The Eyes Have It

Here's one that we didn't get on DVD from Netflix or watch on streaming. It isn't available easily, so we bought it: Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948).

It starts in media res with a young woman, Gail Russell, about to throw herself off a bridge. But her boyfriend, John Lund, has followed her and manages to prevent her suicide. He offers to take her for a cup of coffee while she complains about all the stars in the sky, looking down at her like eyes.

They get to the restaurant, which turns out to be a very swinging Chinese chop suey joint (a black couple by the jukebox, etc). Edward G. Robinson is waiting for them. He is the one who told Lund where to find Russell. He tells his story.

He started out as a vaudeville mentalist, working with a beautiful assistant who would become Russell's mother, and a pianist who would become her father. In the middle of a phony act (you figure out that the pianist is sending cues in the music), he tells a woman in the audience to head home. Her little boy has found some matches and set his bed on fire. She rushes out and he continues. After the show, he dismisses it as just something that came over him, and it was probably nonsense. But the lady has come back to the theater to thank him for saving her child.

Robinson begins to see more and more visions, and the three start to get rich by acting on them. But he worries that he may be causing the disasters he forsees, and deliberately doesn't warn a newsboy to be careful crossing streets. He is immediately killed by a truck. So that didn't work.

Although he and his assistant are clearly in love, he sees a vision of her dying delivering their child. So he breaks up with her, and tells her to marry the pianist and settle down with a few stock tips. They do, but she still dies, delivering the child who will grow up to be Russell.

Robinson withdraws from the world, taking Angel's Flight to Bunker Hill in LA, and starting a magic novelty mail-order company. But many years later, he has a vision of Russell's father dying in a plane crash. He rushes to her house and crashes a party to beg her to call him and tell him not to fly. But when they do get through, he has already crashed. 

But it gets worse - he looks at Russell and she realizes that he has had a vision about her - her death under a starry sky, in the next few days. That brings us up to the present.

But now John Lund brings the police in. He suspects that Robinson is running a con, trying to get at Russell's money. Detective William Demarest (!) is able to confirm parts of the story, but also discovers that the plane crash was due to sabotage. Maybe Robinson is not the troubled unwilling psychic that he appears.

So this isn't quite a noir, nor quite a horror movie, but it's a little of both. Since Angel's Flight always makes a noir, we have that section. But the inevitability of Robinson's terrible predictions gives it a horror element. Getting William Demarest as a police detective is just icing on the cake.