer to admit that he can return the Princess to her normal size — but only with a potion using the eggshell of the giant bird, the Roc, which is found (of course) only on Colossa. So the magician has at last extorted his expedition after all, to be led by Sinbad himself. But Sinbad fears — knows — that Sokurah can’t be trusted, and that he will have to be kept a wary eye on.

 

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was part of a movie vogue that was petering out by the time it went into production in 1957: the Arabian Nights adventure. The genre — at least this incarnation of it — had begun in 1940 with the phenomenal success of the marvelous, magical The Thief of Bagdad from Alexander Korda’s London Films. It spurred a flood of similarly-themed adventures throughout the ’40s — most noticeably in a series of campy Technicolor romps from Universal starring Jon Hall and Maria Montez (“the King and Queen of Technicolor”), but cropping up in other unexpected places, like MGM’s Kismet (1944) with Ronald Colman and Marlene Dietrich, and Warner Bros.’ update of The Desert Song (1943), with Dennis Morgan as a burnoose-clad freedom fighter battling Nazis in war-torn Morocco. 

 

It was during this time that Ray Harryhausen first conceived the idea of a Sinbad adventure, and he drew a series of preliminary sketches of the kind of thing he had in mind. There had been Sinbad the Sailor in ’47, but that was a conventional swashbuckler with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Maureen O’Hara; Fairbanks spoke of battling Rocs and Cyclops and dragons, but what the movie showed was far more mundane. Harryhausen’s idea was to make a movie filled with the things Fairbanks’s Sinbad only talked about. 

 

Unfortunately for him, in 1955, RKO Radio Pictures mogul Howard Hughes, while he was in the process of running his studio into the ground, produced Son of Sinbad with Dale Robertson, which rightly laid a Roc-sized egg at the box office. Wherever Harryhausen turned, the answer was the same: “sailor pictures” are dead, just look at what happened to Son of Sinbad. 

 

But producer Charles H. Schneer — with whom Harryhausen had already made It Came from Beneath the Sea, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and 20 Million Miles to Earth — believed.He even wanted to shoot in color, about which Harryhausen was dubious. Harryhausen had just developed a process — later dubbed Dynamation — with which he could combine live action and special effects animation on the same strip of film negative without having to resort to costly and time-consuming matching of negatives in the lab (the animation alone was costly and time-consuming enough), and he wasn’t sure it would work for color as well as for black-and-white. But Schneer had him shoot some tests to make sure, and they were on their way.

 

The picture was shot in Spain (another point on which Schneer and Harryhausen were pioneers; in the 1960s many Hollywood epics, and Sergio Leone’s Italian spaghetti westerns, would also be shooting there), and Schneer was as resourceful with a budget as Jack Dietz had been. He even secured permission to shoot in the Alhambra in Granada, giving him and director Nathan Juran access to lavish sets at a fraction of the cost of building them. (Later crews were less respectful than Sinbad‘s, and now the Alhambra is off-limits to movie production.)

 

 

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is a movie of endless wonders, thrills and delights. Time and again, Sinbad and his crew (and the tiny Parisa, helpless in her little doll’s cabinet) have barely vanquished or escaped from one fantastic creature before they are set upon by another — like this angry two-headed Roc, who takes exception to Sinbad plundering her eggs for the shell that will help restore the Princess…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

…or the Cyclops again, preparing to barbecue Sinbad’s friend Harufa (Afred Brown) for his dinner…

 

 

 

 

 

 

…or the fire-breathing dragon guarding Sokurah’s underground castle, where Sinbad goes to rescue Parisa after Sokurah has betrayed them all and spirited the Princess away…

 

 

…or most awe-inspiring of all, the skeleton Sokurah brings to life and arms with sword and shield to duel Sinbad to the death. This scene was such a tour de force that Harryhausen couldn’t resist outdoing it five years later in Jason and the Argonauts, when the hero and his friends battle a cadre of no fewer than seven deadly skeletons.

 

The Arabian Nights adventure came in in a blaze of glory with The Thief of Bagdad, and after years of diminishing returns it went out in a blaze of glory with The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. There would be other movies in the genre — Harryhausen himself would make sequels, and pretty good ones, in 1973 and ’77 — but these two movies, each in its own distinct way, are the unassailable peaks of the form, never equaled, much less surpassed.

