The third of three films featuring Dana Andrews and musician Hoagy Carmichael, and this time, Andrews, instead of being a frontiersman/entrepreneur or a war veteran bombardier to Carmichael's mandolin and then piano playing, progressively-minded moral conscious... like in CANYON PASSAGE and THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES... Dana's a musician too: a blind pianist and ticked off 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 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 lessons: all the while pretending to be blind. And she's got her own insightful advise-giving friend in Ethel Barrymore.
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 considered a Hallmark Channel conclusion, is actually quite welcomed: 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 Butches" (Hoagy's joint) along with Frederic March and Harold Russell.
