Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

“night” and “death” obsessively appear in his titles), and its story takes place at night in the
threatening streets of the city. Foster Hirsch also adds that:
The Woolrich world is a maze of wrong impressions as the author sets traps for his
luckless protagonists and then watches as they fall into them. Filled with pitfalls
and sudden violence, the landscape in Woolrich is the kind of place where a single
wrong turn, a mere chance encounter, triggers a chain reaction in which one
calamity follows another. Standing in the wings manipulating the movements of his
players as though they were figures on a chessboard, Woolrich is a master
contriver. His characters, more thinly conceived than those of his more illustrious
hard-boiled predecessors, have no inner life, no history at all apart from their
immediate use to the author as pawns in his clever games. (Hirsch 1981:44)
His Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948) is a psychological thriller with its nightclub
fortune teller teetering on the brink of doom. John Triton (Edward G. Robinson), the
“Mental Wizard”, plays the role of a seer with a gift he never asked for, and which will
precisely feed his feeling of doom throughout the entire movie. Dark obsessions and
ultimately death are the subjects of his vision, and these horrible revelations and future
predictions become a burden too heavy for him to carry. Triton’s dilemma is exemplified
when he tells his best friend’s daughter, “I had become a reverse zombie, the world was
dead and I was living”. The Night Has a Thousand Eyes portrays the noir universe at its
darkest, through the very fine camerawork from John F. Seitz. The night itself is the enemy
and the other noir elements emphasise how Triton’s character is trapped with this curse of
clairvoyance, driving him towards his inevitable end.
64