 

The secret to the success of both movies, of course, is that they aren’t really “Arabian” at all. What they are, in fact, is Arabesque — an elaborate fantasia on the mere idea of the tales of Scheherezade, decorated with the filigree of genies, evil wizards, fabulous monsters, dauntless heroes and pure, chaste maidens in mortal peril.

 

 

 

Oh, and let’s say a word about that genie, Barani — the one in the magic lamp so desperately coveted by the wicked Sokurah. He’s played by 12-year-old Richard Eyer, one of the most ubiquitous child actors of the 1950s, who had already made his mark in such movies as Come Next Spring, The Desperate Hours and Friendly Persuasion, and on countless television series. His talent wasn’t spectacular, but it was real, and he brought a down-to-earth conviction to any role he played; he was a real kid, not a show-off Hollywood brat. And even though he was about as “Arabian” as a Fourth of July picnic, casting him in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was an act of sublime genius. Here, right in the middle of all these monsters and wizards and princesses, was a boy just like you or me — only he could do magic! I’ve never seen this commented on before, but I think Richard Eyer’s presence is crucial to the success of Sinbad, as much as Torin Thatcher’s ability to embody pure wickedness or Kerwin Mathews’s uncanny way of really seeing all the creatures that won’t be tipped into the scene with him until months after shooting has wrapped. Richard Eyer gives the kids in the audience — like my brothers, our friends and me — something they can identify with and hold on to amid the wonders going on before their wide and staring eyes. Richard Eyer had a very special place in my heart after I saw The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

 

Codee may be harder to place from this picture, but her accent and dignified look kept her busy as Madame This or That: Mme. Borodin, the owner of Margaret O’Brien’s ballet academy in The Unfinished Dance; Mme. Bouget in That Midnight Kiss, and so on. Any sci-fi fan will especially remember her, as I do…

There are a few more familiar names and faces — comedian Joe Frisco, character actors Montagu Love, Franklin Pangborn and Henry B. Walthall — but they’re not plentiful. For the most part, what the entertainers in this collection have in common more than anything else is their utter and absolute obscurity, then and now.

Who are these people? Some of them seem to have based their act on the premise that they have no talent whatsoever. Like Jack Born and Elmer Lawrence here, using floppy shoes, a Jew’s harp, and a sad-sack dead-pan delivery in a vain effort to make themselves (and their jokes) funnier than they are. Did they ever really connect with an audience? We can’t know because the audience is, by and large, as gone as they are. Nothing ages like comedy, which is why when we find someone who’s still funny — a Chaplin, a Keaton, a Groucho Marx, even a Moe or Curly Howard — it tells us something. All we know for sure about Born and Lawrence is that they’re not funny now. (Neither, for example, is one Charles “Slim” Timblin, dolled up as a blackface preacher in Revival Day [1930]. Here we have confirmation that at least some people at the time weren’t amused: Sitting in Rev. Timblin’s congregation are a number of bona fide African Americans, and they don’t think he’s funny; rather, they look sullen and disgusted at the thought of what they must put up with for — what, a measly five bucks a day?)

John Farrow’s Night Has a Thousand Eyes is one of those movies. It presumably still exists in the vaults at Universal Pictures (proprietors of Paramount’s pre-1950 library), waiting for the day Universal finds it worth their while to issue a white-market DVD. The day may yet come; the picture does have its following. I tried to bid on a 16mm print on eBay a couple of years ago, but the price quickly went out of my range — and this at a time when 16mm features were hardly moving on eBay at all.

Night Has a Thousand Eyes originated as a novel by Cornell Woolrich, one of the more unusual creeps in the history of Hollywood (where creeps have never exactly been an endangered species). Born Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich in 1903, his parents separated when he was little. He lived with his father in Mexico until he was 12, then moved to New York to live with his mother — which, except for one brief interval, he did for the rest of her life. He dropped out of Columbia when his first novel Cover Charge promised success as a writer. 

Another thing Woolrich did in Hollywood was get married, in 1930, to 20-year-old Gloria Violet Virginia Blackton, daughter of silent movie pioneer J. Stuart Blackton. The marriage was never consummated, and Gloria eventually had it annulled in 1933, after Woolrich had gone home to Mother. According to Corliss (who cites Woolrich biographer Francis M. Nevins), when Woolrich moved out on Gloria he left behind a diary for her to read. In it, for starters (says Corliss), he had written that “it might be a really good joke to marry this Gloria Blackton.” The diary also went into “sordid and dreadful detail” about his daily sexual adventures with anonymous men; as Corliss says, while he never consummated his marriage, he was hardly celibate.

