Kennington Noir Presents Somewhere In the Night (1946)

Directed by Joe Mankiewicz. A soldier returns from WWII with his memory playing tricks on him. Drifting up out of coma in a military hospital, he can’t figure out why everybody calls him George Taylor. Only two letters offer clues to who he is: one from a vindictive girl he ditched, the other apparently from an old pal, Larry Cravat. Without much to go on, he heads to Los Angeles to track down Cravat. But as he skulks through the city’s dark demimonde (Turkish baths, mobbed-up nightclubs, phony spiritualist parlors, insane asylums), he’s quick to learn that other people don’t want Cravat found. Yet he finds allies in club canary Nancy Guild, her boss Richard Conte, and police detective Lloyd Nolan. Cravat proves both elusive and uncomfortably close… With a supporting programme and a short intro from Kulraj Phullar, who has recently completed a PhD on “good girls” in classic Hollywood film noir at King’s College London.