Il mistero di mezzanotte

Nifty low budget Dark House mystery film to check out here. Like the best of the genre the house & location are the real stars, and the stage play derived nature suits the film well. For whatever reason the spoiled brat inheritor of a family fortune chose to live with his popular mystery writer wife on a windswept rain soaked isolated island. He's something of a jerk and openly resentful of his wife's independently won success. She is apparently too enamored with the security his wealth brings to tell him to go stuff it and find someone else. Whether they actually love each other is besides the point, they have busy social lives and being married to each other is helpful enough for both to put off finding out till later.

He invites a group of friends, associates and jealous enemies who have not revealed themselves yet to yacht out for a weekend of Prohibition-free partying. Bitter rivalries are brought to the surface, the resident life of the party makes a pass at the wrong woman, and someone ends up dead, bobbing lifelessly in the surf below in an eye openingly graphic moment which would never have been allowed during the Production Code era. How the victim came to be there is revealed immediately to the viewer and the rest of the film concerns itself with how long the guilty party can deflect attention from their own troubling behavior.

I liked the jilted husband character, Lowell Sherman (cast in the film's Lionel Atwill role), and it is only when his character breaks mold that the film's tension falls apart into a somewhat predictable conclusion. Atwill would have ridden that surfboard right onto the Sea of Fire. I'm new to the Pre-Code mystique and unfamiliar with Betty Compson, am aware she was a celebrity starlet of the 30s whose acting skills appear suitable for such fare. But her ditzy mystery writer character is not interesting enough to wonder about what books she may have written. She acts the role as a personality and does carry the film well enough until the last two or three minutes, which will do.

I'm a tough audience, have been making a study of as many creaky Old Dark House mystery thrillers as there's time for, and this stood out from the rest as one to sit down and write about in some manner. Deserves to be seen in a restored form; a key second appears to be missing on the print I saw, hope its not lost for good. But for heaven's sake, don't remake it. Works just fine as the period relic that it is and proof that some of those relics are still quite good.

This is a 1930 RKO entry, and according to the records of a reputable Turner Classic Movies historian, it has never been aired on that channel. That is odd, because they should own it, and it was a complete surprise for me.

It is not stage bound as most early sound films were, and it is a most Hitchcockian and even feminist murder drama. I would say mystery, but there isn't one. The audience sees the whole thing from the start. The mystery is will anybody else catch on, and if so, how?

A group of people are having a holiday at wealthy Greg Sloane's (Hugh Trevor) mansion off the coast of Cuba. Mischa, a friend of Greg's, is having an affair with married Madeleine, which is rather dangerous since her husband, Tom (Lowell Sherman) is there also. Sally (Betty Compson) is Greg's fiancee and is also a writer of murder mysteries.

Mischa and Madeleine's indiscretion and the argument between Sally and Greg over him wanting her to stop writing these - what he considers to be silly and undignified - murder mysteries are key to an actual killing that takes place at the estate during the storm. It is all so cleverly done. After you see how the killer is caught, you'll probably have to do what I did and rewind to find the clues yourself.

Most of the players didn't make it past this very early talkie era, but fortunately the most talented of the lot - Betty Compson and Lowell Sherman - have prominent roles. Sherman was shaping up to be a pretty good director too when he died of pneumonia at only age 46.

In a private home on an island off Cuba, Hugh Trevor is holding a house party. As the evening progresses, he quarrels with his fiancee, Betty Compson, over her writing mystery novels. They break off their engagement. Pianist Ivan Lebedeff makes love to Rita La Roy, Sherman Lowell's wife. Later Lebedeff disappears, and Trevor confesses to his murder. After everyone goes to sleep, Lebedeff reappears.

It's a nicely turned how-catch-em story, derived from a show that played less than 30 performances on Broadway; Clark Gable had Trevor's role. That wasn't a particularly successful run, but the demand for movie materials was intense. Plays, novels, short stories were ransacked to provide stories for the hundreds of feature movies produced every year. An unproduced play serve as the basis for CASABLANCA. Smash plays and best-selling novels produced bidding wars, sustaining theater and publishing.