I say it again, the man was a creep — not because he was gay, but because of the diary, and because he left it behind for Gloria to read. Then there’s the fact that he lived with his mother until he was 53, when she died. By itself that would just be kind of odd; taken with everything else it tends to red-line the creep factor. (It sounds like Sebastian and Violet Venable in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer.) When his mother died in 1957, Woolrich fell to pieces and wasted away. Literally. He neglected a minor foot infection, dulling the pain with booze, until it became gangrenous and they had to amputate his leg above the knee. When he died, alone and miserable in 1968, he weighed only 89 pounds.

The doom-laden fatalism and frustrated self-loathing that lurk under the thin skin of Woolrich’s life surfaced in his writing when he turned from Fitzgerald Jazz Age society to the dank, shadowed recesses of crime fiction. It may not have made him rich or famous, but it kept him eating, and as luck would have it he caught the leading edge of the wave — first of the pulp-fiction detective magazines of the 1930s and ’40s, then of the dark, morally ambiguous movement in 1940s Hollywood that would become known as film noir. There were no fewer than 15 movies made from his novels and stories in the 1940s alone, and dozens more (for theaters and TV) since then. Probably the best of the lot — certainly the most famous — is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), originally published as “It Had to Be Murder” in Dime Detective Magazine (Feb. ’42). But there were others: Val Lewton’s The Leopard Man (1943, from Black Alibi), Phantom Lady (’43), Deadline at Dawn (’46), The Window (’49, from “The Boy Cried Murder”). More recently, too: Francois Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black (’68) and Mississippi Mermaid (’69, from Waltz into Darkness), Mrs. Winterbourne (’96, from I Married a Dead Man), Original Sin (2001, Waltz into Darkness again).

Night Has a Thousand Eyes was published in 1945 under one of Woolrich’s pen names, George Hopley (his two middle names); later, in this ’50s-vintage paperback, under his other one, William Irish. But in 1948, when Paramount and director John Farrow filmed the novel, the screen credits named Cornell Woolrich as the novel’s author.

 

If Woolrich bothered to see the movie (and my guess is he simply took the money and ran — or rather, stayed home; he doesn’t seem to have gotten out much in those days), he might have had trouble recognizing it. The novel is told from the alternating viewpoints of its two central characters: New York police detective Fred Shawn and heiress Jean Reid, whom he saves from a suicidal jump off a bridge one night while walking home from work. Shattered and timorous, Jean recounts the events that have driven her to such a desperate pass.

 

Jean and her wealthy widowed father Harlan Reid were happy and secure until some weeks before, when he planned to fly west to San Francisco and back on a business trip. Overhearing the plans, a servant girl blurts out to Jean that her father mustn’t fly back; a “friend” has told her that the plane will crash. Jean tries to dismiss the idea, but her sense of dread grows by the hour, and she is devastated when the plane does indeed go down in Colorado. Seeking answers, the grieving Jean tries to meet her maid’s friend but he refuses, sending word that she should go home; she’ll see her father again. At home she finds a telegram: her father missed his flight and is unharmed; he’ll be coming home by train.

 

The Reids eventually meet the mysterious prophet: Jeremiah Tompkins, a shrunken, broken little man who disdains their gratitude, refuses money, and demands only to be left alone. Yet even as he rebuffs them, he speaks in riddles — and every cryptic remark is borne out by events that he could never have foreseen. Harlan Reid is hooked, returning to Tompkins time and again, seeking advice on business matters and always profiting by what he learns, and always offering payment which Tompkins always refuses. Finally Tompkins tells him that further advice is useless: Reid has only a few weeks to live. Unwilling to speak but unable to stop, Tompkins tells him the exact date and hour when he will meet his death “in the jaws of a lion.” The robust, confident Reid becomes a shocked, hollow shell of himself, waiting only to die. Jean, meanwhile, has glimpsed a hostile, uncaring universe without free will, in which she and her father are trapped like insects in amber. As a result, she has despaired and tried to kill herself, only to be rescued by Shawn.

