Zwischen Mitternacht und Morgen

Ed O'Brien and Mark Steven are cop buddies. Gale Storm (whom I had a crush on as a child) plays a female police dispatcher (I think she is miscast here). The film revolves around these three main characters and a lowlife sleazeball who runs the rackets in the city. Another lowlife tries to horn in on Mr. Local Sleaze, but gets dispatched with efficiency by the kill-happy thug. When convicted in court and sentenced to fry, he vows revenge on the two cops. Margie, I mean Gail Storm, logically falls for Mark Stevens, who is slimmer and better looking than O'Brien. And the film is fine up to that point. Then it kind of veers off in undesirable directions and I am sure audiences were disappointed with the final half of the film. I will let you be the judge.

This is a superb crime drama featuring two buddy cops, excellently played by Mark Stevens and Edmond O'Brien. O'Brien's performance is especially marvellous, and he was really in his stride. Three years later he would be tapped by director Ida Lupino to star in 'The Bigamist' (1953), which was surely the greatest performance of his career. He 'really had it in him' despite not being the leading man type, and he should have won more than just one Oscar in his career. This film is helped by a sensationally good screenplay by Eugene Ling. It is packed with excellent one-liners and gags, and has a lot of well-judged humour, even though it is a tense and noirish crime thriller, with a lot of police procedural background. At one point, one of the cops thrusts a bill into the breast pocket of a hood's jacket and says: 'Here, buy yourself a new head, one with a brain in it.' Salty comments like that run all the way through. Modern screenwriters have absolutely no idea how to write wisecracks which work when spoken, it is a lost art, and this is one reason why so many contemporary films are so lacklustre and dull. The chief 'hood' in this story is a criminal played by Donald Buka, who is so eerily convincing as a crazed crook, with his relentless eyes and severe case of lockjaw that one's spine tingles menacingly. Gale Storm is the wholesome love interest who has to overcome the psychological trauma of her policeman father having been killed on duty, and can she get involved with a cop and risk all that pain again. It is a good solid story. Buddy cops really can be just like that. My best friend from school became a sergeant on the D.C. police force, and I used to ride around in his patrol car with him and his buddy while on duty, visit the jails and chat to the latest prostitute arrests, hang around with the cops in his precinct at the station, and exchange gags and joke with them about the street corner drug-pushers ('candy-men'). Banter was the order of the day, as it is the only way to keep sane on a big city US police force, with enforced familiarity with human vermin on a daily basis. Two nice guys really can drive around, responding to calls, draw out their guns and shoot violent criminals, bring people in in handcuffs, and then sit and have a quiet hamburger and roar with jokes with their pals. Mark Stevens and Edmond O'Brien are wholly convincing as buddy cops, mixing toughness with tenderness, and it is obvious that they were copied in hundreds of later television dramas. This was undoubtedly a seminal film which had enormous influence on the film industry. It is very entertaining to watch, though some people will bite their nails anxiously in between the jokes, as portions of the tale are extremely harrowing, especially when a little girl is held hostage by a mad gunman and dangled out of a high window to prevent the police firing at him.

Mark Stevens and Edmond O'Brien are buddies from the war. Now they are cops together in the same patrol car. When Gale Storm comes into their lives, it seems that they might fight, but O'Brien bows out gracefully. This is, until hoodlum Donald Buka escapes from prison and kills Stevens.

One of the reasons that O'Brien is so good in his B pictures around the end of the fifth decade of the 20th Century is that he looks like an ordinary Joe: all right looking, but nothing to right home about, and he could afford to take off a few pounds. For anyone else, this would have meant supporting roles, and he did a lot of those. However, he also played leads in noirs and cop movies like this one, and even westerns. That's because he typified how American men thought of themselves: ordinary people, yeah, but capable of important things. To watch his descent into brutality after Stevens' death here, even with the Production Code still in force, is a fine bit of acting.

Notable for its unusual shifts in nuance, tone and timbre, 'Between Midnight and Dawn' opens as a fly on the wall docu-noir, detailing the experiences of prowl car cops Stevens and O' Brien, during the hours of the title. Stevens' increased interest in Gale Storm results in a gawky, screwball rom-com sequence in which O'Brien finds himself cast as the disgruntled, gauche, threes-a-crowd outsider. Latterly, the movie returns to base as a ruthless hood vs dedicated cops drama.

Impressively scripted, acted and executed, including a prolonged, compelling, must see car chase, 'Between Midnight and Dawn' is one of the more laudable second division noirs. With the odd curve ball thrown in for good measure, it's worth an extensive prowl to seek out.

I would be lying if I said that I know Gordon Douglas' work as director. I did see his 1954 sci-fi effort, THEM, which was OK and in line with the many sci-fi movies of the 1950s, but it did not exactly stay in my memory.

BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND DAWN is an entirely diverse kettle of fish: no sci-fi, plain human emotions as two cops - Stevens and O'Brien - try to discharge their police duties both manfully and professionally.

One spanner in the works: Stevens likes the voice of a police phone operator, pretty Gale Storm, gets to meet her, whereupon a second spanner springs up: both cops love Storm. O'Brien gentlemanly lets Stevens sweep the lady off her feet but from that point on one recalls his words that it would get "crowded" if all three went out together... and one knows that one of the coppers will be sacrificed for the sake of the plot (poor Edmond had already played a bigamist, he probably did not wish to repeat it and become stereotyped as cheater).

Cinematography and script are OK, some notable police car chases do not hurt, though for the most part this film looks and feels more like a B product - the cast is what raises it above that status.

Acting is uniformly competent, with Donald Buka stealing the show as the clean-faced criminal who thinks nothing of using a child as shield. O'Brien delivers a performance as dependable as that of the cop he portrays.

Certainly no waste of time. 7/10.