Night Has a Thousand Eyes

John Triton performs a stage act pretending to read the future; the tricks are arranged in advance. Then one day he begins actually seeing. What he sees is always catastrophe and everything he tries to prevent happens exactly as foreseen. He leaves the stage and disappears for years. Then he reaches a young woman, Jean: he knows her father will die in a plane crash and sees that she will die under the stars. John Farrow directs. Edward G. Robinson plays Triton and Gail Russell plays Jean. The source is Cornell Woolrich's novel. The idea is that knowing is useless. Had Triton been able to change the future the narrative would be a thriller; that every attempt contributes to the disaster carries the film somewhere fatalistic. Woolrich is among the most adapted writers in noir; his narratives contain not criminals but people who cannot escape, and this is one of the clearest instances of that line. Edward G. Robinson was known for gangsters and is somewhere entirely different here: tired, frightened and hating his own gift. The police strand is the weakness; the film has to add characters looking for a rational explanation and it lowers the pace. John F. Seitz is the cinematographer; the night scenes and the observatory are good examples of noir style. Who it is for: viewers who like noir and fatalistic thrillers. Who it is not for: the narrative is slow, the second half drowns in explanation, and the ending does not land as expected.