 

Shawn senses some subtle, diabolical scam afoot and persuades his superiors to launch an investigation in the few days remaining. What is Tompkins up to? Is he up to anything at all? The novel then becomes a blend of police procedures, as detectives try to trace Tompkins’ “predictions” to their roots, and Shawn and Jean’s vigil at the Reid estate. As the two seek to raise Harlan Reid’s spirits and head off the perplexing prophecies, their forlorn efforts take on the futile aura of a death watch. It’s no spoiler to say that, along with a few unexpected turns, events work out precisely as Tompkins said they would. The novel ends on a note of trembling hope, but with the characters sensing that they are playthings in the hands of unbreakable fate, and that they’d have been far happier without that glimpse of the abyss.

Even Woolrich’s most admiring fans know that elegant plots were not among his strengths, and much of Night strains credulity; indeed, the supernatural element is often more credible than the ordinary goings-on (which may have been the whole idea). Nor was he much of a stylist; he often overwrites like a man who gets a penny a word and is determined to squeeze every cent he can out of his story. Sometimes his novel reads like the hard-boiled Mickey Spillane parody “The Girl Hunters Ballet” that Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote for the Fred Astaire musical The Band Wagon (1953), as funny unintentionally as Comden and Green were on purpose.

Rather than plot or style, what Woolrich’s novel has is mood — in spades, and maybe even to a fault — the chilling sense of being in the grip of some insensate force, powerless to resist. If Woolrich did happen to swing by New York’s Paramount Theatre when the movie opened there in October 1948, he might have noticed that that mood is preserved on the screen, even as his entire story and most of his characters are jettisoned.

Elements of the novel remain, recognizable but altered, as in a dream. The tormented oracle, of course. The opening scene of a young woman saved from suicide — only now her name is Jean Courtland (Gail Russell), and her rescuer isn’t a stranger but her fiance Elliott Carson (John Lund). The plane crash — only this time Jean’s father (Jerome Cowan) is on the plane and goes down with it. The police-procedural investigation by William Demarest as Lt. Shawn, the only surname to survive from the novel — only this time the aim is not to avert Jean’s father’s death, but her own. And as in the book, there are the cowardly servants deserting Jean, and treachery within the doomed tycoon’s circle of associates. Even the mysterious reference to a lion remains, and is similarly borne out.

The screenplay of Night Has a Thousand Eyes is by Barre Lyndon and Jonathan Latimer, and for me there’s no getting around the fact that they made major improvements in Cornell Woolrich’s original. The story is simpler and more interesting — positioning Jean as the damsel in distress is a much smoother sell than asking us to worry about a broken old man giving up and sitting around waiting for death.

Lyndon and Latimer’s biggest and most satisfying change is in the character of the psychic, the reason the story exists in the first place. Woolrich, with a typically heavy hand, gives us Jeremiah Tompkins (“Jeremiah”, yet!), cursed and burdened his entire life with a “gift” he doesn’t understand or want and can’t control, crushed by it long before he meets Jean or her father. He’s given up. He’s a haunted zero. 

In the movie Tompkins becomes John Triton (Edward G. Robinson), a vaudeville and nightclub mentalist with a phony mind-reading act. Or rather, that’s what he was some twenty-odd years ago, as he describes things to us in flashback. As he plies his act in theaters and saloons from town to town, he finds himself — and he’s not even sure exactly when it started — getting genuine flashes, glimpses into the future: the winner in a horse race, the son of an audience member who is playing with matches at home and about to set fire to the house, an investment opportunity that will pay off. 

 

Triton has an additional connection with Jean Courtland supplied by Lyndon and Latimer: his partners in the act (Jerome Cowan and Virginia Bruce) are — will be — Jean’s parents, although the woman will die in childbirth and Jean will never know her. Triton sees this coming and thinks he can prevent it by running out on them, so he does (he still believes his visions are mutable and can be changed or forestalled). Courtland grows wealthy on the predictions he got from Triton before he disappeared, and for twenty years Jean has heard tales of Triton from her father, who believed the man was dead. Now Jean’s father himself is dead, and Triton knew it would happen. He knows as well that Jean too will meet…what?…death?…something…but he can’t…quite…make sense of his jumbled and fragmentary vision.

