Somewhere in the Night
Directed by Joseph L. MankiewiczGeorge W. Taylor (John Hodiak) returns from the Pacific theater with no memory of who he was before the war. Among his few possessions is a letter addressed to himself, mentioning a man named Larry Cravat and a sum of money large enough to kill for. With nothing but a name and a city – Los Angeles – Taylor begins working backward through his own obliterated identity, moving through nightclubs, back rooms, and the margins of postwar urban life in search of a self that may not be worth recovering.
His search draws him into the orbit of Christy Smith (Nancy Guild), a nightclub singer whose involvement with the missing Cravat runs deeper than she admits, and Police Lt. Donald Kendall (Lloyd Nolan), a detective who has been tracking Cravat through channels of his own. The criminal world Taylor navigates is populated by figures who know more than they reveal: the sinister Anzelmo (Fritz Kortner), operating under the alias Dr. Oracle, and the cold-blooded Mel Phillips (Richard Conte), who treats human life as a ledger entry. Each new contact tightens the net around Taylor, who cannot be certain whether he is the hunter or the quarry.
Somewhere in the Night belongs to a cycle of postwar amnesia thrillers – films preoccupied with the returning veteran as a figure of radical displacement, a man for whom civilian identity has become as foreign as enemy territory. Mankiewicz uses the amnesiac premise not merely as a plot mechanism but as a moral condition: Taylor's inability to vouch for his own past raises the possibility that the man he is looking for may be someone he would not choose to be.
