Dark and spooky movie about murder and deception with a number of twists and turns to it that keeps you guessing until the very last frame.
"The Night walker" is one of those films that doesn't seem to be what you at first think that it is; Something between a horror and psychological movie. The movie skillfully goes from one side of of line to the other throughout it's almost entire time on the screen until that last ten or so minutes when you really see it for what it is and it's very effective in doing it.
"The Night Walker" starts out like something out of the "Twilight Zone" or "One Step Beyond" with a very good prelude about the world of dreams and how we who dream becomes "Night Walkers" in them. Howard Trent, Hayden Rorke, is a blind millionaire who's suspicious of his wife Irene, Barbara Stanwyck. Howard thinks that Irene is cheating on him but all the evidence that he has is a number of audio tape recordings he secretly recorded in her bedroom while Irene was talking in her sleep.
Howard tells his friend and lawyer Barry Moreland, Robert Taylor, how he feels about his wife Barbara at the start of the movie. You somehow at first think that it's Barry who's the man who having the affair with his Irene. It's seems that the blind but very cagey and clever Howard is manipulating both Barry and his wife Irene is some kind of sub-rosa plan that he's cooking up for them. A little later after Howard got into a fight with Irene he goes into his secret room where he keeps all of his audio equipment and tapes, as Irene runs out of the house, and the room suddenly explodes with him being blown to bits to where there's nothing left of Howard but molecules and atoms. With her husband dead and Irene now all alone in the house her dreams,or better yet nightmares, become more and more pronounced and real to the point where she has to leave the house in order to keep from going insane.
Moving into a room at the back of a beauty shop that she owned now instead of her dreams stopping they become even more real to the point where she can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Irenes conjures up this "Dream Man" Lloyd Bochner, who appears to Irene at night. The "Dream Man" is so real that when he gets her to go out with him one evening to a chapel to get married the next day when Irene was driving with Barry through the city streets Irene recognizes the places that she went with her "Dream Man"! Is Irene dreaming all this or is it real? if it is real why and who is behind all this? and even more if it's real what are the reasons for doing this?
Plays like a very good whodunit with Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck giving the movie the attention and class that it wouldn't have gotten if it had much less known actors in those two top roles. The ending to the movie was not at all that contrived as if the screenplay was written only for shock value. The ending tried and succeeded in tying all the loose ends together and giving the film a satisfying instead of a confusing ending.
