The Midnight Warning

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.

A sister & brother check into a posh hotel. Shortly thereafter, the brother is missing, & despite the sister's inquiries, no one admits to ever having seen the man. Meanwhile, a sniper shoots bullets through the window of the room that the brother & sister stayed in. Is there any connection between these events?

There's a little mystery, a little terror, some spookish pranks, and an eerie mortuary scene that is quite effective in delivering scares, however I found the rest of the film quite average and flat at times and a little confusing - but the denouement at the end for the "strange" going-ons is surprising and offbeat.

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.

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.