Movie: My Brain was Handcuffed

Fear in the Night

1947 / 73 minutes

Tagline: Last night I dreamed I KILLED a man!...I DIDN'T WANT TO DO IT, BUT...MY BRAIN WAS HANDCUFFED!

The screenwriter based this early noir movie on a short story by William Irish, the pen-name of Cornell Woolrich, of Rear Window and The Bride Wore Black fame. Woolrich had a knack for writing strange, scary crime stories set in a world of cruelty, revenge, greed, and violence.

So, a young DeForrest Kelly (Bones on Star Trek 20 years later) has a bad dream in which he kills a guy with an awl. The next morning, he freaks out when he notices thumb marks on his throat, blood on his wrist and in his pocket a key that he doesn’t recognize. He takes his story and evidence to his homicide detective brother-in-law, played by Paul Kelly. The down-to-earth in-law snarls and scoffs and warns him not to tell goofy stories and upset his pregnant sister.

However, as events unfold, we find the nightmare comes true. I’ve not read much Woolrich, but my impression is that Woolrich has knack for making the outlandish all too plausible in his fiction. Recall the scene in Rear Window when Jeff (James Stewart) persuades Lisa (Grace Kelly) that Thorwald (Raymond Burr) has probably knocked off his wife. Once Lisa opens her mind, the possibility that what happens only to other people is happening right across the courtyard grows into a frightening probability. This movie has a plot device that requires us to suspend much belief, but once we do, it makes sense. Kinda sorta.

For me, in noir, the voice-overs rarely satisfy, but I like the lack of polish that comes with the territory in B movies. Produced on a very low-budget, the movie has a technical crudeness that hard-core fans of early noir – like me -- will savor.

In his first movie role, Kelly is just okay, somewhat histrionic. This is probably just confirmation bias on my part, but I thought it odd how his Bones McCoy persona already seems in place. That is, his character is smart, warm, compassionate but impressionable and tightly strung. Easy to influence, his character finds himself, like a typical noir character, doing things totally against his own best interests, for reasons he can’t understand himself, much less control.

The older and more experienced actor Paul Kelly was much more impressive. The scene of him reading Bones the riot act has a lot of power; his character’s latent angry aggression bursts out in a genuinely menacing way. Born in 1911 in Brooklyn, Kelly was a movie actor from the age of 11, a silent-era child-star even before Jackie Coogan. In the late Twenties, he did two years and a month in Q on a manslaughter conviction; Kelly, six-foot and a light heavyweight, “put [another actor] in a headlock and bashed him in the face six or seven times” so the victim later died of a brain hemorrhage. The year after he made this movie he won a Tony Award for Best Actor in Command Decision. 

I’d recommend this one only to serious fans of noir or people who still get that kiddish thrill out of watching shoddy old movies on a black and white TV.