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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good '40s B; character actors help this newspaper yarn, October 23, 2003
This review is from: Midnight Manhunt (DVD)
This is one of Paramount's low-budget features produced by William Pine and William Thomas. As is customary with Pine-Thomas product, the cast is accomplished, the story is atmospheric, and the workmanship is efficient. The entire cast will be familiar to fans of old movies: William Gargan and Ann Savage as the bantering newspaper reporters trying to outscoop each other when a murder victim disappears, George Zucco as a velvet-voiced, dangerous killer, Leo Gorcey as comedy-relief office boy, Charles Halton as a worried museum curator, Don Beddoe as a frustrated detective, Paul Hurst as a bemused watchman, and George E. Stone as the missing corpse (always a fine actor: he doesn't say a word, but he expires eloquently). The pacing is good and the dialogue is snappy. The DVD derives from an old 16mm print that was very popular at some TV station -- there are frequent cue marks for station breaks, but thankfully no choppiness or serious damage. This has its own peculiar charm for movie addicts, because it looks just the way late-show movies used to look on television, before video and cable. It's an enjoyable hour for movie buffs.
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12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Theatre-Clearer-Outer, November 14, 2004
This review is from: Midnight Manhunt (DVD)
MIDNIGHT MANHUNT (1945) was a title with which I was unfamiliar, but the cast was impressive, so I selected it to round out my order. What I got for my $5 was an hour, missing from my life, that I can never, ever replace. Okay, let's keep this short. George Zucco shoots some guy in a cheesy flophouse and takes a box of diamonds from him. The guy - who we find out later is "famous gangster" Joe Mills, missing for five years - isn't quite dead, and crawls to a nearby wax museum called the "Gangster Wax Musuem". No, I'm not kidding, and No, it's not supposed to be a joke. Anyway, a feisty female reporter (Ann Savage, of DETOUR fame) happens to live in an apartment above the wax museum, and coming home, she finds Mills' now quite dead corpse. She stashes it in the wax museum and runs upstairs to write the story. But William Gargan (a/k/a Martin Kane, Private Eye), a rival reporter and sometimes boyfriend of Miss Savage, snoops around and finds out what she's up to. As does a snoopy police lieutenant. And a snoopy night watchman. And Mr. Miggs, owner of the wax museum (played by the Bank Examiner from IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE). And Miggs' assistant, Clutch, played by Leo Gorcey, who thinks he's playing Slip Mahoney, a character that actually hadn't been invented yet ("We can figger dis out t'rough mental reduction"). Oh, and so does George Zucco, looking for the corpse he lost (Mr. Zucco, the film's star, does not have a line until 28 minutes have elapsed of the 61 minute film.) So they all chase each other around and the "comedy bits" consist of old Mr. Miggs constantly whining "I'm tired" and Clutch moidering da King's English and looking for a light for the cigar butts he picks up. And don't worry, I'm not gonna reveal the ending, mainly because I fell asleep about 50 minutes into this thing and woke up just in time to see Mr. Zucco in handcuffs and the two reporters lip-locked. For an Alpha print and transfer, this is good indeed, perhaps the best I've seen from this cheap company. There, I've said something nice. I imagine that this film was shown at the end of a long day to clear the folks out of the movie theatre, and I imagine it worked very well.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A forgettable Forties programmer, except that most of the actors should bring a smile of nostalgia...especially Bernice Lyon, May 11, 2009
This review is from: Midnight Manhunt (DVD)
When a man called Jelke, aging and with wild eyes, turns a resident of the fleabag Empress Hotel into a corpse, he causes a major problem. The resident was Joe Wells, the biggest noise in the rackets who had a five grand reward on his head. And the biggest problem is that Joe Wells has been dead for quite a while. The second biggest is that the corpse keeps moving around, especially within the dark, creepy Last Gangster Wax Museum. It's hard to tell who is a waxy, dead-eyed manikin and who is a waxy, dead-eyed Joe Wells. But before long two smart-mouthed, competing reporters who used to be an item are going to get the truth. It only takes 63 minutes for this low-budget B programmer to race through the plot, find a killer, discover the mystery of the mobile body, uncover just why Joe Wells was so mobile, and bring two competing wiseacres to the realization that some forms of cooperation can be pleasurable. Except for the actors, that's all there is to this brief and dull excursion into low budget comedy mystery. If you're old enough, some of the names, or at least the faces, might bring a smile of recognition. Leo Gorcey plays Clutch, a language-mangling fixer-upper who works in the museum. George E. Stone plays the corpse. Don Beddoe is a detective and Charles Halton is the tired, tired, tired owner of the museum. Halton specialized in roles where looking like a small, aging accountant was a plus. Just to remind us that most B movie actors were capable of something more, watch Gorcey in Dead End (1939), Beddoe in The Narrow Margin (1951) and Stone in Some Like It Hot (1959) or any of the Boston Blackie movies. Most especially if you're fond of nostalgia are the three leads whose careers were almost exclusively confined to tons of programmers. There's George Zucco as Jelke. Zucco was a fine actor in some good movies in the Thirties, but who, as he aged, settled for steady work in B movies. Occasionally he scored something that could use his talent. Just watch him as a cop in Lured (1947), mysterious and threatening and then a very nice guy, or in The Pirate (1948), perfectly at home in an outlandish costume as the Viceroy. William Gargan is one of my favorites. He almost always played tough, good-natured, energetic guys who always had an angle and a comeback. He plays reporter Pete Willis, a guy who always has an angle and a comeback. And, of course, there's Bernice Lyon as Sue Gallagher, the reporter who lives above the wax museum and who finds the body on the stairway to her apartment. She made 21 movies between 1943 (her first) and 1945 when she made the cheese B classic that put her in the books. She'd be long forgotten except for her memorable film name -- Ann Savage -- and the movie Detour (1945). So I guess Midnight Manhunt qualifies as at least a kinda-noir out of respect for Ann Savage and her over-the-top portrayal of that classic femme fatale named Vera, a woman with sharp nails. The DVD transfer is execrable. Unless you like forgotten character actors, Midnight Manhunt is probably worth passing by. .
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