“The further this unremembering gentleman pursues his mysterious past and confronts odd and brutal characters, the more he—and you—become confused,” wrote the inimitable Bosley Crowther of Somewhere in the Night’s protagonist in his New York Times review. “Apparently he and his associates fit the pieces together in the end, but this writer is still completely baffled.” Crowther wasn’t alone—Mankiewicz’s second film, with the brooding John Hodiak as an amnesiac vet who prowls through L.A. in search of a man named Larry Cravat (and his own identity), might be the most crazily plotted of all films noirs. But nearly 70 years later, it is an atmospheric triumph, a series of evocatively rendered encounters with many richly drawn characters, including Fritz Kortner’s menacing Mr. Anzelmo. “I certainly wouldn’t have gone looking for it,” Mankiewicz later said of Somewhere in the Night, “and it wouldn’t have come looking for me.” Nonetheless, it’s one of the best of his early works.