starring Paul Kelly, DeForest Kelley
directed by Maxwell Shane
72 minutes
Vincent (DeForest Kelley) has a dream that he murdered a man. He wakes up the next day with bruises and a couple pieces of evidence that he recalls from the dream.
Police detective Cliff Herlihy (Paul Kelly), Vincent's brother-in-law, wants to write off the story as a bad dream but then evidence starts to accumulate that indicate that there might be something to his wife's younger brother's story.
Nightmare, the story this movie is based upon, was written by Cornell Woolrich, writing under the pen name William Irish.
DeForest Kelley is best known for playing Doctor McCoy on Star Trek (1966). This is the first time I can recall seeing him in a non-Star Trek movie. His performance in this movie did not blow my socks off but it sometimes made me chuckle, although I doubt that was the intent.
I've seen Paul Kelly in a few other films but I think this is the only one in which he played one of the leads.
This is just one of five films directed by Maxwell Shane but he has over fifty credits as a screenwriter. One of his other four films is a remake of Fear in the Night but with Kevin McCarthy and Edgar G. Robinson playing the leads.
I watched Fear in the Night on Tubi. The quality of the print was far from great. It's desperately in need of restoration but I'm sure that there are hundreds if not thousands of films that deserve to be restored before this one.
This movie was fun and kept my attention for a while but it kind of lost me in the last 20 minutes. The ending reminded me a bit of the ending to A Woman's Face (1941) but the similarities between the two films begins ands there. I was drawn to it because DeForest Kelley is one of the leads, because it is a film noir, and because it is relatively short.
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