Night Has a Thousand Eyes

In the opening scene of John Farrow’s Night Has a Thousand Eyes, a young woman attempts to leap in front of a train but is snatched to safety at the last moment by a tall, handsome man. We learn that the couple is Elliott Carson (John Lund) and his girlfriend, the wealthy heiress Jean Courtland (Gail Russell), who’s feeling hopeless because a spiritualist named John Triton (Edward G. Robinson) has predicted she’s going to die in a few days. In flashback, we learn that Triton had once performed on stage as “The Mental Wizard” but halted his career when his dire, deadly predictions started coming true. The skeptical Elliott, still resentful that Triton is causing Jean emotional pain, reports the reluctant medium to the police, who move into Jean’s mansion to monitor the countdown to her foretold death, expected on a clear night with stars in the sky. The camera work is relatively pedestrian, the score is melodramatic, and the noir sensibility is underdeveloped, but the fatalism of Cornell Woolrich’s source novel creeps through to make the film a satisfying indulgence in darkness. Note: While supernatural films are excluded from this collection, such elements are debatable here as fraud or chance are equally plausible explanations for Triton’s prophecy.