Strange Illusion, a.k.a. Out of the Night (PRC, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, February 14) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing movie on YouTube that I’d seen before. It’s listed as Strange Illusion but it was also released as Out of the Night (it’s on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWamErNN_LE without hard-coded English subtitles, which Charles and I had to deal with when we watched the film last night on a different YouTube post). I’ve often named it as one of the five best films ever made by PRC, which officially stood for Producers’ Releasing Corporation but which put out so many dreadful, boring films the joke around Hollywood was the initials really meant “Pretty Rotten Crap.” It was directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, Fritz Lang’s former art director, who came to the U.S. in 1930 (three years before the Nazis took over Germany) and got a big chance at Universal directing Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in their first film together, The Black Cat (1934). Alas, he blew his chance by falling in love with his script girl (today the job title is “continuity person” and the job is to make sure that, for example, if an actor was wearing his hat in the long shot he wears it again in his close-up), Shirley Castle, not realizing that Universal Studios production chief Carl Laemmle, Jr. was also interested in her. While Ulmer and Shirley Castle got married and stayed together the rest of his life (her credit can be seen as Shirley Ulmer on almost all his later films), the incident cost him his potential for a major-studio career and relegated him to independent productions (including an anti-syphilis movie from 1933 called Damaged Lives that was produced secretly by Columbia under the studio pseudonym “Weldon Productions”), Yiddish-language films shot in New York, and, after 1942, work for PRC. Ulmer “made his bones” at the Little Studio That Could with a women’s-prison melodrama called Girls in Chains and went on to do Jive Junction, a reworking of the 1940 Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland/Busby Berkeley musical Strike Up the Band, before making the trio of high-quality films on which his reputation rests: Bluebeard (1944), Strange Illusion a.k.a. Out of the Night (1945), and Detour (1946). The other two PRC films on my five all-time best list are Steve Sekely’s Lady in the Death House (1944) and Frank Wisbar’s Strangler of the Swamp (1945) – all made by foreign-born directors.

Strange Illusion was written by Adele Commandini (whose last name in this credit is shorn of one of its “m”’s) based on a supposedly “original” story by Fritz Rotter, though it’s clear that the real source is William Shakespeare’s (and Thomas Kyd’s before him!) Hamlet. (Commandini seems an odd choice to write this film given that her best-known previous credit is for Three Smart Girls, the 1936 Universal musical that made Deanna Durbin a star.) In this film the Hamlet equivalent is Paul Cartwright (James Lydon, who in the 1930’s had been the teenage male lead in Paramount’s Aldrich family films, their attempt to compete with the Hardy family at MGM – so Lydon was basically their Mickey Rooney), a college student majoring in criminology so he can follow in the footsteps of his late father, an attorney turned judge. The elder Cartwright was killed in an accident when his car was run over by a train right after it had an accident with a truck that knocked it onto the path of the train in the first place (illustrated with some very fake-looking model work on an ultra-limited PRC budget). But Paul is convinced that his dad was murdered, especially when he receives a letter from his late father, one of several missives he left with his own lawyers to be sent to his son in case of his death (the equivalent of Hamlet’s ghost in the play). This particular letter warns Paul not to let his mother Virginia (Sally Eilers, who’s quite good) get mixed up with any fortune-hunters, and Paul takes his late dad’s advice to heart when Virginia hooks up with a slimy-looking man named Brett Curtis (Warren William). Paul and his best friend George Hanover (Jimmy Clark), who’s been dating Paul’s sister Dorothy (Jayne Hazard), take an instant dislike to Brett immediately, though Dorothy is enthralled by him and forms a schoolgirl crush on him, telling George that she no longer considers him “sophisticated” enough for her. Paul also has a girlfriend, Lydia (Mary McLeod, who looks so much like Jayne Hazard it’s often hard to tell them apart), who sort of hangs around the back of the action. Midway through the movie Paul decides that “Brett Curtis” is actually the criminal Claude Barrington, who figured prominently in his dad’s files as the crook he was most angry he’d never managed to catch.

Not only is “Curtis” really Barrington, he has an ally in Professor Muhlbach (Charles Arnt), who runs the local mental hospital. When Paul seems to be getting too close to the truth for their comfort, Muhlbach has him committed to his asylum and keeps him there against his will. Meanwhile, Paul has lifted a fingerprint of the mysterious “Brett Curtis” off a glass he used and sent it to the local cops, who in turn submit it to the FBI for analysis and comparison. The authorities have “Brett”’s thumbprint on file because, though he insists that he’s never learned to drive after a childhood accident in which he was a passenger in a car that crashed, we see him get behind the wheel and drive off in a car belonging to one of his previous victims. For years Barrington, like Chaplin’s Henri Verdoux, has been marrying rich women, knocking them off and grabbing their fortunes as seemingly legitimate inheritances. He was also behind the murder of Paul’s father, driving the truck on the fatal night and crashing it into the train tracks. Muhlbach gives Paul a tour of the roof of the asylum and seemingly gets him set up to be pushed off the roof to his death – but another staff member interrupts and Paul discovers an old barn that was once occupied by Barrington a.k.a. “Curtis.” He and his confidant, Dr. Vincent (Regis Toomey, playing a good guy for a change!), explore the barn and find the door of the truck that says, “Acme Trucking Company” (which made both Charles and I chuckle over the usual record of Acme products in the Road Runner cartoons). Dr. Vincent loads the door into the trunk of his car and drives off to present it as evidence to the police, and to my surprise Muhlbach doesn’t try to run Dr. Vincent off the road and force him to crash so the telltale evidence will never reach the cops. Instead they are able to identify “Curtis” as Barrington judging from the thumbprint he had to give when he applied for a California drivers’ license and the blood spatter he left on the truck once he killed the real Brett Curtis to steal his identity.

While the basic story outline is strikingly similar to Hamlet, there are also some differences: Brett is not Paul’s uncle, and contrary to Hamlet’s fabled indecisiveness, Paul is clear from the get-go that he wants to expose Brett as the killer of his dad and make sure he’s sent to jail. Visually, Strange Illusion is an uneven film; there are scenes that are shot and lit plainly (the cinematographer is Philip Tannura) and other scenes that approach film noir. I wish Ulmer or someone in the production crew could have toned down James Lydon’s golly-gee-whillikers affectations as Paul, which get annoying in several scenes even while there are scenes in which Lydon turns in a powerfully restrained acting job and becomes stronger and more moving because of it. And the last time I watched this film I couldn’t help but wince at the sheer banality of Warren William’s exit line as “Curtis,” t/n Barrington, is arrested: “You meddling fool!” Yes, I know we couldn’t have expected Adele Commandini to come up with anything as good as Shakespeare, but still … This time I also found myself wishing that Peter Cookson could have played Paul; the year after Strange Illusion Cookson found himself at Monogram making a quite similar modern-dress updating of a public-domain classic, Fear (based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment), and turned in a much more understated performance. Ironically, Fear also co-starred Warren William, though not as the villain but in a basically sympathetic role as the police officer who’s out to prove Cookson guilty of murdering a university professor who moonlights as a loan shark taking advantage of his students when they’re in financial need. But despite the crude effects work and the flaws in Lydon’s performance, Strange Illusion is a marvelous little movie that showed off Ulmer’s Gothic imagination, especially in the opening scene (repeated at the end more optimistically once Paul, his mother and his girlfriend are out of the clutches of the dastardly Barrington) which anticipates the story and represents Paul’s dream, only it’s more than a dream because much of it comes true in the story we are about to see. It makes no literal sense that Paul would be dreaming of places he’s never seen and people he’s never met before, but it doesn’t matter – and it’s welcome that at least Rotter and Commandini avoided the mistake Fear’s co-writers, Alfred Zeisler (who also directed) and Dennis Cooper, made of having the entire plot turn out to be the central character’s dream!