Midnight Manhunt

Fast-moving mix of comedic nonsense and creepy thick-ear, of the sort popular at the time. Seems everybody's trying to find the corpse of gangster Wells and hold onto it. Competing reporters Willis (gargan) and Gallagher (Savage) are trying to out-scoop one another, that is, when not romancing. At the same time, bad guy Jelke (Zucco) wants to hide the body to cover for his stolen jewels, while the cops are trying to figure things out and poor Miggs just wants some sleep. Complicated? Yes, but in an entertaining, if crowded, programmer style. It's not a whodunit, rather we wait to see how all the conflicting interests will play out.

Apparently Gorcey's on leave from the East Side Kids, while furnishing his impudent brand of fractured English. Now if he can just figure out how to be a cool guy and light a cigarette. The wax museum setting is inventive, but someone should tell director Thomas that wax figures are not limber. Note too how much of the proceedings are filmed in half-light, probably to cover for the budget sets. For fans of statuesque Ann Savage, she shows a different side here from her definitive Detour (1945) spider woman. Happily, she also shows a lot of shapely leg near the end.

Overall, it's a fairly nifty little programmer with a brisk pace and a number of 40's familiar faces.

Ann Savage and William Gargan star as rival newspaper reporters in this wild murder comedy complete with wax dummies, a wandering corpse, dumb cops, and George Zucco at his sinister best.

Leo Gorcey is very funny as a helper and general chatterbox at the Last Gangster Wax Museum. He toys around with the electric chair exhibit and tosses off a fair number of Bowery Boys-style malapropisms ("It's an optical delusion").

Zucco opens the picture by creeping into a hotel room, shooting a man and stealing a small case of diamonds; besides the mysterious Zucco and the adventurous reporters, police detectives Paul Hurst (dumb flatfoot) and Don Beddoe (harassed and exasperated lieutenant) are soon also attempting to track down the murdered man's body, which appears then disappears more than once.

A silly subplot concerns Savage and Gargan—a onetime romantic couple for whom, as Gorcey puts it, "the milk of romance slightly curdled." Gargan persists in disrupting Savage's efforts toward solving the case and landing the big story, for reasons that are less than clear; their conflict is supposed to be cute but is instead mildly irritating.

Overall, it's predictable but still very enjoyable; while the dialog may be lowbrow, it's still moderately clever, and good humor and energetic performances make up for lack of suspense and surprises. Good fun for fans of B movies—or any of these stars.

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).

The sole reason to watch this B-movie is the cast of veteran actors which includes George Zucco and Leo Gorcey, and who give the material more care than it deserves.

The plot concerns the "now we see it, now we don't" game thats played with the corpse of a murdered man. The man was a notorious killer who had been missing for five years before turning up near a wax museum. I won't spoil what happens since despite all the flaws can be quite entertaining if taken on its own terms.

The film suffers from two problems. The first is a cheapness that, while not truly bad, makes the wax museum seem more like a cardboard dive then a real place. The other problem is that the script, while containing funny lines, moves everyone around in a rather awkward manner as if they had to fill out several sections of the movie until its time to move to the next location. Neither problem is deadly, rather they are annoying in the "If they just didn't do that this would be so much better" sort of way.

If you should see this on TV or on the bargain video rack, by all means venture to dive in, since while its not the best of its type, its pretty damn good thanks to the great cast.

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.