So Dark the Night (1946)

Warning: even though I’m not explicitly going to spoil the ending, I’ll have to imply things!

Brilliant Parisian police detective Henri Cassin (Steven Geray, who was from Hungary in real life) has finally been talked into going on vacation, after apparently eleven years without one. Which might explain a lot of what happens during the course of the movie.

Cassin’s friends in the police have arranged a stay in a picturesque country inn, where the policeman should find all the peace and quiet his usually intense lifestyle doesn’t allow him. As it turns ou, the inn and the surrounding countryside are a pretty place indeed. Even better, the much much younger innkeeper’s daughter Nanette (Micheline Cheirel), does seem to be rather interested in our protagonist; though if it is actually him as a person or the idea of PARIS(!!!!) she’s clearly none to sure herself. Things do develop in the direction of an actual love affair, though there are problems, and not just that Nanette’s father isn’t terribly excited about his daughter courting a guy his own age. There’s also the little fact that Nanette is engaged to her childhood sweetheart Leon (Paul Marion), a local farmer. Though she says their love has always been a childish thing, she’s clearly wavering.

Eventually, the at first sceptical Cassin – who well understands about differences of age and culture but also can’t really resist a pretty young thing throwing herself at him for the first time in a life full of work and nothing beyond – and Nanette make up their minds to get serious and marry. But before that can happen, Nanette and Leon disappear, only for the girl’s body to be found strangled some time later.

Obviously, Cassin investigates the case himself, but the solution ever eludes him, as obsessively as he may work himself.

While the solution to Joseph H. Lewis’s noirish mystery and proto-psychological thriller may be a bit Freudian and implausible for today’s tastes, its actual execution as a movie is flawless. In a rather ironic development, given the film’s pretend-Frenchness, its tone and style somewhat prefigure what would become the French manner of the latter genre, particularly in pacing and tone.

I found myself rather convinced of the film’s moments of Freudian implausibility by Lewis’s – and his DP Burnett Guffey’s – staging of details large and tiny, an ability to suggest much of the film’s psychological structure via camera angles, the positioning of characters in physical spaces, and the succession of natural light and shadows.

In fact, prefiguring the sunlit noirs of the 50s, quite a bit of So Dark takes place by daylight in actual exteriors. Most of those later films don’t make use of movements from the real outside into interiors, artificial light and expressive shadows like Lewis does here, though. It is an approach that is all too fitting for a movie that’s very much about the gap between the rational mind and our desires, and a man’s inability to bridge this gap ending badly for others as well as him.

Very typical of the part of Lewis’s humungous output I’ve seen, there’s a great flow and sense of movement to nearly every scene, never letting the director’s obvious love for the meaningful and composed shot drift into the realm of the static.

This combines well with the already mentioned sense for the importance of little details, be it in the way the camera is angled upwards or downwards in dialogue scenes, or in the shifting of an actor’s shoulders.

That the solution to the mystery plaguing Cassin makes more sense on a metaphorical level than one of actual human psychology matters very little in a film shot as artfully as this one; Freud read as the stories a man told himself about the world does after all make for pretty great fiction, too.