cult film freak: DANA ANDREWS AND MERLE OBERON CONNECT IN 'NIGHT SONG'

Dana Andrews in NIGHT SONG Year: 1947

The third of three films featuring Dana Andrews with musician Hoagy Carmichael, and this time, Andrews, after playing frontiersman or a war vet to Carmichael's musical moral conscious ala CANYON PASSAGE and THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, Dana's now a musician too: a blind pianist and plenty pissed about it, working for and living with Carmichael's jazz club manager, Chick, who winds up in cahoots with lovely rich girl Merle Oberon...

The best scenes happen early when she first meets Andrews at the nightclub with her stuffy friends in tow (including sassy blonde Jacqueline White ) and he, between jazz sets, is playing a smoky classical composition only she seems to hear, and then pretends to "run into him," first at the beach, and then meeting up for private piano lessons: all the while pretending to be blind. And she's got her own insightful advise-giving friend in scene-stealing Ethel Barrymore, equipped with great lines like "no one detests money like the rich."

Poster For NIGHT SONG Rating: ***1/2

As for Dana Andrews, the performance is realistic enough throughout the first half that the happy-sappy second part, leading to what would now be very Hallmark Channel ending, is actually welcome: Being such a genuinely grouchy, hateful jerk without sight, you'll hope he's cured just to give the poor little rich smitten girl a break...

Who's painted herself into more corners by pretending to be someone else, again: After which NIGHT SONG plays out like a biopic of a famous composer, which it's not: And in one scene, when Dana tells Hoagy's he's a mediocre musician, well... that took some good acting on Dana's part, who, just the year before, was getting "stinking at Butch's" (Hoagy's joint) along with Frederic March and Harold Russell in BEST YEARS.