 

Carson, Jean’s fiance, sees in Triton a carnival con-man running some kind of game to fleece a wealthy and vulnerable orphan, and he takes his concerns to the police. But Triton’s game, if there is a game, is a subtle one. He asks no money, does nothing illegal, and cooperates with the police one hundred percent. “He puts up a good show,” says a skeptical psychiatrist. What is this man up to?

There is simply no end to the ways in which Night Has a Thousand Eyes is better than the novel it’s based on. The book may be a work of art that expresses the author’s nightmarish vision of an overpowering and inexorable universe (though I have my doubts on that score), but the movie was made by craftsmen who had the story sense (Barre Lyndon and Jonathan Latimer) and fluid style (John Farrow) that Cornell Woolrich lacked. In John Triton, the movie has a protagonist more complex, dramatic and interesting than the cringing troll Tompkins. Triton is a true Cassandra, a prophet fated to be disbelieved — not because people think he’s mad, but because they think he’s too sane, a slick and calculating huckster with a smooth line of patter. Which, once upon a time, he was.

In addition, and perhaps more important, the movie has Edward G. Robinson. Robinson once said of himself, “Some people have youth, some have beauty — I have menace.” In one of his other 1948 pictures, Key Largo, he menaced Bogart, Bacall, Lionel Barrymore, Claire Trevor and anyone else who entered a room with him. Billy Wilder used that menace to great effect in Double Indemnity, where Robinson played, in fact, a good man who (without knowing it) menaced the picture’s protagonist and actual villain, perennial nice guy Fred MacMurray. 

 

In Night Has a Thousand Eyes Robinson’s menace is turned in on itself, a serpent eating its tail for so long it’s hard to tell where the serpent ends and the tail begins, or what is eating whom. Triton can’t un-see his visions, and he knows that trying to change events will make them happen, but he can’t keep himself from trying anymore than he can keep them from happening. In the end we can’t decide whether Triton embraces his “gift” or surrenders to it. Neither, perhaps, can he.

 

We need a good professional DVD of Night Has a Thousand Eyes. The nocturnal motif of the title, the looming sense of prying, encroaching darkness, plays out in the relentless charcoal shadows strewn across the frame by Farrow and cinematographer John F. Seitz (I discussed this great cameraman in my essay on director Rex Ingram), and without a proper transfer, elements of their images can be (and no doubt have been) lost in the murk of careless reproduction. Still, even in the gray-market renditions currently available, this is a sinister and unsettling movie in the best sense of the phrase, one that seems to have a foot in two different worlds — one the world we live in, the other a world that just may have its foot in us. 

 

Night Has a Thousand Eyes is a specimen of a rare subgenre: supernatural noir. There aren’t many examples of that; parapsychology, the “spirit world”, and such things are not to be easily grafted onto the gritty, cynical urban landscapes of movies like Laura and Double Indemnity. But John Farrow, Jonathan Latimer and producer Endre Bohem would do it again the following year in their next picture together, just a few months after finishing this. The result would be a neglected classic — forgotten now but, once seen, unforgettable. I’ll write about that one next time.

 

Also, the book could have used a more thorough job of copy editing. There are far more than the usual number of misspellings (“Donald O’Conner,” “legers [ledgers]”) typographical errors (“The Barrett’s of Wimpole Street,” elsewhere called “Wimple Street”), malapropisms (“initialized” for “initiated,” “cache” for “cachet,” “skewered” for “skewed”), grammatical missteps (“…the sets fell in to disrepair…”) and other hard-to-classify errors that could be one or more of the above (“…the seeds of destruction…were sewn…”). You can hardly go five pages without one gaffe or another. (And by the way, was there really a “Red Square” set in Yolanda and the Thief [1945]? I don’t remember one in that picture, which took place in a mythical South American country, but the authors say there was one, and that Lot 2’s New York Street played the role.)

All quibbles notwithstanding, this book is a swell read, a step-by-step tour that takes us through each lot one by one, ushering us in the front gate and taking in every building (on Lot 1) and outdoor set (on the others) in turn. There are plenty of maps, starting with this one showing all MGM’s holdings at its peak. (The two lots on the left are the ones you can see in the picture above.) If you live in the L.A. area and have a passing familiarity with Culver City, it’s easy to get the lay of MGM’s land.