This movie shows its stage origins; the first few minutes, with most of the guests in one room and Lebedeff in the other room, playing, is indistinguishable from a stage show. It opens up a bit thereafter, then retreats occasionally to its stage origins, but the staging of the mystery and its uncovering makes it pretty interesting.

MIDNIGHT MYSTERY takes place in a castle/mansion on a rock off the coast on Cuba on a dark and stormy night. It's based on a play called "Hawk Island" and involves the murder of one of the guests. Intriguing little film has the usual plot elements, but this one also has some snappy dialog and a mostly good cast.

Betty Compson gets top billing as a writer of cheap murder novels. She's engaged to Hugh Trevor, a spoiled rich boy who doesn't think much of her writing. Then there's Lowell Sherman as a lawyer who wife (Rita LaRoy) is having a fling with a pianist (Ivan Lebedeff). There's also a giddy woman (June Clyde) and a bickering couple (Raymond Hatton, Marcelle Corday) as well as a butler and groundskeeper. It seems they're having a sort of "murder weekend" party when Trevor gets bored with it all. So he and Lebedeff cook up a fake murder replete with a dummy tossed into the sea. Everyone falls for it, but one of the guest gets a bright idea to take advantage of the joke and it leads to a real murder. Compson, Sherman, and Trevor are all quite good and the film is a lark. Compson gets to emote against the howling storm, "Oh listen to it! Atmosphere in chunks!"

This is a very entertaining early-sound film. From the opening credits, superimposed over a bobbing, ringing offshore buoy, the film maintains a feeling of mystery. The plot is very clever, and keeps you off-guard. And it has that other-worldly feeling that so many early talkies seem to have now. The technical limitations of that time actually add to movies like this, I think, as they give that distant feeling, as if you're looking into another universe. They say the past is a different country, and maybe that's right. It sure is fun peering into that different time and place.

The film boasts some entertaining actors. My favorite is Lowell Sherman, who was good in everything he did. As an actor, he was the world-weary type. The guy who has seen it all, but still finds life kind of amusing. He reminds me of John Barrymore, but without the burden of the profile. He always seems to be having a good time, and livens up the proceedings. He was great in the 1932 "What Price Hollywood?," as the burned-out movie director. He was also a pretty good film director in real life, and nurtured some important careers. He directed Mae West and Cary Grant in "She Done Him Wrong," in 1933, followed by Katharine Hepburn in "Morning Glory," 1933, "Born To Be Bad," 1934, with Grant and Loretta Young, and a number of others. He was the original director for the 1935 Miriam Hopkins' "Becky Sharp," but died during production, and was replaced by Rouben Mamoulian. Many think that if he'd lived longer, he'd be considered one of the top directors of that time. And even if he is remembered only for his acting, he has a secure place in film history.

Betty Compson was a big silent star, but her career was kind of tapering off at this point. She is still pretty good in the film, and is fun to watch. Hugh Trevor, the young romantic lead, had a short career at RKO at that time, and was a standard hero type, but not bad. He died just a few years after making this movie. I like Ivan Lebedeff, who often played phony European-nobility types. He sometimes played it nasty, but was often a comic character. The gigolo/phony prince, etc. He was hilarious as such a type in Jean Harlow's "Blonde Bombshell," in 1933, making fun of those real-life European princes who seemed to specialize in marrying Hollywood royalty- actresses like Gloria Swanson and Constance Bennett. He played the part very well.

The sets in the film are fun- just the creepy kinds of things you'd expect in an "old dark house" kind of place. Somehow these kinds of places exist only in the movies. At least, I've never seen such a fogbound place in my travels. But that's fine- "only in the movies" is OK in my book.

This film may have shown up on TCM, but it isn't well known, or available to any great extant. I saw it years ago on a local TV channel in Baltimore (Channel 13 all-night movies, which were usually the C & C TV- RKO films- rather ragged and blurry prints, but lots of fun). I bought a DVD copy from a collector, and that's what I have now. Most of these early- sound films don't have big audiences, but it would be nice to have this for sale somewhere. Some other early films are showing up on low-priced DVDs, so perhaps this one will too. It isn't a great classic, but it is worth watching, and is lots of fun.