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An absurdist marvel for its title alone. "An uncanny feeling" throughout, beginning with the good doctor (Bela Lugosi) settling down for an opulent dinner and toasting the vacant chair across the table. A wedding anniversary is the occasion except that the wife has taken off with his friend, the daughter (Polly Ann Young) explains to her beau (John McGuire), butler (Clarence Muse), maid (Terry Walker) and gardener (Ernie Adams) discuss the mystery in the kitchen in a cogent triangular composition. The lost woman on the painted portrait is very much alive (cf. Laura), in the garden shack lives the wife (Betty Compson) racked with amnesia following a car crash, dazedly she wanders the grounds in white robes. Her appearance is enough to slip Lugosi into murderous trances (change in focus, jack-o'-lantern lighting), the maid's death is a bizarre POV shot utilizing only the upper half of the screen (later on a peppy radio program scores the discovery of the corpse). The boyfriend is blamed and promptly executed, though resurrections ("Apparently my brother never told you about me," says the twin) are not uncommon in this irrational Monogram netherworld. The hackneyed through-the-fireplace shot suddenly justified when all the other lights are turned off, the face by the rain-streaked window ahead of Buñuel (Los Olvidados, Susana), all grist for the mill of Joseph H. Lewis. Lugosi adduces an air of Conrad Veidt for the proceedings, the novice filmmaker seizes it for an atmosphere of somnambulist helplessness as pungent as Ulmer's. "I'm dead. I'm afraid to come home." So Dark the Night is an uncredited reconfiguration. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |