Possibly containing too many comedic elements to qualify for this collection,
Fly-By-Night is significant because it’s noir master Robert Siodmak’s first American film that approximates the noir style. Opening with an insane-looking patient strangling a guard and escaping a dark sanitorium during a thunderstorm, the tone lightens over time, dipping into screwball territory in the middle (even compelled matrimony and a shared hotel room) and culminating in a shocking conclusion. The wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time, Dr. Geoffrey Burton (Richard Carlson) finds himself framed for the escapist’s murder in his hotel room, hooked up with sketch artist Pat Lindsey (Nancy Kelly), and running from both the police and a gang of spies seeking the mysterious military invention called “G32” which the patient was involved in creating. While Siodmak’s famous expressionism wasn’t yet on full display, the film’s pacing, with its twists, turns, comic relief, and set pieces (leaps between speeding vehicles, a chemical explosion out of a sci-fi film) is near perfect for keeping viewers attentive. Like so many films of the period, mental illness is played for comic effect (“A cousin of my wife’s once thought he was a chocolate éclair”) and psychiatric evaluation is ludicrously facile: to be committed to the sanitorium where he can track down the incarcerated Professor Langner (Miles Mander), the ostensibly married couple pretends Burton is a mentally disturbed wedding ring thief in a scene that was practically recreated six years later in Budd Boetticher’s
Behind Locked Doors (1948).
