WARNING: SPOILERS

The movie poster kind of gives away the goods, doesn’t it? Not that there’s much good in them.

At the outset, Stan (Kevin McCarthy), a big-band clarinetist, is having a nightmare. He’s in a small, mirrored room, where a man is attempting to open a safe with a blowtorch, while a beautiful blonde (Marian Carr), first seen as a floating head, stands nearby. Then the man tries to choke Stan. They go round and round, and the blonde hands the man an icepick, except, oops, she hands it to Stan who sticks it in the other guy. Cue Nelson Riddle-like blare of music. The girl flees, Stan hides the body, steps outside and falls, and falls, and falls…

And wakes up. Whew!

Except! What are these odd bruises around his neck? Why the bloodstains on his sleeve? And where did he get this odd-shaped key?

He calls in sick to work (with Billy May and his Orchestra) and wanders the town. “I had to get out of my room,” he tells us via voiceover. “Out into the sunshine. I had to stay out of the shadows.“

A lot of the movie is this kind of voiceover. It gets old fast. One generation’s arty is the next generation’s eyeroll.

Eventually he goes to see his brother-in-law, Rene (Edward G. Robinson), who’s in the garage working on his boat, but during the day is a New Orleans homicide detective. Whereas earlier Stan was confused about whether the murder was in a dream or not, now he’s certain. “It happened, Rene, it happened!” he insists. Rene tells him to take a vacation. “C’mon, kid,” he says. “Let’s wrap ourselves around some chow.”

So Stan investigates on his own. In his dream, he remembers a slow, melancholy tune, a dirge, but he can’t place it, and goes around town playing it before bandmates and famed New Orleans musicians—such as Meade “Lux” Lewis making a cameo. “Sorry, Stan,” Lewis says. “I guess I lose the $64,000.”

But guess who he spots at Meade’s bar? The blonde! They drink rye, she suggests going back to her place, they neck for two seconds, and then he sees the reflection of their reflection in the mirror—his back, her front—things get wavy, and he begs off, learning nothing.

Days go by. More fretting and frustration. Then Rene shows up with his wife, Stan’s sister (Virginia Christine, who played Mrs. Olson in Folgers commercials for decades), and Stan’s songstress girlfriend Gina (Connie Russell), for a picnic in the country. Stan relents, then suggests Bayou Lafourche, but doesn’t know why; and when a thunderstorm sends them scattering, Stan tells them where to drive: over this bridge and toward that mansion. It’s like he’s been there before! Nobody’s home, but Stan finds the spare key ... in the flower pot! Then they go in and make themselves at home—as one does.

For some reaason, Rene now believes Stan really did murder someone. “You didn’t have the guts to say, ‘Look, Rene, I went to such-and-such a place and killed a guy!’” he shouts. “You had to cook up a dream!” As they argue in the kitchen, guess who walks in? Deputy Torrence (Rhys Williams), who’s been watching the place, the Belknap mansion, because, yes, a double homicide was committed there. The more they look into it, the more all signs point to Stan. And when Rene drops him back at his place, this is his parting advice: “Run out. I’m giving you that one last chance. When they catch up with you, I want you to meet your finish somewhere else, not here.” Geez, thanks, bro-in-law.

After a suicide attempt that Rene foils, Rene finally asks the question he should’ve asked back at the garage: “Tell me everything that happened that night.” The key to it all? His kooky neighbor, Britten, at the Hotel New Orleans, who foists cough drops and daiquiris on him, and who that night showed up with a candle to say his lights were out, then retreated, telling Stan over and over: “You’re tired… you’re tired.”

Yes, two-thirds of the way through we finally get to the hypnosis that the movie poster spills at the outset.

Nightmare, I did
Britten, Rene figures out, is actually Mr. Belknap (Gage Clarke), and he hypnotized the notoriously suggestive Stan into … I guess showing up at the Belknap place and standing around until someone tried to choke him? And hopefully the girl would hand him an icepick by mistake? Seriously, what was Belknap’s plan? And who did he want killed—safecracker Bob Clune (Sol Gorss) or his own wife, whom we never see, and who is run over by a car even though Stan can’t drive? Or was the blonde his wife? And the pickup at Meade’s bar was in fact a case of mistaken identity? Which makes you wonder why she couldn’t keep her hands off Stan. Was she a prostitute? No offense, Kevin.

As for the dirge no one recognizes? That’s a familiar tune played at a slower speed. So did Belknap play it at a slower speed to aid with the hypnosis, or did Stan hear it at a slower speed because of his hypnotic state? And if Belknap can hypnotize Stan into, whatever, showing up during a safecracking, why doesn’t he hypnotize him into sticking around at the scene of the crime? Or into writing a confession? Think of the work that went into this idiot plot. He stayed at the hotel for a week, priming Stan, and only got what he wanted because the icepick wound up in the wrong hands. And then he has to run over his wife with a car.

Apparently all that’s not enough to exonerate Stan—who, after all, did kill the safecracker. So Rene works with the local cops to record Belknap 1) confessing to the crime, and 2) hypnotizing Stan again (to show the law that it could be done).

“Nightmare” is based on a novella, “And So to Death,” by Cornell Woolrich, who was the source material for dozens of films, most notably Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” and whose work, someone wrote, tends to be heavy on atmosphere and light on plausibility. Checks out here anyway. The movie was adapted by its director, Maxwell Shane, who did five noir features in 10 years: “Fear in the Night,” “City Across the River,” “The Glass Wall,” “The Naked Street,” and this. This was the end of the line.

I like the location shooting around 1950s New Orleans—including a shot of the vertical neon “Hotel New Orleans” sign with the “s” burned out. I also like one bit of dialogue. After Rene’s “Run out” speech, Stan tries to kill himself by jumping out of his 15th floor window. He’s on the ledge, sweating, fretting, and a crowd gathers. Rene sees, and rushes back in. He tells the elevator operator “15th floor!” A few seconds later, we cut back to them.

Rene (frantic): Can’t you go any faster?
Elevator operator (bored): Got it wide open. 

In his memoir, Edward G. Robinson devotes barely a sentence to the film. It was made during the post-HUAC phase of his career, after he’d been accused of disloyalty and made to come hat-in-hand to the likes of Ward Bond so he could keep working. But he’d been relegated to B-pictures, which he did for money and for something to do, hating himself all the while. “Hell on Frisco Bay I did, and it was hell in Beverly Hills,” he writes. “Nightmare, I did, and it was nightmare all around me.”

The car ride to Bayou Lafourche looks like a scene from a failed '50 TV sitcom, “Brother-in-Law Knows Best,” about a New Orleans detective, his coffee-loving wife, her grumpy, twitchy brother, and his big-band-singing girlfriend. Tonight's episode: “Sunday Picnic”!