***SPOILERS*** Extremely deep and heavy stuff directed by Don Siegel who's known for his shoot em up police flicks like "Madigan" and "Dirty Harry". It's here where Siegel directs the kind of movie that you would have expected the famed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman to do.
The films title "Night Unto Night" even sounds like an Ingmar Bergman movie but that's where the similarities, between Siegel and Bergman, ends. In the movie Bio-Chemist John Galen, Ronald Reagan, is looking for a place to stay, on the Florida East Coast, to conduct his experiments on bacteriological agents to improve the healing powers of penicillin. Staying at Ann Gracy's, Viceca Linfors, almost empty mansion John soon comes to realize that Ann is a bit off center in her insisting that she communicates, verbally, with her dead husband Bill.
John being a man of science knows that the dead can't communicate with anyone but keeps that fact from Ann in order not to ether embarrass or hurt her feelings. It's when John comes in contact with C.L Shawn, Broderick Crawford, an artist as well as deep thinker whom he considerer's to be in full control of his mental faculties that his opinion about Ann starts to change. Shawn sees nothing strange at all in the existence of ghosts and unfamiliar spirits that John feels is nothing but pure unadulterated BS!
Ann soon falls in love with John, a life long bachelor, but he doesn't seem that interested in her because it, having an affair with Ann, will interfere with his scientific research. It's then that the cat is let out of the bag in John's very strange and bizarre behavior. It soon comes out that John is suffering from a severe case of epilepsy and is trying, in the Florida sunshine, live with the disease. John's epilepsy according to the doctors treating it-Dr. Pool(Art Baker) from his hometown of Chicago and Dr. Altheim (Erskine Sanford) from here in Florida-is getting worse by the day and will eventually render him useless as a man of science or anything else!
It's later when Ann gets the news, from Shawn, about John's condition that she does everything to get him to overcome the stigma, back then in the 1940's, of being an hopeless epileptic. It's when Ann's jealous sister Lisa, Osa Massen, who's also crazy about John, and whom John earlier rejected, insults and humiliates John, in front of Ann among others, about his condition that he tried to keep secret that he went into, what seemed like, an epileptic seizure. Hurt and ashamed about being exposed, as an epileptic, John goes into his room planing to end it all by blowing, with a .45 caliber revolver, his brains out.
***SPOILER ALERT*** As it turned out it was Ann who came to Johns aid and, by threatening to kill herself, kept him from committing suicide. John looked at things, like the scientist that he was, as being either black or white without any grays in between. It was both Ann as well as Shawn who believed in things beyond science, like life surviving death, that made John see the light that always eluded him. It also made John realize that even though his illness, epilepsy, was not curable faith in a higher power as well as the whole hearted support of those who love him will do a lot more for him then all of medical science put together.
The films title "Night Unto Night" even sounds like an Ingmar Bergman movie but that's where the similarities, between Siegel and Bergman, ends. In the movie Bio-Chemist John Galen, Ronald Reagan, is looking for a place to stay, on the Florida East Coast, to conduct his experiments on bacteriological agents to improve the healing powers of penicillin. Staying at Ann Gracy's, Viceca Linfors, almost empty mansion John soon comes to realize that Ann is a bit off center in her insisting that she communicates, verbally, with her dead husband Bill.
John being a man of science knows that the dead can't communicate with anyone but keeps that fact from Ann in order not to ether embarrass or hurt her feelings. It's when John comes in contact with C.L Shawn, Broderick Crawford, an artist as well as deep thinker whom he considerer's to be in full control of his mental faculties that his opinion about Ann starts to change. Shawn sees nothing strange at all in the existence of ghosts and unfamiliar spirits that John feels is nothing but pure unadulterated BS!
Ann soon falls in love with John, a life long bachelor, but he doesn't seem that interested in her because it, having an affair with Ann, will interfere with his scientific research. It's then that the cat is let out of the bag in John's very strange and bizarre behavior. It soon comes out that John is suffering from a severe case of epilepsy and is trying, in the Florida sunshine, live with the disease. John's epilepsy according to the doctors treating it-Dr. Pool(Art Baker) from his hometown of Chicago and Dr. Altheim (Erskine Sanford) from here in Florida-is getting worse by the day and will eventually render him useless as a man of science or anything else!
It's later when Ann gets the news, from Shawn, about John's condition that she does everything to get him to overcome the stigma, back then in the 1940's, of being an hopeless epileptic. It's when Ann's jealous sister Lisa, Osa Massen, who's also crazy about John, and whom John earlier rejected, insults and humiliates John, in front of Ann among others, about his condition that he tried to keep secret that he went into, what seemed like, an epileptic seizure. Hurt and ashamed about being exposed, as an epileptic, John goes into his room planing to end it all by blowing, with a .45 caliber revolver, his brains out.
***SPOILER ALERT*** As it turned out it was Ann who came to Johns aid and, by threatening to kill herself, kept him from committing suicide. John looked at things, like the scientist that he was, as being either black or white without any grays in between. It was both Ann as well as Shawn who believed in things beyond science, like life surviving death, that made John see the light that always eluded him. It also made John realize that even though his illness, epilepsy, was not curable faith in a higher power as well as the whole hearted support of those who love him will do a lot more for him then all of medical science put together.