What's wrong with this movie? Two words:

Nunnally Johnson.

Johnson was a major Hollywood screenwriter responsible for many excellent screenplays, notably The Grapes of Wrath, and he was also a competent producer at Fox.

But he fell terribly short with Night People -- unsurprisingly as a first-time director, but surprisingly with his screenplay as well.

Personal note: I have long liked this film, but as I've re-watched it over the years its flaws have become more and more evident, and I eventually realized that they all stem from problems with Johnson's script, and especially his direction. When I see it now (as I did again today) it becomes less enjoyable for me, I'm sad to say. My issues:

The screenplay. Annoying is the first word that comes to mind. The incessant -- incessant -- baseball metaphors Johnson insists on inserting into virtually every scene with Peck (and some without him) are distracting, inapt and repetitive. It's clear from his use of slang throughout the film, including the baseball stuff, that Johnson had no clue about how soldiers, or civilians, really talked in 1954. It all feels phony and artificial -- not to mention paralyzingly boring. Add to this Peck's insistence on giving everyone he deals with a nickname using the same, dull, again annoying mode -- adding a "y" to their real name (sometimes shortening the name to do so): Hoffy, Petey, Loddy, Stansy, Burnsy -- he even calls a nurse "nursey". He calls Buddy Ebsen "Eddie" and Casey Adams "Freddie", normally acceptable nicknames, except that everyone else calls them Ed and Fred. God, could Johnson have been any more monotonous and any less imaginative? Night People offers Peck some of the worst dialogue he was ever given in a film -- too obviously scripted, too overdone, too stilted, too everything bad you can name. This movie falls so far below Johnson's usual standards it's amazing anyone thought this was well-written enough to get before the cameras without major revisions. (At least, I hope there were no major revisions -- I'd hate to see the original if there were.)

(Johnson also, as he predictably did in most of his films, insisted on having one of his characters utter what was apparently his favorite exclamation of all -- "Holy Moses!" Johnson had some weird affinity for this tiresome and stupid phrase, since he included it in most of the scripts he wrote. Here, Greg Peck once again gets stuck with this bad piece of dialogue. Check Johnson's screenplay credits -- next time you see one of his films, odds are that expression will surface somewhere. Not in every film by any means, but in most.)

The direction. Nunnally Johnson had never before directed a picture and was desperate to do so. Since Greg Peck had a veto over the director of his films by this time, Johnson asked him if he'd agree to let him helm the film. Always a nice guy, and knowing he'd written the script, Peck said yes. Mistake. Watch how Johnson filmed virtually every scene. His idea of direction was to plant the camera and shoot. There is virtually no camera movement, minimum intercutting, few close-ups -- just long- or medium shots from a camera simply standing there recording the "action". Johnson is as static a director as ever lived. He had absolutely no sense of film as a creative medium. His blocking of actors and objects is basic and, like much of his screenplay, monotonous: one person on this side of the shot, one person on the other side -- period.

The siutation was made even worse by the fact that this was a CinemaScope picture. At this time veteran directors were struggling to learn how to cope with the new widescreen processes, but at least they had knowledge of proper camera techniques and had only to adapt these -- and they also had the wit to explore new ways as well. But Johnson lacked any of this background and worse, demonstrated absolutely no talent, intuition or ability to experiment for the camera at all. His one virtue as a director was that he did usually extract good performances from his actors -- though how much credit he deserved for this is open to question. Later on, Peck, and others who Johnson directed, also made these same criticisms of him, which is why even good films he directed fall far short in that department (e.g., The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Three Faces of Eve, etc.). And when he directed a bad film -- notably his second 1954 effort, the awful Black Widow, featuring a lousy script, terrible performances and his trademark static cinema -- well, watch out. He was, in a word, incompetent. In two words, utterly incompetent. Unfortunately, he was permitted to direct several more films, every one of them poorly, before finally withdrawing exclusively back to screenwriting.

Night People had a lot of potential, and considering the enormous handicap of Nunnally Johnson's ineptness, it's a wonder it turned out as well as it did. But it could have been so very, very much better -- with a different writer (or at least active interference from Darryl Zanuck or someone with the power to blue-pencil the script and order it heavily rewritten), and certainly with an experienced, competent director who knew what he was doing. Henry Hathaway would have done wonders with this movie. Or imagine how good it would have been if Joseph L. Mankiewicz had written and directed it. There were lots of superior choices available. Too bad Night People didn't make use of any of them.