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Bookmark this pageSomewhere in the Night (1946)
Director: Joseph L Mankiewicz
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Hodiak as a marine blown up at Okinawa who returns to Los Angeles armed only with a name that means nothing to him and a letter from a girl, now dead, who hated him. Out of this familiar premise, Mankiewicz has fashioned a classic film noir account of the amnesiac who suspects he isn't going to like rediscovering the man he once was. His odyssey in quest of himself leads through a long dark night with murder and a missing $2 million dollars at the end of it, peopled along the way by the lost and the lonely, the suave and the sinister (wonderful supporting performances) and taking in a series of suitably clammy settings (waterfront fortune-telling parlour, mission hall, sanatorium for the insane). Mankiewicz's superb control of a complex plot (as both writer and director) takes him into at least one outstanding set piece: an elaborate nightclub sequence in which Hodiak questions a bartender, the latter casually tips off two hoods, a bowl of pretzels is slipped down the bar to identify the target, and just as something is about to explode, the lights dim as the band strikes up a new number...Author: TM
Cast & crew
Director: Joseph L Mankiewicz
Producer: Anderson Lawler
Cast: John Hodiak, Nancy Guild, Lloyd Nolan, Richard Conte, Josephine Hutchinson, Fritz Kortner, Margo Woode, Sheldon Leonard, John Russell, Houseley Stevenson full cast
Genre(s): Film Noir
Duration: 110 mins
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