Before Morning

The opening reel is so dull, it's the opposite of a grabber: if multiplexes had been invented by 1933 (too bad they invaded en masse in the '70s), patrons would have skipped for another screen on the premises showing a different movie after about 10 minutes. Low point immediately follows, as lead Lora hums (with sudden musical accompaniment from nowhere) a lullaby over the phone at the request of her adorable (not) kid in the hospital while her sugardaddy old fart Russell Hicks lies dying in the bedroom.

Things fail to pick up when Carillo enters as a shady sanitorium doctor who takes over the show. The "hit stage play" this was based upon is not opened up at all in basically a single-set movie drama, and nothing happens as the wax figures yammer on screen. Final reel of twists involving mystery and scandal are merely hot air, unconvincing and stupid. Carillo remains boring throughout until the final minute when the plot is explained stupidly.

Carillo's big line is: "For the love of Mike, get me a cigarette", a bit ironic in that the script has poisoning (presumably from an insecticide) with a capsule of nicotine as the murder weapon.

Acting and direction by Arthur Hoerl is so flat and static it could have been executed via animatronics rather than live actors.

Though ethnic Leo Carillo gets the lead role, the era's discrimination has a Black actress relegated as usual to playing the heroine's strictly functional maid Jenny, and gets no credit at all. The other characters say "Jenny" in conversation dozens of times, so one would think that the role of Jenny would be listed in the credits. And the bland leading man who has plenty of lines and is scheduled to mary Lora goes uncredited, too.

Louis Jean Heydt (in his first movie role) has come from the premiere of his first Broadway show. He drops in on Lora Baxter, and tells her that if it is a success, he wants her to star in his next. She turns him down. She's retiring and getting married. After he leaves, her old lover, Russell Hicks comes in. He doesn't feel too well and lies down. When Miss Baxter checks on him, he is dead.

She makes some phone calls. A dead married man in her apartment is not something she wants bruited about. In comes Doctor Leo Carillo. He says it was not a heart attack, but nicotine poisoning, that he found Hicks' will in his breast pocket -- where people always keep them -- and it leaves $200,000 to Miss Baxter. He suggests that he can take the corpse to his sanitarium and report the death as a heart attack for $200,000 in cash by the next day.

This interesting written murder mystery suffers a common issue for Poverty Row dramas of the era: very stagy line readings. However, the excellence of the story and Leo Carillo makes it very worthwhile. Although Carillo is probably best remembered as Pancho on TV's CISCO KID, and frequently played with a Mexican accent, in truth he came from a wealthy Los Angeles family who could trace themselves back to the Conquistadors. His grandfather had been the first provisional governor of California, and his father the first mayor of Santa Monica. Carillo himself was a trained engineer and cartoonist. In the 1930s he excelled at playing threatening villains, although his career turned into one of more standard accent parts in the 1940s. He died in 1961 at the age of 80.

One of the difficulties of the transition from silent to talkies was that not enough actors could successfully make that transition, and even those that did needed time to get the hang of it. That's why so many movies from the early to mid-thirties don't vocalize well. The actors either sound stiff and wooden or else too loud and dramatic, which is the case here.

It came as no surprise that "Before Morning" had been a stage play first, because it's acted as if it's still one, with over-the-top dramatization and lines being spoken as if the folks in the rear balcony have to be heard. Also, the storyline (death, cover-up, blackmail, deception, secret identity, etc.) would work well on stage, but somehow didn't work so well on film.

It was a nice try, though.

So many bad films are being remade of classics these days, you have to ask how anyone could be so stupid. The films that need to be remade are those that have great possibilities, but, for some reason, never fulfilled their promise. The plot of Before Morning is wonderful, with twist after twist. The screen play held my interest, despite the poor direction and acting. I was hoping that other IMDb reviewers would tell me it had been remade. Alas, no. There must be some way to bring Before Morning to the attention of some venturesome producer.

In answer to a previous reviewer, the opening line is clearly: "Good evening, Albert."

I agree the film is in a very poor state, though it's not surprising nobody bothered to preserve it - the direction, staging, and acting, along with photography and editing are appalling, even for it's age - there were hundreds of decently, and professionally made films at that time - this is not one of them.

I expect it worked better in the more intimate environment of theatre but it's transference to the screen leaves a lot to be desired... Even many silent movies were more exciting than this.

The gaps in the delivery are almost big enough for the 'prompter' to get the words in... :)