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Dec 06, 2021 Web Exclusive By Stephen Danay

The film noir of the 1940s and 1950s frequently features a strain of fatalism that could be described as bordering on the supernatural. In the same way that the protagonists of romantic comedies are fated to find love in the end, the protagonists of film noirs are almost inevitably doomed to failure or death. Classic film noirs were often so stylistically and thematically fraught that adding actual supernatural elements would probably have blackened the lily, as it were. John Farrow’s 1948 film Night Has a Thousand Eyes is one of the few films of the cycle that expressly deals with science-fiction/fantasy elements, specifically the ability to see the future.

Edward G. Robinson stars as John Triton, a con man who spent much of the 1920s as part of a three-man act telling fortunes in nightclubs. Although their show is a scam, Triton slowly begins to discover that his flashes of intuition are actually glimpses into the futures of the people around him. When he sees that his partners Whitney and Jenny will fall in love - despite Triton being in love with Jenny himself - he decides to acquiesce to fate and strike out on his own, although not before giving Whitney a tip-off on an oil investment that makes the couple rich. Triton spends decades living in isolation to avoid seeing future tragedies he seems unable to prevent. But when he has a vision that foretells that Whitney and Jenny’s now adult daughter will die under a starlit night sky, he makes one last attempt to change fate.

Night Has a Thousand Eyes does a good job of leavening its overt fatalism with a kindness that’s uncommon to noirs of the era. Most films of that cycle feature callous, indifferent or actively cruel characters, but everyone in this story seems to be doing their best to do the right thing. John, Whitney and Jenny are perhaps the most emotionally well-adjusted and honest con artists in the history of the trade and the film really has no villain beyond fate itself. Robinson, who rose to fame playing vicious gangsters and hard-ass cops, here shows an attempt to shake off the tough guy image he built for himself in the 1930s. Much of Robinson’s immediate post-war filmography cast him as an everyday schlub caught up in sinister plots that he couldn’t fully comprehend. The Fritz Lang films Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window both cast him as average guys who get in too deep with femme fatales. 1948 was also the year he starred as Johnny Rocco in Key Largo, the character that would more or less serve as a elegy to the numerous gangsters role he played previously. With his bullfrog face, machine-gun delivery and short but imposing stature, it’s not hard to see why Hollywood cast him as a heavy. In reality, Robinson was well-spoken, well-educated and politically-minded, characteristics that began to come through more clearly in his later roles. As Triton, his hang-dog features and compact physicality seem to collapse in one themselves under the wait of his seemingly paranormal burden.

Much of the plot of Night Has a Thousand Eyes concerns Triton trying to convince various characters and authorities that he’s not crazy, and the film eventually turns into something of mystery as the characters attempt to decipher the impressions and vagaries that make up his visions. Perhaps adding to the tragic ambiance of the film is the casting of Gail Russell as the seemingly doomed Jean. Following her breakthrough role in 1944’s The Uninvited, Russell worked steadily through much of the following decade before her death from alcoholism at the young age of 36. Apparently, she’d never drank alcohol until she started acting and used it to calm her terrible stage fright. It’s not quite visions of the future, but it’s enough to make you wonder about the fatalism of self-destruction.

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