Night Editor

Night Editor is directed by Henry Levin and adapted to screenplay by Hal Smith from the radio program of the same name - by Hal Burdick - and the short story, Inside Story, written by Scott Littleton. It stars William Gargan, Janis Carter, Jeff Donnell, Coulter Irwin and Charles D. Brown. Cinematography is by Burnett Guffey and Philip Tannura, and music is credited to Mischa Bakaleinikoff, though it's believed that Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco did the work.

"You are just no good for me. We both add up to zero"

A raging "B" pic out of Columbia? Absolutely! This is something of a film noir lovers delight. There is no getting away from the fact it has one of those endings that has proved to be divisive, so how it stacks up for first time viewers now may make or break your opinion of it...

Story finds copper Tony Cochrane (Gargan) having a love affair with viper like Jill Merrill (Carter), this in spite of the fact he has a gorgeous loving wife and a son who worships him. During one of the illicit couple's love trysts they witness a violent murder, and fearing scandal Cochrane fails to uphold the law. From such decisions does life often spiral out of control...

Okies. So we got hot and sweaty scenes, flashbacks, wet streets lit by lamps, alleyways, barely lighted rooms - particularly the station offices - symbolic and metaphorical sequences (oh my those crashing waves), but it's the barbed dialogue, the blend of sex and violence, and a femme fatale of considerable greatness, that ultimately makes this soar.

Personally I hate the ending, but as stated before, I do know noir lovers who find it cheeky and enjoyable. Yet even with my irritation at the finale - and of Carter's hair style (which pushes Phyllis Dietrichson for most unflattering look), there's just so much good here for noir lovers not to enjoy greatly. 7.5/10

This is a superb film noir B picture. It stars William Gargan as a cop, and the sizzling dish Janis Carter as the femme fatale. And what a femme and how fatale! She is really something. What a pity she did not achieve the status in films which she clearly deserved. Here she plays a hyper-glamorous psychotic man-eater. Poor, bumbling homicide detective Gargan is no match for her. He succumbs, and succumbs, and succumbs. Well, one evening things get complicated. One has to remember that he is happily married to sweetie Martha, played with big loving eyes and a warm smile by 'Jeff' Donnell (she was born Jean Marie but was always called by the nickname of Jeff; see her also as Sylvia Nicolai in IN A LONELY PLACE, 1950), and adores his son. But there he is sitting in a car in a lover's retreat off the road, with Miss Glamour-puss, doing his usual succumbing, when another car pulls up and does not see them. The man proceeds to bash in the skull of the girl and then runs off, but not before they see his face very clearly in the headlights. It later transpires that Janis knows the man very well, but she says nothing at the time. Gargan starts to give chase but then realizes that he dare not do so because his involvement with Janis will come to light and his wife might leave him. So he endures an enforced silence and is then a member of the homicide team which investigates that very crime. A wrong man is accused and is about to 'get the chair'. Tension mounts. Should he do the right thing and stop the execution, at the risk of his career and his marriage? He wants to, but Janis is going crazier and crazier. She is so nuts that she makes statements like: 'I don't know why I do these things' as she tries to stab a man to death. Just the kind of girlfriend one wants! She is a rich socialite and highly sophisticated, thus intimidating the humble Gargan further. As he bitterly says to her at one point: 'You and I both add up to zero.' Every time he tries to leave her, she kisses him, which all goes to show just how dangerous kissing can be. After they have seen the murder, Janis gets a wild look in her eye and, in the midst of a seizure of psychotic excitement, says she wants to go and look at the girl's bashed-in skull and all the brains spattered all over the car because it excites her, and Gargan restrains her only with great difficulty. Janis really is very convincing in all of these scenes, and it is all pretty hair-raising. And so the story progresses. I must not reveal the ending. The next year, Janis went on to scare people further in FRAMED (1947).

William Gargan and Janis Carter star in "Night Editor," a 1946 B noir.

On a newspaper night shift, the people in the newsroom are told the story of Tony Cochrane, a police officer. This was the first in a planned series of night editor stories, which never happened.

Tony was a married man cheating on his wife (Jeff Donnell) with a married socialite, Jill Merrill (Janis Carter). One night, they're parking down by the beach, and they see a man beat a woman and run away. They both see his face clearly. Tony could have apprehended the man, and perhaps even stopped the murder (though it seemed to have happened very quickly) but he was afraid of being found out and losing his wife, son, and his job.

When the murder is reported, Tony has to investigate, not letting on that he was a witness. By now he's broken things off with Jill. He's surprised to see her name on a list of the dead woman's friends. He confronts her, because he suspects she recognized the man, but she won't tell him the man's identity. Things go from bad to worse.

This was pretty good and effective, with a nice ending. Gargan by then wasn't anyone's idea of a leading man, but was a good playing a cop. Gargan had a laryngectomy in 1960, after which he devoted his time to the American Cancer Society and used a voice box.

Janis Carter is a glamorous femme fatale here and plays a woman devoid of any conscience or compassion. In fact, when she learns the dead woman's face had been bashed in, she wants to see it. The idea is, she's married to an older rich man and likes slumming.

I wasn't expecting much from this two-noir disc from Netflix, but I would up liking both of them.

Synopsis Crane Stewart (Charles D. Brown), the editor of the New York Star, while playing poker with his friends, tells a story about a cop involved in a murder investigation.

In flashback, the editor tells the tale of police lieutenant Tony Cochrane (William Gargan), a family man who cheats on his wife with socialite femme fatale Jill Merrill (Janis Carter). Cochrane and the woman, who is also cheating on her husband, witness a man bludgeoning his girlfriend to death with a tire iron while the couple is parked at "lovers lane" by the beach.

The two can't report the crime without revealing their cheating, a dilemma which eventually leads to bigger troubles. Meanwhile, Cochrane must investigate the killing but is not able to tell anyone he witnessed the crime.

This movie was supposed to be the first in a series of Night Editor movies, but it's the only one that was ever made.

It's definitely Film Noir (I've been watching quite a few so called Film Noir movies and many just aren't. This is a fairy good example of the genre, although it sure is "talkie." I would have preferred some more action.

A lot more action. On the plus side, it's a really short film. I guess it was part of a two feature showing.

Night Editor was the proposed "pilot" for a series of B-movie programmers introduced by a bunch of graveyard-shift reporters working the police beat. The series came to naught, but this maiden effort bears watching. William Gargan is a basically decent married detective on the force who has been getting a little action on the side with rich dame Janis Carter, a haut-40s glamourpuss in the Claire Trevor/Helen Walker/Audrey Totter mold whose few performances leave us wondering why her career wasn't a lot bigger. Parked in a lover's lane one night, they witness a man bludgeoning his girlfriend to death with a tire iron. In the movie's most notorious scene, Carter reaches a pitch of erotic frenzy from this random act of sadistic voyeurism. Gargan then has to investigate the crime while keeping mum about the fact that he saw it happen. Of course it turns out that the murderer was not a stranger, but a well-to-do banker friend of Carter's.... Night Editor is a splendid example of why, in the early postwar years, audiences took to these dimly lit, zero-budget, quick-and-dirty crime dramas: They were unapologetically sleazy, they had no time for the sentimental gloss that Hollywood had confected, and they were shocking fun.