The Midnight Story

In an unusually deep performance, Curtis plays a cop who goes undercover to try to find a priest's murderer. At times, the story seems to teeter on the precipice of turgid melodrama, but Curtis and Roland are always there to right the course. Roland is magnificent as the Italian patriarch whose family Curtis invades. The painstaking attention that the film gives the Italian neighborhood and its collective perspectives pays handsome dividends. Worth a look.

I'm only going to comment on Peggy Maley. This actress appears only twice in the film but her "Veda Pinelli" really stands out. She is enthralling as she possesses an odd sort of tough, working-class glamor. Peggy Maley looks luscious and delightfully feminine in her silky housecoat and later in an average dress set off by clattering bracelets. She even assumes a kind of movie star glamour when she dons sunglasses to cover the black eye she gets from her husband (never seen in the film) for "stepping out." I watched this movie a second time only to see Peggy Maley as the enticing and vulnerable Veda Pinelli.

Peggy Maley may be best known for delivering the feeder line, "Whaddya rebelling against, Johnny?" to Marlon Brando in "The Wild One" but "The Midnight Story" may be her best and most vibrant work.

Here's to you, Peggy Maley!

When young, I saw this movie three or four times, and from then I have not seen more: not TV exhibits, not video edition (at least in my country) and no DVD edition (as I know). Instead, I keep a formidable memory of it: a crime story where the humanity of the characters reveals to be the most important thing: Tony Curtis searches a murderer, and takes friendship with Gilbert Roland, and fall in love with Roland's sister, Marisa Pavan. But Roland is the murderer that he has searched, and when he discovers that, explodes the human conflict --the friendship, the treason, the love-- and that gives the force of the film. Perhaps it is the masterpiece of Pevney, a modest director with some interesting movies, today forgotten in favour of others directors and movies not always betters than theirs. I wished that more people could see this film, and appreciate its valors and quality. A modest story of friendship and crime.

A beloved parish priest is knifed in an alley in San Francisco. Motorcycle cop Tony Curtis asked to be transferred so he can investigate; the priest had been a tremendous influence on him at the orphanage. He's turned down. At the funeral he spots Gilbert Roland - harboring the unfortunate name of 'Malatesta' - and has a hunch. His superiors put him on leave, and he gets on Roland's good side, moves into his home, and falls in love with with Roland's cousin, Marisa Pavan, while trying to find some reason to confirm his suspicion.

It's clearly a Tony Curtis vehicle, but as soon as Roland steps onto the screen, he pushes The star off. In fact, the only way for anyone else to get their time on. Screen is to have Roland someplace else. He's big, he's boisterous, he's good-hearted, and loves everyone, particularly the dead parish priest. What a mistake for any actor to agree to be in a movie with him!

Besides Gilbert Roland, this movie features some nice location shooting in San Francisco, which is completely recognizable, despite never showing the Golden Gate Bridge, cablecars, Union Square or the Transamericabuilding (that last had not been built yet).

One night in San Francisco's seedy North Beach neighborhood, a beloved priest is attacked in an alley and stabbed to death. A traffic cop (Tony Curtis), who grew up in the orphanage the priest ran, takes the murder particularly hard but sees it as his chance to advance to the homicide squad. At the funeral, he spots a man (Gilbert Roland) so shaken that his rosary has cut into his hand, drawing blood. Curtis follows his hunch that this man knows something about the murder.

Posing as a young fisherman fallen on hard times, he gets a job in Roland's crab shack on Fisherman's Wharf. Next, he's invited to live in the home Roland shares with his mother and his cousin (Marisa Pavan – Pier Angeli's twin sister). And for about half the movie, the noirish plot about the murder gets shoved onto the back burner like a kettle of red sauce in favor of an Italian-ethnic family drama (Curtis falls for Pavan, who plays hard to get, and so forth).

Though it seems as if director Joseph Pevney has lost track of the suspense story, he hasn't – he interweaves it into the family dynamics. When Curtis finds out information that he thinks exonerates Roland, he's so relieved he asks Pavan to marry him. But at the engagement party, he discovers that Roland's alibi is full of holes....

Falling late in the noir cycle, The Midnight Story recalls in its theme of a priest's killing (and in its San Francisco setting) the haunting little noir Red Light, of 1949. Red Light was pretty hard-core, while The Midnight Story is watered down with heart-warming vignettes. Still, it's more than an honorable try.

Curtis doesn't make the role as unforgettable as Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success the same year, but he doesn't embarrass himself, either. Roland comes close to overdoing the lusty fisherman, but instinctively pulls short. Pavan, however, looks and acts like Natalie Wood as Maria in West Side Story. Special mention, however, ought to go to Jay C. Flippen, as Curtis' `rabbi' in the police department; one of the unsung stalwarts of the noir cycle, he brightens the screen whenever he turns up because he's sure to polish up a little gem of a performance.