Micitype Pretty Good

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

blanche-2 Someone missed the boat here, but I'm not sure where it all went wrong. Ronald Reagan, Viveca Lindfors, Broderick Crawford, Rosemary DeCamp and Osa Massen star in "Night Unto Night," a 1949 psychological drama directed by Don Siegel.The story concerns a scientist, John Galen (Reagan) who rents a house in South Florida owned by a widow, Ann (Lindfors) who believes she hears her husband's voice. She continues to mourn her husband and can't embrace life; Galen has been told he has epilepsy and has taken the house to work and try to deal with his situation.Filmed mostly on sets, despite the beautiful cinematography, a lot of scenes look fake. The photography does give the film a brooding atmosphere.There are some interesting metaphysical, "today" ideas tossed around in the script, but the dialogue is pretentious, not at all like normal people speak. Also, epilepsy here seems to be treated as almost a death sentence or at least a communicable disease. Perhaps back in 1949 that's how it was viewed.Reagan, a pleasant actor, didn't have a great range and was much better in comedy. He seems miscast here, and the role didn't play to his main assets, which were charm and a genial presence.Viveca Lindfors was brought over from Sweden as the next Ingrid Bergman; it came as a surprise when husband Don Siegel made a name for himself when he directed "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" when she was supposed to be the star. Despite being beautiful and a wonderful actress, she never made it to the top tier. The actresses who were part of the foreign influx post-war: Alida Valli, Valentina Cortese, Maria Schell, Hildegarde Knef, Mai Zetterling -- all met similar fates. Of all of them, Lindfors was the only one who stayed in America and worked, in film, television, and on the stage - until her death in 1995.A bizarre film, with spirited performances by Lillian Yarbo, Rosemary DeCamp, Osa Massen, and Broderick Crawford.

sol ***SPOILERS*** Extremely deep and heavy stuff directed by Don Siegel who's known for his shoot em up police flicks like "Madigan" and "Dirty Harry". It's here where Siegel directs the kind of movie that you would have expected the famed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman to do.The films title "Night Unto Night" even sounds like an Ingmar Bergman movie but that's where the similarities, between Siegel and Bergman, ends. In the movie Bio-Chemist John Galen, Ronald Reagan, is looking for a place to stay, on the Florida East Coast, to conduct his experiments on bacteriological agents to improve the healing powers of penicillin. Staying at Ann Gracy's, Viceca Linfors, almost empty mansion John soon comes to realize that Ann is a bit off center in her insisting that she communicates, verbally, with her dead husband Bill. John being a man of science knows that the dead can't communicate with anyone but keeps that fact from Ann in order not to ether embarrass or hurt her feelings. It's when John comes in contact with C.L Shawn, Broderick Crawford, an artist as well as deep thinker whom he considerer's to be in full control of his mental faculties that his opinion about Ann starts to change. Shawn sees nothing strange at all in the existence of ghosts and unfamiliar spirits that John feels is nothing but pure unadulterated BS!Ann soon falls in love with John, a life long bachelor, but he doesn't seem that interested in her because it, having an affair with Ann, will interfere with his scientific research. It's then that the cat is let out of the bag in John's very strange and bizarre behavior. It soon comes out that John is suffering from a severe case of epilepsy and is trying, in the Florida sunshine, live with the disease. John's epilepsy according to the doctors treating it-Dr. Pool(Art Baker) from his hometown of Chicago and Dr. Altheim (Erskine Sanford) from here in Florida-is getting worse by the day and will eventually render him useless as a man of science or anything else!It's later when Ann gets the news, from Shawn, about John's condition that she does everything to get him to overcome the stigma, back then in the 1940's, of being an hopeless epileptic. It's when Ann's jealous sister Lisa, Osa Massen, who's also crazy about John, and whom John earlier rejected, insults and humiliates John, in front of Ann among others, about his condition that he tried to keep secret that he went into, what seemed like, an epileptic seizure. Hurt and ashamed about being exposed, as an epileptic, John goes into his room planing to end it all by blowing, with a .45 caliber revolver, his brains out.***SPOILER ALERT*** As it turned out it was Ann who came to Johns aid and, by threatening to kill herself, kept him from committing suicide. John looked at things, like the scientist that he was, as being either black or white without any grays in between. It was both Ann as well as Shawn who believed in things beyond science, like life surviving death, that made John see the light that always eluded him. It also made John realize that even though his illness, epilepsy, was not curable faith in a higher power as well as the whole hearted support of those who love him will do a lot more for him then all of medical science put together.

