Eyes in the Night (MGM, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, my husband Charles came home from work in time to join me in watching the second film on TCM’s schedule of works featuring blind leads: Eyes in the Night, a 1942 80-minute programmer (it was strictly verboten, by orders of Louis B. Mayer himself, to call any MGM film a “B”-picture) directed by the young Fred Zinnemann with a script by Guy Trosper and Howard Emmett Rogers based on a novel called The Odor of Violets by Baynard Kendrick. A founder of the Mystery Writers of America, Kendrick had introduced his blind detective character, Duncan Maclain, in a novel called The Last Witness in 1937. (It was filmed by Universal in 1938 as part of their “Clue Club” series, but I don’t recall having seen the movie and so I don’t know whether Universal used the blind detective or not.) Kendrick continued to write Duncan Maclain mysteries until Frankincense and Murder in 1961, 16 years before his death. A lot of the Maclain books were published as newspaper serials before they were actually released as books, including The Odor of Violets, which first saw the light of day in the New York Daily News and other papers nationwide. I’d only read one Duncan Maclain story in a mystery anthology I read in the 1970’s; it was about Maclain deducing the whereabouts of a kidnapped woman from a recording her captors sent her family. By hearing the background noises on the record, including rushing water and a D.J. introducing a record of Bing Crosby singing “Silent Night,” he was able to figure out where she was being held and get the cops to free her and arrest her captors. Like that story, this one has a World War II setting, and the MacGuffin is a secret weapon developed by Stephen Lawry (Reginald Denny) which is so secret even we’re not told what it is. All we learn about it is that it needs to be tested from the air – which Stephen goes off to do in the middle of the action – and when he returns he’s in a good mood, showing that the test was successful.

Stephen, a widower, recently married former actress Norma Lawry (Ann Harding), who tells her old friend Duncan Maclain (Edward Arnold) she’s having problems with Stephen’s daughter by his first wife, Barbara (the young, pre-stardom Donna Reed). The problem is that Barbara has joined the local theatre company and fallen in love with her leading man, Paul Gerente (John Emery, Tallulah Bankhead’s real-life husband), even though not only is Paul twice her age and a no-good rotter to boot, he formerly dated Barbara’s stepmother Norma. Naturally, Norma tries to warn Barbara that he’s just an S.O.B., and equally naturally Barbara says stepmom is just jealous because she has Paul and Norma doesn’t. As a gesture of defiance, Barbara calls Paul and changes their date for that evening from a restaurant to Paul’s apartment, only when she gets there Paul is dead. Norma begs off on going with Stephen for the big test of his invention, and instead goes to Paul’s apartment herself, discovers Barbara with Paul’s body, and Barbara threatens Norma. She’ll go to the police and say Norma killed Paul unless Norma leaves the Lawry house immediately and never comes back. Donna Reed plays these scenes with a sort of steel-eyed determination and a soupçon of nastiness that suggests she could have had an interesting career as a femme fatale in films noir if Frank Capra hadn’t grabbed her and cast her as the nice wife of James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life three years later. It turns out that the director of the local theatre company, Cheli Scott (Katharine Emery), is the head of a ring of Axis spies determined to break into Stephen Lawry’s safe and steal the plans for his secret invention (whatever it is), and she’s planted her people, including butler Victor (Reginald Sheffield) and maid Vera Hoffman (Rosemary DeCamp), on the Lawrys’ household staff.

Vera’s husband Gabriel (Stephen McNally, though billed here by the first name “Horace”), murdered Paul and wrapped his body in a bearskin rug to carry it out of there – when Duncan Maclain shows up to investigate the next day it’s no longer there – but he’s able to arrest Gabriel and turn him over to the police. The gang members congregate at the Lawry place, where despite the bad guys’ planning that no one be at the home except themselves they are inundated with various people, including Maclain, his Archie Goodwin-esque sidekick Marty (Allen Jenkins in full Allen Jenkins mode; the parallels between Duncan Maclain and Nero Wolfe are only more obvious when you remember that Edward Arnold was the first actor to play Wolfe on screen, too) and all three Lawrys, including Stephen, who returns home with the good news that the test of whatever it was succeeded. Only the villains take him and Maclain captive, and Maclain tries to alert the authorities by writing a secret message and pinning it, homing pigeon-style, to his guide dog Friday (“played by himself,” as the credits tell us), not knowing that the crooks have already raided his home and tied up Marty and Maclain’s newly hired Black servant Alistair (Mantan Moreland, outfitted with grey hair and given woefully little to do but a welcome sight nonetheless). Friday has to figure out how to break into the house (though it’s already established that he knows how to open a door with his mouth) and free Marty and Alistair from their bonds, whereupon they get the message to the cops, who duly show up and arrest the still-living bad people (Vera having previously been killed by Victor when she tried to run away in search of her husband Gabriel).

Eyes in the Night was well directed by the young Fred Zinnemann, a refugee from Nazi Germany and before that one of the circle of would-be writers and directors that also included Robert Siodmak and Billy Wilder. He’d got a job at MGM directing shorts, including entries in the Crime Does Not Pay series as well as a dramatization of the life of real-life Dr. Ignaz Semmelweiss called That Mothers May Live (1938) which won an Academy Award. (To my knowledge, Zinnemann is the only director who’s won Oscars for both a short and a feature: From Here to Eternity, 1953.) Though the print of Eyes in the Night shown on TCM was awfully grainy – particularly in a scene in which Zinnemann totally darkens the screen so Duncan Maclain can boast to the two baddies he’s fighting with, “You’re in my world now!” – Zinnemann’s work is creative and vaguely noir-ish even though Eyes in the Night doesn’t have the moral ambiguity to be true film noir. The good guys are all good (despite Barbara’s bitchy tendencies early on as her stepmom tries without immediate success to warn her off her terrible older boyfriend), the bad guys are all bad, and what makes the film work more than anything else are Edward Arnold’s authority (among other things, he’s at least relatively convincing as a blind person) and the occasional flashes of creativity in Zinnemann’s direction. It’s also worth noting that Barry Nelson, cast here as “Busch,” one of the baddies in Cheli’s gang, would later return to the field of international intrigue as the first actor to play James Bond in the 1954 Climax! TV episode “Casino Royale,” with Linda Christian (the second Mrs. Tyrone Power) as the first “Bond Girl” and Peter Lorre as the villain, “Le Chiffre.” (You thought Sean Connery was the first James Bond? Think again!)