The Midnight Warning

Reviewing this movie is a bit tricky. First, it was made in 1932, and we can't expect too much. The acting is stilted, and the dialogue.... is sometimes.... a bit stiff. Then, part of the detective's success depends on his super-duper binocular-glasses, which is more than a bit goofy. They look like something out of the back of a comic book, circa 1955. Between the set-up and the climax scene at the end, it drags, and I found myself pausing it and browsing web sites for a while.

The end of the action, as mentioned in some other reviews, is actually pretty harrowing, if you imagine watching it in a dark movie theatre in 1932. The scene seems to come out of nowhere in this otherwise standard genre film. If the rest of the film had been up to that standard, it would have been a much better production.

Finally, the denouement is a surprising twist - it doesn't work out anything like you'd expect in the genre. Let's just say it's far more ambiguous than Hollywood usually produced. I'd say it's worth watching if you're a fan of the genre and films of the early talkie era. Just don't expect too much - I don't know how another reviewer gave this nine stars. Different strokes, I guess.

Detective Cornish goes to visit his friend Dr Walcott at a swanky hotel. Walcott has found something that Cornish would find interesting, a human ear bone in his fireplace. As Walcott is standing the window he suddenly collapses. Cornish calls for a doctor who arrives and tells Cornish that his friend collapsed from the heat, and that the blood on his forehead was from the fall. Something doesn't seem right and when the pair tries to investigate someone again takes a shot at the good doctor. With that the detective and the doctor are plunged head long into a mystery that the owners don't want them to know anything about.

From the opening minutes this movie grabs you and pulls you in. Just what in the heck is going on here? You have to know, as mystery is added to mystery and layer is piled on layer you really do want to get to the bottom of things. Certainly things take a strange turn or two, but in this case make it even more intriguing. This is a great little thriller.

The question I want to know is why this film isn't better known since its a dynamite way to spend an hour. William "Stage" Boyd makes a great detective and Hooper Atchley as Dr Walcott is simply a great deal of fun. Not only is the mystery really mysterious, you have some truly frightening scenes toward the end as the dead seem not to be so dead after all.These are the sort of thing you'd expect in a horror film not a mystery film, certainly not one that isn't an old dark house. (You may want to keep the lights on during the second half of the film)

See this movie. This is a keeper, and while you may not watch it a lot, it will be one that you hand off to friends that you'd like to turn on to a really good movie. See this movie you will enjoy it.

9 out of 10.

The Midnight Warning (1932)

* (out of 4)

Really bland mix of mystery and horror has a group staying in a hotel shocked when a member dies. It appears to be murder so a detective tries to figure out what's going on before more people turn up dead.

THE MIDNIGHT WARNING was just one of hundreds of films to deal with murders in a trapped setting. They took place in hotels, cabins, lodges, houses and various other settings and more often than not they were rather forgettable. Sometimes you'd get lucky with an interesting movie but sadly this here isn't that and in fact it's really one of the worst that I've seen from the genre.

Even at just 62 minutes the film seems to run three times as long. The biggest problem is that the acting and dialogue are just so poor that it's really hard to keep interest in anything going on. Even worse is the fact that the low-budget makes for some pretty boring scenes of people just standing around with this bad dialogue going back and forth. I will admit that the twist ending manages to throw you off and there's one good sequence where a woman is surrounded by dead bodies and hears them "speaking" to her. Still, THE MIDNIGHT WARNING is a film you can easily skip.

Supposedly based on a real incident which occurred at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. This film fits into the "Pre-Code" genre, only because the "baddies" are not brought to "justice" at the end. The acting is pretty good, although I have to smile when I remember that William "Stage" Boyd was shortly afterwards involved in a famous Hollywood sex scandal, which temporarily ruined the career of William "Hopalong Cassidy" Boyd when his photograph was erroneously printed in a newspaper along with the scandal story; I can understand why reporters thought it was the "Hoppy" Boyd & not the "Stage" Boyd! A bit too talky at times, but an interesting film nonetheless.

It all starts with detective William 'Stage' Boyd and Doctor Hooper Atchley looking at a human tympanus bone discovered in a hotel room. Atchley collapses. When the hotel doctor comes in, he suggests something wrong with Atchley's liver. In actuality, Atchley has been shot through a window.

Although the editing by Byron Robinson avoids the endless shots that director Spencer Gordon Bennett was so fond of, this is a poor movie. It's 35 minutes into this 61-minute movie before anything approaching the actual mystery is even discussed, because every time a new character enters the scene, everything that has gone before has to be recapitulated to him or her. It's dialogue heavy as a result, with some good performers standing around speaking in emphatic tones. The cast includes Claudia Dell, Phillips Smalley, and Lloyd Ingraham. None of them succeed in making this short second feature moving at any speed.