dcole-2 The story is kind of a muddle and doesn't always make sense: Both Ronald Reagan and Viveca Lindfors are damaged, brooding people. She's obsessed with her dead husband. He has epilepsy and thinks his life will end soon. But they fall in love -- and somehow must overcome their personal problems to find happiness. Her 'turn' to the good side really is contrived, with no reason behind it. His is almost as bad. Plus Reagan is totally miscast and comes across as about as emotional as a block of driftwood. Lindfors, Osa Massen and Broderick Crawford all try hard. But the man who tries the hardest is director Don Siegel. He dismisses this movie in his autobiography (though he later romanced leading lady Lindfors) but he works his butt off on it with constantly interesting camera moves and shot compositions -- some amazing dolly-work and beautiful black-and-white cinematography. So I'm giving this high marks because Siegel makes it seem so much better than it actually is. And that's the mark of a first-rate director.

bmacv A curious, brooding drama with metaphysical airs, Night Unto Night holds interest by its very oddity (and to some extent as an early directorial effort by Don Siegel). It's set in pre-boom, primitive Florida near the Everglades and takes its redemptive close during a purging hurricane, along the way touching on transcendent themes - though it seems to confuse spirituality with spiritualism. These are its dramatis personae:. Ronald Reagan plays a biochemist (!) come to coastal Florida seeking a simple, reclusive life; he's been diagnosed with epilepsy and, man of science or not, he views his condition as a mysterious and terrible curse. So he rents a gloomy old pile of a house from a young widow where he sets up a laboratory to fiddle with his molds and spores. He's a disturbed, perhaps suicidal man, but, Kings Row notwithstanding, Reagan is an actor who leaves the impression of never having been troubled a day in his life. . Viveca Lindfors is the widow, who must vacate the house because in it she keeps hearing the voice of her dead husband, whose boat was torpedoed just offshore. Lindfors was imported to Hollywood in an attempt to recreate the mystique of Ingrid Bergman, whom she resembled in voice and visage, but the imposture never quite worked. Still, she's as good here as she ever was and gives a glimpse into the thinking that brought her from Sweden.. Broderick Crawford is a friend and neighbor. In a drastic stretch, he plays a painter who earns his living doing commercial art but saves his talent for vast murals in what looks like the Socialist-realism school. Nonetheless, he serves as the spokesman for faith, which he carries like a chip on his shoulder, waylaying the scientists and psychiatrists he meets with harangues about their puny rationalism.. Osa Mussen, though a Dane not a Swede, plays Lindfors' twisted sister, a spiteful hedonist who throws herself at Reagan and does not suffer rebuff kindly. She drinks too much and ignites the volatile gases of the plot's alchemy.The story, from a novel by Philip Wylie (whose 15 minutes of notoriety would come in the mid-1950s with his book Generation of Vipers), has a reach which far exceeds its grasp. While it does hold interest - thanks chiefly to Siegel's shifting but steady pace - it raises questions which it does not bother to (or cannot) resolve. Too many of its strands (the spirit of the dead man, the murderous enmity between the sisters, Crawford's ill-packed intellectual baggage) start to flap in the winds of the concluding hurricane and fly off, never to be seen again. At the end, all that we're left with of the ineffable is plain old guy-meets-gal chemistry.