The Night Has Eyes - 1942 film review

The Night Has Eyes is a British film, released in 1942, and not to be confused with Cornell Woolrich's Night Has a Thousand Eyes, which was published three years later and subsequently turned into a good film starring Edward G. Robinson. The British film also had two alternative titles in the US - Terror House and Moonlight Madness. No prizes for guessing which title I prefer.

The Night Has Eyes is based on a thriller by Alan Kennington which was published in 1939. I know very little about Kennington, though apparently in later life he was friendly with the better-known (yet still under-estimated) P. M. Hubbard. The film version of his book is in some respects creaky and melodramatic, as well as fog-shrouded, but it has a number of redeeming features.

One of these is the performance of James Mason as Stephen Dermid, a composer who has suffered severe shell-shock after being wounded while fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Mason manages, not for the only time in his career, to combine the charming with the sinister. A young teacher called Marian (Joyce Howard) falls for him after travelling to the Yorkshire moors with her American chum (Tucker McGuire) to try to discover the fate of her friend Evelyn, who disappeared a year ago.

Stephen is cared for by a housekeeper, Mrs Ranger (Mary Clare, an actress of real ability who played the very different part of Mrs Pym of Scotland Yard) and an odd-job man, Jim. Unfortunately for Marian, it becomes increasingly clear that something terrible happened to Evelyn, and before long she is at risk of suffering a similar fate. Despite the presentation of Yorkshire, a county I love, as a wild blend of fog and bog, and not much else, I found the film rather entertaining.

Mrs Pym of Scotland Yard - film review

I never met the late Nigel Morland, but I was in touch with him briefly prior to his death in 1986. He edited a magazine called Current Crime, which coincidentally is discussed in the latest issue of CADS. I was keen to lay my hands on copies, but although he supplied some to me, he was clearly struggling to cope with things at that point, when he must have been about 80. But he had a long and rather interesting career in crime fiction.

His real name, it seems, was Carl Van Biene, and after a spell in journalism as a teenager, he worked for a short time as Edgar Wallace's secretary. in his debut novel, The Phantom Gunman, published when he was 30, he introduced Mrs Palymyra Pym. Although he wrote under a host of pen-names, and produced a long list of books over the next four decades, Mrs Pym remained his best-known character. In 1953, he became a founder member of the CWA.

Mrs Pym made it into the movies in 1939, when Morland wrote the screenplay for Mrs Pym of Scotland Yard. This film was thought for a long time to have been lost, but it resurfaced a while ago, and I've now caught up with it on Talking Pictures. And I'm glad I did. It's decent entertainment for its period, and there's a lot of pleasure to be taken in the chauvinistic reaction of the male establishment to the arrival in a murder investigation of a female cop, Mrs Pym. What would Cressida Dick make of it, I wonder?

The story concerns the mysterious deaths of two women, who just happen to have bequeathed substantial sums to a psychical research society. A young newspaper reporter (Nigel Patrick) is sceptical about the psychics, and Mrs Pym (played with gusto by Mary Clare) suspects dark deeds. The mystery is nicely done, and I enjoyed watching it. I'm not suggesting that Morland was a great writer - I suspect he was essentially a journeyman, but there's no shame whatever in that. I get the impression of a hard-working professional who came up with a very good idea, a detective character who really was ahead of her time.  ,