I'm not a fanatic about black and white movies, and I like color just fine. However, I couldn't help but think this film would have had a bit more of an edge, and matched its dark themes, if it had been filmed in black and white. Some of the scenes had a feel of looking at someone's old Kodachrome slides. Still, it was a good movie.
shareNight People was an early CinemaScope film, CinemaScope was intended to be a prestige attraction that differentiated films from television, it did this by increasing screen size, width, but also providing colour and stereo sound. Fox would only license CinemaScope to productions that were going to be shot in colour. They only changed this policy in November 1956 when they released Teenage Rebel and Love Me Tender (Elvis Presley's first film) which were filmed in black and white CinemaScope.
There is one exception to this 'rule', Fox distributed many B-films made by Regal that were black and white CinemaScope, however, they were marketed as RegalScope, not CinemaScope, even though they used exactly the same lenses.
Incidentally, the James Dean film Rebel Without A Cause was going to be in black and white, but Fox insisted that it had to be in colour. So Warner Bros. had to re-shoot a lot of material in colour, that had already been shot in black and white.