The Longest Night

Store clerk Eve Sutton is the lookout for her comrades as they steal from the department store. Her sister Joan Sutton reports her suspicions to her supervisor Mrs. Briggs. Store owner's son Charley Phelps is taken with Joan. When Mrs. Briggs' dead body is found, the police investigators descend upon the store and round up everybody.

Fifty minutes is not really a full film but it's not a short either. It has the form of a whodunnit in a locked room. Only it has non of the tension. The attempted comedy is not funny. If anything, it loses any tension with the bumbling cops routine and the ridiculous actions. The cops don't call for backup. They don't try to barricade the civilians in a safe room. It's a lot of bad character work as people are literally getting murdered and nobody seems to behave realistically. It needs to be a slapstick Scooby Doo whodunnit adventure if it decides to be an actual comedy.

Even though this murder mystery starts off silly, it ends up being quite a fast-paced movie with lots of action and entertaining sequences. A murder takes place in a department store, and until the murderer is discovered, everyone is locked in with a few policemen all night. There are two sisters, Florence Rice and Julie Haydon, one of whom is dating a jewelry thief, Leslie Fenton, as well as a kleptomaniac, Etienne Girardot, and both the old owner of the store and the new buyer, Paul Stanton and Robert Young. Will police chief Ted Healy be able to find out who's guilty and why?

How do you keep everyone entertained in one room of a department store? By opening up the rest of the department store, restoring a previously unused elevator, and having the lights go out! Robert Young is busy wooing Florence, but since Julie is implicated, he's got a bigger job on his hands than to score a date for Saturday night. Before long, everyone's gone from suspect to detective and have to work to prove their innocence at the expense of someone else's guilt. Check this one out if it appeals to you!

This is the type of film that ran on late night TV in the early 50s. The difference from then to now is that this 55 minute film would been placed into a 90 minute time slot and interrupted at every reel change with 8-10 minutes of commercials. Considering that its MGM, the acting and plot are inane but production value quite good. It would be fun to have the Mystery Science Theater crew commentate.

A nice short (55 min) "B" picture with a good cast of MGM stock players. Robert Young is pleasant and keeps this murder mystery in proper perspective.

For me, the real highlight was seeing Sidney Tolar playing the police honcho who conducted the investigation. It's the only time that I have ever seen him in any role other than Charlie Chan. To hear him talk that tough New York police lingo without a Chinese accent was fun for me. If I had no other reason to watch this film, Tolar, alone, would be sufficient.

Being of such short duration, the movie moves quickly. It's a good thing because (and I say this with reverence) this flick has "B" movie written all over it. Enjoy............

Robert Young is at the department store for the first time in five years to sell it. He is distracted by some of the goods on sale and clerk Florence Rice. He is delayed when a corpse tumbles out of his private elevator and the police come to investigate.

Robert Young may have been one of the stars at MGM, but with more stars than there were in heaven, he was not of the first magnitude. In this, the shortest of any MGM feature, there are a lot of character actors to fill up its 51 minutes, and lots of gimmicks on display, but not much for the bland Young to do. Even the support wind up fairly bland, with Ted Healy as a cop, Sidney Toler as a (Caucasian) police captain, Samuel Hinds as the store's manager and Etienne Giradot as a kleptomaniac millionaire. It's undistinguished and painless.