ScoobyMint Disappointment for a huge fan!

Dorathen Better Late Then Never

Bereamic Awesome Movie

SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

BSK This review will not be centered on technical or artistic aspects because others have done so and there´s no need to repeat; it is added to supply the information the film fails to give to round the story.When watching this psychological story with supernatural accents about two human beings meeting and helping each other cope with their mutual ghosts (a recent war widow and a biochemistry scientist diagnosed with epilepsy) it struck me, besides the great athmosphere helped by Franz Waxman´s music, that several facts remain unexplained and are left unsolved : the dead husband´s voice haunting his young widow, her sister´s attitude towards life and Ann, the dramatism assigned to being an epileptic which is here equalled to a death sentence, and what comes after the hurricane at the end. All these questions remain unexplained in the movie.All of them are answered in the novel by Philip Wylie. The book is more centered on the metaphysical consideration of life after death and the supernatural phenomena than the picture. There are several more than Bill´s voice and also happen to Galen himself once, troubling him and, as the intellectual scientist he is, making himself both question and discuss them with Ann, friend artist Shawn (who also recalls a couple of unusual experiences himself) and his Psychiatrist and close friend Dr. Johann Altheim (one wonders why they changed the Swiss doctor´s leading and key role, purely anecdotic in the film, for his American colleague Dr. Poole). It will in fact be the inquisitive and open-minded Psychiatrist who will in the end find the answer about the mystery haunting the Gracey mansion, shortly before the hurricane breaks out. This secret is left out of the plot, taking half of the mystery and motivation off.At one point Altheim tells Galen (approximated) "John, you are an architect. You build new structures in your mind where people want to live. Interesting people come in and interesting things happen". That gives us a clue not only about Galen´s personality but about him taking interest in the metaphysical events. Shawn, by the way, is not only the commercially successful unconventional artist but has a darker artistic side not precisely socialist. Lisa, Ann´s sister (Gail in the novel), is so seductive, hedonistic and selfish because she can´t cope with a trauma from her past, one which is connected to the haunted house mystery. It is quite nonsense watching her in the picture acting as she does and towards Ann without much reason for it. Epilepsy as a fatal illness ? Well, back in the 40s there were limited options for resistant cases. Patients not responding to potassium bromide or barbiturates (phenobarbital = Luminal) had only phenytoin (discovered in 1938) to try until II World War ended. The original story happens during the war, that´s why Ann is recently widowed. SPOILER : We are shown that Galen suffers from partial disconnection crises and finds out that he is allergyc to the drug. He later suffers a serious convulsion on the beach. This means the illness is progressing (END OF SPOILER). What should be added is that he had epileptic relatives that ended in mental hospitals. Also that he was turned down by Dr. Poole when applying for military service. AND that´s why he is scared and has even suicidal thoughts at one point, why he is reluctant to make his mind about Ann, and why he says that "death is not the worst thing that can happen to a man, only the last".Finally - the hurricane. It breaks out at the right point, when the truth is known by all, when Galen must decide if love is stronger than his founded fears, and when the secrets that haunt the mansion are discovered and Lisa´s past unveiled and cleared out. After this climax each character will evolve. But we are not told about this, only partially regarding John and Ann. Why not conclude the story, as the novel does? What we don´t see is how they struggle together to survive both the hurricane and their psychological suffering, and then which choice takes each one of them. The movie ends with the impression they went out of budget and had to conclude somehow, leaving loose ends the script had been good enough to have been building from the beginning. The original story does give a clue for everyone. But no spoilers here are intended about the novel either, only answers to better enjoy this movie, which could have been even better.

wes-connors On the east coast of Florida, epileptic scientist Ronald Reagan (as John Galen) rents a house from attractive, but loony, Viveca Lindfors (as Ann Gracy). The house comes with a maid, Lillian Yarbo (as Josephine), who seems to appear from a different movie. Ms. Lindfors' sexy sister, Osa Massen (as Lisa), visits Mr. Reagan, and he begins to become intrigued by Lindfors' tragic history - she thinks her dead husband "Bill" speaks to her. Broderick Crawford (as Shawn) is a believer. The "house" sets, location, photography, and direction are strengths. Reagan is thoroughly unconvincing, and the story is wastefully insufferable.** Night Unto Night (1949) Don Siegel ~ Ronald Reagan, Viveca Lindfors, Broderick Crawford

