Midnight Manhunt

***Major Spoilers*** With free-lance hit man Jelke, George Zucco, tracking down his quarry diamond thief Peter Bernett, George E. Stone, from Uruguay South America to a mid-town Manhattan hotel he surprises and guns him down when he answers the door. Taking $250,000.00 in diamonds that Barnett had on him Jelke goes to call a cab to have Barnett's body taken and later dumped, by Jelke, in the East River.

There's also an alert for a New York gangster Joe Wells who's been either dead or on the lamb for five years and the state is willing to pay $5,000.00 to find and prove who he is, dead or alive. You see both Peter Barnett & Joe Wells are one and the same person. Wells badly hurt from being shot by Jelke struggles to his feet and staggers across the street from his hotel to the Last Gangster Wax Museum and collapses and dies.

Later girl reporter Sue Gallagher, Ann Savage, finds the dead Wells on the museum staircase and hides it so that she can later get the reward for proving that the elusive Joe Wells case has finally been solved. Unknown to her and the police and Sue's friends Jelke has a lot more to gain if Joe Wells stays lost then they do in having him found. Humorous crime/drama about a stiff, Joe Wells, who stiffed everyone looking for him by getting stiffed and hidden in the car trunk of police let.Max Hurley,Don Beddoe, who's been in charge of finding the stiff for five years.

George Zucco seems too refined and sophisticated to be a hoodlum in the movie, he's much better playing mad doctors and scientists. There's also that expert in the proper use of diction in the English language Leo Gorcey, Clutch Tracy, in the film playing an attendant at the wax museum who shows us how he can magically make a lighted cigar butt last for over an hour which was the length of the movie.

There's no denying that this B-feature has its flaws, but it's kind of fun to watch. It's a crime drama with plenty of comic relief, with a solid cast that does pretty well with a story that could easily have fallen apart. The production is strictly low-grade, but they tried to make up for it in part with a lot of offbeat sets and dimly-lit scenes.

The story reminds you of Hitchcock's "The Trouble With Harry", since most of the plot concerns the trouble caused by an inconvenient corpse. It's not, of course, as good as a Hitchcock movie, and its implausible aspects are not masked the way they would be in a better production, but it still gets some decent mileage out of the premise.

Ann Savage does well as a young reporter trying to sort things out. She has the strong presence that she showed in noir features like "Detour", while this time being much more sympathetic. George Zucco strikes an appropriately menacing tone, and Leo Gorcey adds some entertaining comic relief.

This is a good movie to watch when you just want to pass a pleasant hour or so with something entertaining that does not demand careful attention, and when you are prepared not to be too critical. With the right expectations, it actually works pretty well.

There isn't much to say about this one. It involves a body (which should be decomposing) being dragged around by a series of people. There are a couple of reporters who use absolutely no common sense in the process of trying to use the body to get a scoop. There's Leo Gorcey, playing the Bowery Boys character, with the malapropisms and the general insensitivity. George Zucco is running around, trying to get his hands on the body. Keeping a low profile probably would have protected him, but this doesn't occur to him. Everything is silly and far fetched and probably played well in a theatre on Saturday afternoon as a bit of escapist drivel in the forties.

Diamond-thieving gangster Joe Wells winds up dead in a gangster wax museum where the jokers who run it not only recognize him but also happen to be pals with a couple of rival crime reporters. The reporters want the scoop. The cops want the corpse. And the old man just wants to go home because he's "so tired." Leo Gorcey provides a bit of comic relief with malapropisms and a troublesome cigar. The reporters cooperate and betray each other as it becomes convenient, regardless of how many laws they're breaking or how much danger they're in.

The acting is generally good, not great, but the direction is very stagy. With so few sets and so little camera movement, this could easily be a stage play. It's the kind of movie where people tell each other to stop beating their gums and to go soak their heads, offer each other stiff drinks, and light a lot of cigarettes.

The killer's explanation of why he hasn't just fled is ridiculous. And the shenanigans with the corpse are just bizarre.

After Scared Stiff, Ann Savage played the feminine lead in Midnight Manhunt, in which she is relentlessly put down by charmless William Gargan – not one of my favorite leading men by a long chalk. David Lang's script is one of those affairs in which a collection of not overbright characters get themselves involved with murder and missing jewels on the flimsiest of pretexts. As a time filler, this little "B" is overladen with dialogue but still plays with reasonable celerity, thanks more to the sterling efforts of an A-1 support cast led by Leo Gorcey and Charles Halton than to any input from dull, relentlessly plodding, over-emphatic direction from co-producer William C. Thomas (of the Scared Stiff Two-Dollar Bills).