Look Back in Horror

The Night Walker is a lukewarm bloodbath, but it does afford Veteran Horrorist Barbara Stanwyck a chance to unleash her hysteria as of yore.

As a rich, unstable matron, Barbara finds ample cause for panic. She dreams pleasant dreams about an ardent young man, but wakes to a nightmare life with an insanely jealous husband who has no eyeballs, like Orphan Annie. His blindness encourages him to visualize elaborate hanky-panky between his wife and his attorney, Robert Taylor. When Husband Howard disappears in a fiery explosion, Barbara grows restive. Howard's cane begins tap-tapping around the house at midnight. She moves into the apartment behind a beauty parlor she owns, clearly preferring the mud-packed monstrosities that sit out front all day to the night folk who appear in her back room after hours. First, there is Howard again, hideously scarred. Then her dream lover materializes. He looks more like a floorwalker than a night walker, but he whisks her off to a ghoulish wedding witnessed by store dummies.

Barbara asks Attorney Taylor to help her figure out whether she has been asleep or awake. Of course, nobody could have snoozed through all that screaming, and the mystery is solved in a violent climax that has virtually the whole cast closing in on Barbara with towels, knives, guns and steam hoses. Night Walker's real suspense, and perhaps the bizarre point of the entire show, lies in the tandem casting of Stanwyck and Taylor, in private life one of Hollywood's most celebrated Mr. and Mrs. teams prior to their 1951 divorce. To stage a family reunion in a mediocre horror film may not stagger the general public, but it will assuredly give marriage counselors the creeps.

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