The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, September 21-27
The Night Has Eyes (1942)
Directed by Leslie Arliss
James Mason specialized in playing absolute creeps. The British star born in 1909 was his nation’s most popular screen idol between 1944 and 1947, before he departed for Hollywood. He embodied the psyche of a country damaged by war as a slender, charming young man—often dressed in fine clothes and housed in opulent quarters—with a round head that looked too big for his body and contained a face often riven by tortured thoughts. In this early effort with Arliss (among the filmmakers who would make him a star), Mason plays Stephen Deremid, a celebrated piano composer who lives in his Yorkshire Moors estate with two servants and horrible memories of his recent time spent fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He confesses his bouts of seizures and murderous fantasies to two stranded, lost schoolteachers (played by Joyce Howard and Tucker McGuire) whose friend went missing in the Moors the prior year; one of them falls in love with him and, along the way, discovers that he might know what happened to the vanished woman. Moral codes naturally dictate a degree of false alarm but, long before any happy ending comes into view, Mason’s incarnation of a man struggling against himself threatens to outdo Max de Winter, Rochester, and Bluebeard all at once. Aaron Cutler (September 23, 10pm at the Spectacle’s selection of Mason’s British films)