Back in the 50s and 60s, comic books and trashy magazines routinely carried small advertisements for learning hypnotism. These were fairly creepy as they often promised to give you the power to control any person so that they did whatever you wanted, accompanied by a drawing of a young woman in a scanty negligee. Before hypnotism was well understood, film makers could get away with convincing audiences that a hypnotist could control people's actions like some kind of puppeteer. Now that we know more about how hypnosis actually works, the idea that person could commit a murder under hypnosis is far less convincing. For all that, Nightmare (dir. Maxwell Shane) is an effective film noir well supported by Edward G. Robinson as hard bitten detective Renee Bressard, a cool jazz soundtrack (with appearances from Meade 'Lux' Lewis and Billy May and his Orchestra) and some nice New Orleans locations.
This was the second time that director Maxwell Shane had adapted Cornell Woolrich's short story, 'And So to Death.' The first was in Fear in the Night (1946), and it's interesting to see how the same material was dealt with by the same director a decade earlier on a lower budget. Kevin McCarthy plays Stan Grayson who dreams he has committed a murder and then becomes convinced that it was more than a dream. He is pushed to the brink of madness until he tells his brother-in-law (Edward G. Robinson), who at first rejects it all as fanciful imagination and then comes to believe that Stan is a killer who has invented the dream story to mitigate his guilt. In a creepy house in the Louisiana Bayou the truth will be revealed.
Jazz singer Connie Russel plays Stan's girl, Gina, and she has a couple of good performances backed by Billy May and his Orchestra. The nightclub scenes are really well shot, though there is the subtle suggestion that black music is dangerous, subversive, and best avoided. There are some femme fatale tropes that seem to go nowhere in terms of the narrative, but overall this is a fairly solid late-noir outing for fans of the genre like me. Edward G. Robinson was such a talent he could lift the quality of any film and Nightmare is no exception.
This was the second time that director Maxwell Shane had adapted Cornell Woolrich's short story, 'And So to Death.' The first was in Fear in the Night (1946), and it's interesting to see how the same material was dealt with by the same director a decade earlier on a lower budget. Kevin McCarthy plays Stan Grayson who dreams he has committed a murder and then becomes convinced that it was more than a dream. He is pushed to the brink of madness until he tells his brother-in-law (Edward G. Robinson), who at first rejects it all as fanciful imagination and then comes to believe that Stan is a killer who has invented the dream story to mitigate his guilt. In a creepy house in the Louisiana Bayou the truth will be revealed.
Jazz singer Connie Russel plays Stan's girl, Gina, and she has a couple of good performances backed by Billy May and his Orchestra. The nightclub scenes are really well shot, though there is the subtle suggestion that black music is dangerous, subversive, and best avoided. There are some femme fatale tropes that seem to go nowhere in terms of the narrative, but overall this is a fairly solid late-noir outing for fans of the genre like me. Edward G. Robinson was such a talent he could lift the quality of any film and Nightmare is no exception.