Midnight Phantom

1935's "Midnight Phantom" was a rare non-Western from Reliable Pictures Corporation, which lasted five years and produced 48 titles overall. Top billing goes to Reginald Denny, playing a famed criminologist who just happens to be conducting a lecture on that subject when the local police chief (James G. Farley) gets knocked off. Among the roomful of officers under suspicion, we have his daughter's fiancée, whose late brother was killed in the process of committing a crime. Then when the police surgeon claims to have discovered the murder method, he immediately keels over dead! Unfortunately, the first murder doesn't occur until the 45 minute mark of this 59 minute feature, way too much exposition for even the sturdiest movie buff. Claudia Dell's promising career never really took off, making her final appearance in a 1944 Monogram Charlie Chan, "Black Magic." In the end, Reginald Denny was perfectly cast, coming off a similar role in James Whale's sumptuous "Remember Last Night?"

Ludicrous dialog! Impossible plot! Execrable acting! Looks like it was shot in one afternoon. How can you not love a movie where someone says "When the lights went out, I held up the glass table top between us. So you're poison dart missed me!" In the scene right after the police chief has (hysterically) dressed down all of his subordinates and they're all filing out of the room, you can hear someone, presumably the director, shouting "Now call back Silverstein" just before the chief says "Inspector Silverstein, a word with you please." A highlight has a "professor of criminology" accurately guessing the offences of criminals in a line up based solely on their appearance. These ultra-cheap movies of the 30's and 40's, made by companies long out of business like PRC, Reliable Pictures, Chesterfield are ghoulishly fascinating, when they're not the routine westerns that were made by the hundreds. The interesting thing is when they feature a name actor (this one has Reginald Denny!) at some really low point in his/her career. You have to wonder, where were they shown? What did audiences of the time think of them? When we hear that half the films made before 1950 are lost, I suspect that most of the lost films are of this calibur and aside from the weirdness value, it's no great tragedy, though there were the rare gems in this bunch....

This bizarrely paced thriller gets it all wrong for some odd reason. Instead of killing off the person who needs to be killed (and we find out early that that person is going to be killed, the way he sets himself and the characters up) and then creating a mystery leading to the solving of the case, the film introduces us to characters, sets up ridiculous some ridiculous family dramas, and THEN gets around to the murder in the final 15 minutes or so, and goes on to solve it in that time! As usual, it's the guy you least expect that does the deed, but I had my suspicions from the start! Anyways, the bad guy is executed, and one of the characters says, "Gee!" to that. I agree. This movie is fun to watch though for the bizarre story structure though, and the pacing makes it quite entertaining.

A new police chief is murdered and almost all of the suspects are cops.

This is a very talky movie. People talk and talk and talk and talk and it gets dull very quickly since this seems to be more about talk than action. A case in point is that most of the first third of this film is the police chief talking to various members of the police force about how he wants them to change their corrupt or incompetent ways or else he'll fire them or lock them up. While it sets up the suspects nicely it doesn't do much for keeping interest. Eventually Reginald Denny shows up playing a professor of criminology and things pick up as we at last get to the murder. The second half of the film is a battle between Denny's science vs the tried and true police methods. Its a bit more interesting than whats gone before but its still long winded.

Not a bad film as such its just not very compelling. There are too many characters and too much talk and it really just doesn't grab you the way it should. Is it worth seeing? If you like old mysteries its worth a shot but I'd see if you can borrow a copy off a friend since its not worth renting or purchasing since you'll probably watch it just once.

Dreary tale of nothing that centres around a city police precinct in which the cranky chief (Farley) becomes the target of an apparently disgruntled regional captain, while his daughter (Dell) frets about her imminent marriage to precinct hotshot (Hughes) whose younger brother was exposed to be a criminal, tainting both his position in the Force and with his future wife and in-law.

Reginald Denny co-stars as the charismatic, cigar-making professor who can diagnose a criminal from just a line-up, a performance he duly displays for the precinct at midnight leading to the anti-climactic five-minute whodunit. The final five minutes treats the audience to a pointless epilogue involving a picnic; something to which you can look forward. As for the first fifty minutes, there's very little material on which to comment, just Farley berating his captains for their ineptitude and remonstrating with Hughes over the shame his criminal family name will bring onto his only daughter. It's an aimless soap opera.

Still not too sure why Denny appears in this film given his relative stature, though his performance is assured where those of his peers in this film leave more than a little to be desired - two obvious line fluffs and frequent jump cuts suggesting a very amateurish production is in the making. Even by mid-thirties poverty row standards, the "Midnight Phantom" is a late-night yawn.