An excellent and very underrated film noir, "Night has a Thousand Eyes" certainly takes its noirish credentials seriously beginning in almost total darkness as John Lund saves Gail Russell from jumping under a train. The movie is then told in flashback, at least up to the midway point, by Edward G. Robinson as the mind-reader Triton, quite happy to admit his act was a phony until one night he actually did seem to develop second sight.
John Farrow's film is based on another novel by the great Cornell Woolrich and it might have been just another B-Movie chiller were it not for Farrow's intelligent direction and another excellent turn from Robinson whose genius was that he could play quiet and introvert just as easily as loud and pugnacious, underplaying just as easily as playing to the gallery and making the film's supernatural element totally believable.
This is one far-fetched yarn and yet you hang on every word. It may be no classic and it lacks the hard-edged brilliance of Edmund Goulding's "Nightmare Alley" but it's certainly smart, at times genuinely funny and deserves to be better known that it is.
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