Notte d'angoscia

Check out that unsettling scene in the lonely police waiting room. Little guy Houser (Lubin) sits on one side and vulnerable newly-wed Millie (Hunter) sits on the other with a big empty space between. It's a great visual metaphor for the danger facing our young stranger in the city. A hostile world appears on one side and poor Millie all alone on the other. Even little things work against her in the big, impersonal surroundings—the unhelpful news guy, streetlights suddenly going out. Then too, those spare sets from budget-minded Monogram fairly echo with undefined menace.

From such atmospheric touches, it's not hard to detect the influence of Val Lewton's horror classic The Seventh Victim (1943). At the same time, the movie's director William Castle was a moving force behind the brilliantly unconventional Whistler series from Columbia studios. So the many imaginative touches here, like the lunging lion's head that opens the film, should come as no surprise.

Despite the overall suspense, I had trouble following plot convolutions—who was where, when, and why. But then the screenplay did have four writers, which is seldom an asset. Still, the mysterious husband (Jagger) and Millie's suspicions does generate core interest. In my little book, the main appeal is in the players and the atmosphere, such as the winsome young Hunter, a virile young Mitchum, and the jazzy Harlem nightclub. All in all, the sixty-minutes remains a clever little surprise from poverty row Monogram.