Night Without Sleep

I'm thanking my lucky stars that I only had to endure 77 minutes of this dreck-fest. Poor Hildegard Knef wastes an hour and forty minutes of her life waiting for Gary Merrill to make an appearance......and then he has the gall to turn up drunk!

Moody, menacing and mysterious at the outset; Bemused and confused Merrill hasn't a clue whether it's 5 A. M. or P. M. and the speaking clock has no intention of enlightening him on the issue. As Merrill desperately tries to unscramble his brain and fill in the Blankety Blanks from the previous few hours, deeply perturbed by the prospect that something horrific has occurred, there are flashbacks to his unhappy marriage with domineering June Vincent and his life as a writer and musician in the world of theatre.

The movie attempts to go through the gears, with Merrill slowly finding the missing pieces of the jigsaw, his fractious encounter with Knef and a more protracted, romantic one with Linda Darnell, all propelled by a succession of dry martinis (on an empty stomach). As suspense builders go, this is more likely to produce twiddling thumbs than a pounding heart.

By the end it appears that Merrill's ship has sailed. Indeed, the whole film seems to miss the boat.

MERRILL: 'Like Grimm's fairy tales, gruesome and wonderful.' 'Night Without Sleep' is no fairy tale........It's just GRIM!