Somewhere in the Night (film)
Somewhere in the Night is a 1946 American film noir psychological thriller film directed and co-written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starring John Hodiak and Nancy Guild. Plot. The film tells the tale of a man called George Taylor, who returns home to the U.S. from fighting in World War II. He is suffering from amnesia, having been badly injured by a grenade. He tries to find his old identity, following a trail left behind by the mysterious Mr. Larry Cravat. He ends up stumbling into a murder mystery involving Nazi loot. Production notes . 20th Century Fox purchased Marvin Borowsky's original, unpublished story "The Lonely Journey" and his accompanying screenplay in December 1944 for $11,000. "Somewhere in the Night" was Nancy Guild's first film. Production Dates: 21 Nov 1945–24 Jan 1946. A radio version of the film, starring John Hodiak and Lynn Bari, was broadcast on "Lux Radio Theatre" on March 3, 1947. Reception. When the film was first released, film critic Bosley Crowther gave the film a negative review, writing "Lloyd Nolan, Richard Conte, Josephine Hutchinson and several others are competent as varied pawns. Their performances are interesting; it's  only too bad that they have such turbid and inconclusive things to do. After a while, the mad confusion of the story inspires a complete apathy." More recently, film critic Dennis Schwartz praised the film, writing, "A dark moody noir tale about a marine who gets blown up by a grenade in the South Pacific during a skirmish in WW-II and survives, only to become an amnesia victim...Mankiewicz does a nice job of creating the dark noir mood. The film is spiced up with comedy, excellent performances, plenty of suspense, plus a tense voice-over by John Ireland , and it manages to keep the pot boiling with a quintessential amnesiac story."