"You forget who you are, or where you belong," says one character, when asked to define amnesia in Somewhere in the Night (1946). Now out on DVD in the Fox Film Noir line, this very good movie indeed conveys a paranoid sense of being lost in the world. It's in the dialogue, in the plot, and in the visual look, especially in the knockout opening minutes. John Hodiak stars as a WWII soldier who wakes up in a field hospital with amnesia. He cannot even remember his name, and he is unable to speak because his jaw is wired shut from injury. Through voiceover, we hear his thoughts as he struggles mentally to remember anything about himself. Medics and nurses call him "George Taylor." Eventually he discovers a letter in his pocket which clues him into thinking he must have been something of a scoundrel in his civilian life. He vows not to become the person he used to be and intends to start over without telling anyone of his condition. But as he is healed and then rejoins Los Angeles civilian life, other pieces of his identity start to surface and he gets drawn into a complicated scheme involving a past murder, some lost money, and a wealth of shady people - not to mention, of course, a beautiful dame played by young Nancy Guild.

Probably the least convincing aspect of this intriguing yet convoluted - and at a certain point incomprehensible - plot is Taylor's decision not to tell anyone that he has amnesia. You basically have to just accept this and move on. The complexity of the rest of the movie works because the movie has already done such a good job of making us share Taylor's confusion. To make us feel further confused by the story itself, after all, does mirror Taylor's state of mind. That said, director Joseph L. Mankiewicz never really re-captures the initial cinematic thrill of Taylor's daze. When he's lying in the hospital bed, Mankiewicz uses close-ups of his eyes, striking POV shots and vivid voiceover to immerse us completely inside Taylor. This type of powerful subjectivity gets lost along the way.

It's not too surprising, really, for Mankiewicz was never especially known as a visual stylist. His movies generally work due to excellent performances and scripts, especially dialogue. After a writing career that began in 1929, Somewhere in the Nigh was his first full feature as a director. (He had previously completed directing Dragonwyck, 1946, when original director Ernst Lubitsch fell ill during production.)

The resources of Twentieth Century Fox helped the novice director considerably. The great supporting cast, for instance, includes Richard Conte, Lloyd Nolan, Henry Morgan, Sheldon Leonard, Fritz Kortner, Jeff Corey, Whit Bissell and Josephine Hutchinson, who steals the show in her one poignant scene. Co-star Nancy Guild was a newcomer, billed by the Fox publicity machine as "Nancy Guild rhymes with wild." (She never became a major actress, however.) Also helping considerably was twice Oscar®-nominated cinematographer Norbert Brodine, whose crisp black-and-white images capture the quintessential noir look. Mankiewicz's dexterity with actors and Brodine's talent with lighting and angles create some wonderful moments of dread. Watch, for example, the scene where Hodiak enters a nightclub early in the movie and asks the bartender about a man he's looking for. The bustling, safe space suddenly becomes dark, menacing, and sinister - the kind of tonal shift which is pure film noir.

Somewhere in the Night captures a sense of post-WWII anxiety. Upon returning from the war, Taylor clearly feels alienated and displaced, with little idea of his direction in society. As in many other noirs, this is a reflection of a real social condition - it's just stylized with things like amnesia, with murder and mayhem thrown in. The dialogue also is full of allusions to these issues, with lines like "Do you know what it's like to be alone in the world?" and "I don't have to be afraid of the world anymore" running through the entire picture.

Typical of the Fox Film Noir series, Somewhere in the Night looks and sounds wonderful. The commentary track by noir historian Eddie Muller is overall worthwhile, and Muller has some good insights into the noir style, saying, for example, "In film noir, the good women work for a living and the bad women want something for nothing." Hard to argue with that observation.

For more information about Somewhere in the Night, visit Fox Home Entertainment. To order Somewhere in the Night, go to TCM Shopping.

by Jeremy Arnold