Night Without Sleep
Directed by Roy Ward BakerRichard Morton, a moderately successful composer living in San Francisco, wakes one morning with no memory of the previous night. When a woman is found murdered, Morton begins to suspect that he may be responsible – a suspicion deepened by fragmentary recollections, an unexplained absence, and the discovery that the victim was known to him. His wife Laura is loyal but frightened; his past, it emerges, is crowded with women he has treated badly.
The investigation draws in two figures from Morton's recent history: Julie Bannon, a nightclub singer with a proprietary claim on his affections, and Lisa Muller, a European émigré whose composed exterior conceals something more volatile. As Morton attempts to reconstruct the missing hours, the loyalties of those around him prove elastic. Dr. Clarke, his analyst, occupies an ambiguous position between confidant and accuser, and the domestic arrangement Morton has built begins to reveal the rot beneath its surface.
Night Without Sleep belongs to the strand of postwar noir organized around male instability rather than criminal conspiracy – films in which the protagonist's psychology is itself the labyrinth. The question of whether Morton is guilty is secondary to the film's interest in what guilt, real or imagined, does to a man already inclined toward self-destruction. The screenplay keeps its mechanics tidy while the performances carry the film's darker freight.
