Night Without Sleep

I'm thanking my lucky stars that I only had to endure 77 minutes of this dreck-fest. Poor Hildegard Knef wastes an hour and forty minutes of her life waiting for Gary Merrill to make an appearance......and then he has the gall to turn up drunk!

Moody, menacing and mysterious at the outset; Bemused and confused Merrill hasn't a clue whether it's 5 A. M. or P. M. and the speaking clock has no intention of enlightening him on the issue. As Merrill desperately tries to unscramble his brain and fill in the Blankety Blanks from the previous few hours, deeply perturbed by the prospect that something horrific has occurred, there are flashbacks to his unhappy marriage with domineering June Vincent and his life as a writer and musician in the world of theatre.

The movie attempts to go through the gears, with Merrill slowly finding the missing pieces of the jigsaw, his fractious encounter with Knef and a more protracted, romantic one with Linda Darnell, all propelled by a succession of dry martinis (on an empty stomach). As suspense builders go, this is more likely to produce twiddling thumbs than a pounding heart.

By the end it appears that Merrill's ship has sailed. Indeed, the whole film seems to miss the boat.

MERRILL: 'Like Grimm's fairy tales, gruesome and wonderful.' 'Night Without Sleep' is no fairy tale........It's just GRIM!

Gary Merrill plays a failed playwright in a dreary marriage, trying to recall a drunken evening. And if you ask me next week what this movie is about, I'd probably have a hard time recalling it. There's little reason to care about what's going on, and not much to care about anyway. At least there is something of a payoff in the end, but it's a matter of too little, too late. You could make a case that the film explores bitter regrets and existential ennui, but it's too superficial to get excited about. Bland performances (Linda Darnell stands out but only because of her beauty), bland imagery, bland drama. A good remedy for your own nights without sleep.

1952's "Night Without Sleep" is an obscure Fox 'B' that popped up on Pittsburgh's Chiller Theater on February 28 1976, followed by second feature "Beginning of the End," the Bert I. Gordon cheapie about giant grasshoppers. The prospect of sitting through this snoozefest does indeed chill the blood, basically a feature length exposition centering on a once famous musician, now an unhappily married alcoholic who finds more camaraderie with his dog than with the numerous females in the cast. Star Gary Merrill made a career out of roles like this, especially on the Hitchcock teleseries, but never once raises the scale on the dramatic meter. Earlier on Chiller Theater was the even more obscure "Run Psycho Run," a 1965 melodrama that Merrill did in Italy, even tougher to find. In 1974, he and June Vincent would be reunited, again as husband and wife, on an episode of KUNG FU, "The Way of Violence Has No Mind." Any audience that braves "Night Without Sleep" may have trouble avoiding 90 minutes of boredom.

I don't really know where to start with Night Without Sleep. I began with thinking I'd give it 5 stars, but worked my way down to three. Maybe it deserves a four, but I was so bored with this film I stood my ground.

On the positive side, it starts out fairly well. And the ending is quite downbeat...qualifying it as a bonafide film noir (although it tries very hard to extricate itself from that description by turning into a melodrama). The cast is impressive and the Roy Baker directed many fine films.

On the flip side: It is a total bore. It's not that the script is amateurish, but it is very uninteresting at best. 77 minutes feels like eternity. Gary Merrill endlessly talks to himself - out loud and in his brain - and to his dog(!). Overall, the acting does nothing to save the film. There is some typical (for the era) psycho-babble and a racist line (delivered by Merrill).

Apparently, this was filmed in 3 weeks. That probably didn't help, but it doesn't feel like a bad B film. It feels worse.

Night Without Sleep may very well put you into the land of nod. It's a faint retread of Black Angel, based on one of Cornell Woolrich's alcoholic-blackout stories and starring Dan Duryea as the hung-over protagonist who may or may not have committed a murder of which he can recall nothing. But the script for Night Without Sleep bears no trace of Woolrich's febrile ingenuity, and instead of the cagey Duryea we get the bland Gary Merrill.

Two years after having been lucky enough to land the part of Margo Channing's Broadway director fiancé in All About Eve (he and Bette Davis married just after the production), Merrill plays another theatrical figure, a composer toiling under the shadow of his wealthy wife (June Vincent). His last hit (`Purple Like Grapes') was years ago, so he drowns his frustrations in multitudinous `very dry' martinis (whose responsibility for his very dry spell is never considered).

Matters come to a head when he wakes at five but doesn't know if it's evening or morning. He tries to piece together the previous hours from fragments of hazy recollection: He was bickering with his wife before he was to take her to the airport; he drove into Manhattan; he dropped in on a cocktail party where he met a new Hollywood star (Linda Darnell); and, in consequence, he was hours late in meeting his volatile mistress (Hildegard Knef) for drinks and dinner. But he can't shake the thought that he murdered one of these women in his disordered life...

Merrill's emerging memories offer opportunity for flashbacks, some brief but others cumbersomely long. The one involving Darnell - whom it turns out he had once met when she was a starving hoofer - turns into a movie-within-a-movie, a full-blown romance within a sketchy film noir (there's even a flashback within this flashback). Darnell lightens the movie with a straightforward, unaffected performance (at least until she's called upon to cry) but lightening is the last thing this movie needs. What it needs is a decent script and an actor in the principal role. That leaves out Merrill, who may as well have been carved out of a block of balsa wood.