sol ***SPOILERS*** Extremely deep and heavy stuff directed by Don Siegel who's known for his shoot em up police flicks like "Madigan" and "Dirty Harry". It's here where Siegel directs the kind of movie that you would have expected the famed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman to do.The films title "Night Unto Night" even sounds like an Ingmar Bergman movie but that's where the similarities, between Siegel and Bergman, ends. In the movie Bio-Chemist John Galen, Ronald Reagan, is looking for a place to stay, on the Florida East Coast, to conduct his experiments on bacteriological agents to improve the healing powers of penicillin. Staying at Ann Gracy's, Viceca Linfors, almost empty mansion John soon comes to realize that Ann is a bit off center in her insisting that she communicates, verbally, with her dead husband Bill. John being a man of science knows that the dead can't communicate with anyone but keeps that fact from Ann in order not to ether embarrass or hurt her feelings. It's when John comes in contact with C.L Shawn, Broderick Crawford, an artist as well as deep thinker whom he considerer's to be in full control of his mental faculties that his opinion about Ann starts to change. Shawn sees nothing strange at all in the existence of ghosts and unfamiliar spirits that John feels is nothing but pure unadulterated BS!Ann soon falls in love with John, a life long bachelor, but he doesn't seem that interested in her because it, having an affair with Ann, will interfere with his scientific research. It's then that the cat is let out of the bag in John's very strange and bizarre behavior. It soon comes out that John is suffering from a severe case of epilepsy and is trying, in the Florida sunshine, live with the disease. John's epilepsy according to the doctors treating it-Dr. Pool(Art Baker) from his hometown of Chicago and Dr. Altheim (Erskine Sanford) from here in Florida-is getting worse by the day and will eventually render him useless as a man of science or anything else!It's later when Ann gets the news, from Shawn, about John's condition that she does everything to get him to overcome the stigma, back then in the 1940's, of being an hopeless epileptic. It's when Ann's jealous sister Lisa, Osa Massen, who's also crazy about John, and whom John earlier rejected, insults and humiliates John, in front of Ann among others, about his condition that he tried to keep secret that he went into, what seemed like, an epileptic seizure. Hurt and ashamed about being exposed, as an epileptic, John goes into his room planing to end it all by blowing, with a .45 caliber revolver, his brains out.***SPOILER ALERT*** As it turned out it was Ann who came to Johns aid and, by threatening to kill herself, kept him from committing suicide. John looked at things, like the scientist that he was, as being either black or white without any grays in between. It was both Ann as well as Shawn who believed in things beyond science, like life surviving death, that made John see the light that always eluded him. It also made John realize that even though his illness, epilepsy, was not curable faith in a higher power as well as the whole hearted support of those who love him will do a lot more for him then all of medical science put together.

bmacv A curious, brooding drama with metaphysical airs, Night Unto Night holds interest by its very oddity (and to some extent as an early directorial effort by Don Siegel). It's set in pre-boom, primitive Florida near the Everglades and takes its redemptive close during a purging hurricane, along the way touching on transcendent themes - though it seems to confuse spirituality with spiritualism. These are its dramatis personae:. Ronald Reagan plays a biochemist (!) come to coastal Florida seeking a simple, reclusive life; he's been diagnosed with epilepsy and, man of science or not, he views his condition as a mysterious and terrible curse. So he rents a gloomy old pile of a house from a young widow where he sets up a laboratory to fiddle with his molds and spores. He's a disturbed, perhaps suicidal man, but, Kings Row notwithstanding, Reagan is an actor who leaves the impression of never having been troubled a day in his life. . Viveca Lindfors is the widow, who must vacate the house because in it she keeps hearing the voice of her dead husband, whose boat was torpedoed just offshore. Lindfors was imported to Hollywood in an attempt to recreate the mystique of Ingrid Bergman, whom she resembled in voice and visage, but the imposture never quite worked. Still, she's as good here as she ever was and gives a glimpse into the thinking that brought her from Sweden.. Broderick Crawford is a friend and neighbor. In a drastic stretch, he plays a painter who earns his living doing commercial art but saves his talent for vast murals in what looks like the Socialist-realism school. Nonetheless, he serves as the spokesman for faith, which he carries like a chip on his shoulder, waylaying the scientists and psychiatrists he meets with harangues about their puny rationalism.. Osa Mussen, though a Dane not a Swede, plays Lindfors' twisted sister, a spiteful hedonist who throws herself at Reagan and does not suffer rebuff kindly. She drinks too much and ignites the volatile gases of the plot's alchemy.The story, from a novel by Philip Wylie (whose 15 minutes of notoriety would come in the mid-1950s with his book Generation of Vipers), has a reach which far exceeds its grasp. While it does hold interest - thanks chiefly to Siegel's shifting but steady pace - it raises questions which it does not bother to (or cannot) resolve. Too many of its strands (the spirit of the dead man, the murderous enmity between the sisters, Crawford's ill-packed intellectual baggage) start to flap in the winds of the concluding hurricane and fly off, never to be seen again. At the end, all that we're left with of the ineffable is plain old guy-meets-gal chemistry.