Customer Reviews

Night Has Eyes [VHS]

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I'm a big fan of James Mason & here you get to see one of his earliest movies. The plot is pretty simple: two young schoolteachers take a walk after a bad storm & get lost. James Mason finds them & brings them to his house which is somewhat isolated from the rest of civilization! At his house the two women learn that Mason is a composer & a bitter veteran of the Spanish Civil War. The piano playing scenes with Mason aren't convincing at all but the music is great! The women also learn that a friend of theirs who's been missing for months had a relationship with Mason, & from there the tension builds & builds until the ending which has a surprise twist. Is Mason a murderer or a framed man? Watch this movie & find out! While the acting from the other cast members is a little too over-the-top, James Mason is terrific (as usual) & makes this worth watching. This is even more fun on a rainy night!

Two young school teachers decide to visit the Yorkshire moors where, a year earlier, a friend of theirs disappeared. They find an isolated mansion on the edge of a foggy, desolate marsh. In it, James Mason, a pianist recovering from nightmares, is taken care of by a housekeeper and a handyman. Something mysterious is going on, with doors slowly closing and warnings about the marshland.

This is early Mason, but he already has the romantic but driven and possibly violent persona down pat. The movie itself is pretty good but the VHS transfer isn't. The transfer is shaky, a little out of focus and much of the action in the night scenes (and there are a lot of night scenes) gets lost. Still, if you like old, dark houses, stormy nights and James Mason, it's worth the price.

Oh, this is exactly what a spooky, suspense-filled movie should be! Why can't they make movies like this anymore? Everything is perfect in this overly darkly-lit movie. The old house, the actors are great in all their parts, even the monkey deserves an Oscar. Two young school teachers (Mary Clare and Joyce Howard) traverse the Yorkshire Moors looking for the dead body of a friend, foolishly. They are almost swallowed up by the bog in the drenching rain when they find refuge in the castle-ly home of James Mason's character. They learn that he is a war-scarred pianist with a mysterious past and there are two loyal household employees filling out this macabre soup. The home contains a forboding secret room which one of the houseguests must get into. Also there is the strange request that everyone in the household must lock themselves in their rooms at night--especially when there is a full moon. One of the school teachers stays behind in the home when an opportunity comes for a ride back to civilization. She has fallen in love with the pianist and must find out more. She does discover a dead body--but whose? This movie is so dark that I feel it is a disguise for some of the low-budget special effects used. The girls on the moor is probably produced by a giant wind fan in the studio and all of the backgroud scenery, including the first view of the house are probably black cardboard cutouts that are just displayed by occasional flashes of backlighting (lightning). There is also a very fake looking lightning bolt that just appears for a split second on screen--looks like it is hand-drawn with white paint. These "flaws" are entertaining, rather than distracting, as we admire the creativity of the art department. Bravo, for a great movie and James Mason as an actor, especially when he utters the almost evil sounding command to the arriving women, "You'd better get DRY."

I am now 70 - and still remember this film vividly after 56 years.

I was 14 when I saw it (illegally) at a smelly Sunday cinema fleapit in my hometown of Northampton UK (in the 'Temperance Hall' where they never asked whether we were 16, and the only place where we could smoke our lungs to death without worrying).

I remember every moment of that film, the finale in particular, and came out from the cinema terrified - and have been terrified ever since of swampy looking land. Being a frequent visitor to Bangladesh, this has been a handicap!

Seeing this well-made superb thriller again - and I'd love to get a DVD of it - has brought back so many memories.

I thoroughly recommend it.