Somewhere in the Night (1946)

After throwing himself on a grenade, a soldier (John Hodiak) in World War II suffers from amnesia. He’s probably called George Taylor, or so the facts suggest. He’s not too keen on finding out more about himself, and even hides his condition from the Army, because he has found a letter among his belongings that suggests he might not be the nicest of guys.

Yet when the opportunity arises to be released to his apparently native Los Angeles, he still grasps it. Once there, the shell-shocked George even learns he might have had an actual friend by the name of Larry Cravat. Looking for something, anything to hold onto, George decides to find Larry. What follows is a series of encounters with the night people of LA, various attacks on his life, and even more questions concerning his own former habits and personality. Bar chanteuse Christy Smith (Nancy Guild) appears quite smitten by George, so things aren’t all bad, confusing and traumatic, even though our protagonist’s face has the sweaty Hollywood glow of stress on his face most of the time.

In many regards, Somewhere in the Night is a bit of a best of collection of the tropes later decades decided would make up the character of the noir as a genre. As many a noir, it isn’t an orderly constructed mystery, it hardly even is a laissez faire one, but rather a film that puts its audience very much into the same position as its protagonist has stepped into: utter confusion about his self and the world surrounding him, chasing shadows while encountering characters – all played by brilliant character actors – whose importance to his own questions or his life he can neither grasp nor understand for much of the film’s running time.

This sense of dislocation and confusion isn’t a weakness of writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film, however, but its point. If ever there was a film about existentialist angst and a world that has broken down so much, a person even has to doubt their own identity and character, this one is it. As a portrayal of this, Somewhere in the Night is flawless.

Even George’s encounters with people who will turn out to have very little to do with his problems have a point in this regard, as Somewhere in the Night shows most of these characters to be just as much in the dark about the world, the plot and their roles in it as he is. Even the film’s main villain knows only parts of what is actually going on, and about these, he isn’t exactly right. Confusion and doubt are just the natural state of the film’s world.

All of this gives Somewhere the quality of an anxiety driven dream even before Mankiewicz and DP Norbert Brodine drench much of it in shadows not so much of night but of our ideal of night.

The dialogue wavers between sharp, clever and sarcastic quips and bouts of depression and existentialist doubt – all of which is about as naturalistic as a Shakespeare monologue, and therefore perfectly fitting to the artificial depths of the noir.

Somehow – perhaps because Hodiak looks and feels like a guy who really deserves a break, and Guild projects a genuine kind of  goodness that makes one root for the guy she goes out of her way to protect – I’m not even annoyed about Somewhere in the Night’s happy end, usually  a small irritant in noirs for me. Nightmares do turn into more pleasant dreams from time to time, after all.