It begins with Kevin McCarthy's nightmare. He murders a man with the help of a terrified woman, in a room full of mirrors, and then falls into a black hole before waking up in a sweat. It really doesn't look too promising. The print on YouTube is flat with high-key lighting, like "I Love Lucy." But at least McCarthy doesn't wake from his nightmare by shoving his face into the camera lens.
Dreams are hard to describe in print and even on film because a fictional narrative has to impose some sort of logic on them. Here, McCarthy must step into a hole in order to fall into it. In real dreams, you just fall. There is no hole and no logic. Falling is statistically frequent in dreams. So are flying and being naked in public, but the most common dream is of being pursued. I'm especially fond of the ones where I'm being chased by some unseen ogre and find myself running in slow motion, as through a swamp of molasses. I speak to you as your psychologist. That will be ten cents.
The literalness doesn't stop with the nightmare. McCarthy gets out of bed to find that he has bruises and blood from his dream fight. "All of a sudden the room started spinning" -- and the room spins and spins and resolves into the bell of a trumpet.
McCarthy's semi hard-boiled narration carries us through an explanation of how he actually came to kill a stranger, which he did. There are a lot of interludes with Billy May and his band. McCarthy is his arranger and clarinetist. May was kept pretty busy on tours and in television during the big band era, in which he was associated with names like Les Brown and Ray Noble. Meade "Lux" Lewis shows up for a cameo, a pianist who more or less began boogie woogie. You can hear him on YouTube.
I've seen the earlier version and wasn't especially impressed by it. I thought it might make a good Alfred Hitchcock hour. Except for its location shooting in New Orleans, this later version doesn't represent a vast improvement. It's not one of Kevin McCarthy's best performances. He's a weakling and a nervous wreck from beginning to end. I suppose, though, that he's as handsome as his sister was talented and sensual, the writer Mary McCarthy ("The Group", etc.). Mary had a way with words. Of Lillian Hellman, she noted that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."
Dreams are hard to describe in print and even on film because a fictional narrative has to impose some sort of logic on them. Here, McCarthy must step into a hole in order to fall into it. In real dreams, you just fall. There is no hole and no logic. Falling is statistically frequent in dreams. So are flying and being naked in public, but the most common dream is of being pursued. I'm especially fond of the ones where I'm being chased by some unseen ogre and find myself running in slow motion, as through a swamp of molasses. I speak to you as your psychologist. That will be ten cents.
The literalness doesn't stop with the nightmare. McCarthy gets out of bed to find that he has bruises and blood from his dream fight. "All of a sudden the room started spinning" -- and the room spins and spins and resolves into the bell of a trumpet.
McCarthy's semi hard-boiled narration carries us through an explanation of how he actually came to kill a stranger, which he did. There are a lot of interludes with Billy May and his band. McCarthy is his arranger and clarinetist. May was kept pretty busy on tours and in television during the big band era, in which he was associated with names like Les Brown and Ray Noble. Meade "Lux" Lewis shows up for a cameo, a pianist who more or less began boogie woogie. You can hear him on YouTube.
I've seen the earlier version and wasn't especially impressed by it. I thought it might make a good Alfred Hitchcock hour. Except for its location shooting in New Orleans, this later version doesn't represent a vast improvement. It's not one of Kevin McCarthy's best performances. He's a weakling and a nervous wreck from beginning to end. I suppose, though, that he's as handsome as his sister was talented and sensual, the writer Mary McCarthy ("The Group", etc.). Mary had a way with words. Of Lillian Hellman, she noted that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."