If it’s a really good Edward G Robinson performance you’re looking for, can I suggest Night Has a Thousand Eyes, a knotty little potboiler elevated by Robinson. Out of gangster mode he was a versatile actor who could bring home the goods in all sorts of roles. Here he’s a stage magician who gets spooked when the phoney predictions he offers audiences start coming true. So spooked that he gives it all up and flees, away from the woman he loves – a premonition has told him she’ll die if he stays – and away from the best friend who will become stinking rich by investing in oil, another fulfilment of John Triton’s predictions.
The story is told in flashback, through the eyes of Jean (Gail Russell), the daughter Triton should have had with his true love Jenny (Virginia Bruce). Instead, Jenny had the child with Whitney Courtland (Jerome Cowan), Johnny’s pianist, who made a move on Jenny after Johnny disappeared, emboldened by his oil riches.
Knowledge is a curse is the vague idea. Or maybe passivity is the curse. Should we be knocked about by fate or stand up to it? Johnny’s reaction was to run and hide. As we meet Jean she is trying to throw herself off a bridge into the path of an oncoming train. But she’s rescued by Elliott Carson (John Lund), who listens to her rationale for what she was about to do – she’s being watched, she says, by a thousand eyes – and decides to get the police involved.
How? What? It doesn’t quite add up, and it’s hard to imagine the cops being overly impressed by a spooky story from a would-be suicide. But Elliott persists and eventually gets Special Prosecutor Melville Weston (Roman Bohnen) involved.
A white knight at first, Elliott turns out to be the villain of this piece – far too rational and closed off to alternative explanations. But his persistence with Weston does at least give us several glimpses of the workings of a special prosecutor’s office, which seems to be staffed entirely by hot young women.
Not sure what that’s about but maybe director John Farrow – a notorious womaniser – was just lining up some options for himself.
Back to the movie, which is the sort of little story that would make an episode of paranormal TV show The Twilight Zone not too many years later. Robinson really sells it, playing a man who is shaken to his marrow and haunted by what he sees. William Demarest is also better than he might be as the cop on the case. Gail Russell, a beauty whose terrible performer’s nerves drove her to drink and an early grave, plays Jean. She is badly directed by Farrow, who too often just leaves her (and Lund, while we’re about it) flapping about.
So, a bit of this and a bit of that. Film noir in looks, spooky proto-horror movie in plot, it’s enjoyable, entertaining and notable for being a tale of the supernatural that doesn’t indulge in any special effects trickery at all. The odd woo-eee-ooo from a theremin when Johnny is having his premonitions is all we get.
But is it an A movie or B movie? In terms of running time, at 81 minutes it sits between the two. Being a Paramount production with Robinson in the lead suggests A. Maybe Farrow could have been encouraged to spin the wheels and add another ten minutes, but whatever else he was, Farrow was a director who didn’t hang about. This movie has pace and packs a lot of plot into its running time. Ten minutes longer would have been ten minutes worse. B+ is what’s it’s often described as. A good B+ all round, I’d say.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
