Midnight Phantom

1935's "Midnight Phantom" was a rare non-Western from Reliable Pictures Corporation, which lasted five years and produced 48 titles overall. Top billing goes to Reginald Denny, playing a famed criminologist who just happens to be conducting a lecture on that subject when the local police chief (James G. Farley) gets knocked off. Among the roomful of officers under suspicion, we have his daughter's fiancée, whose late brother was killed in the process of committing a crime. Then when the police surgeon claims to have discovered the murder method, he immediately keels over dead! Unfortunately, the first murder doesn't occur until the 45 minute mark of this 59 minute feature, way too much exposition for even the sturdiest movie buff. Claudia Dell's promising career never really took off, making her final appearance in a 1944 Monogram Charlie Chan, "Black Magic." In the end, Reginald Denny was perfectly cast, coming off a similar role in James Whale's sumptuous "Remember Last Night?"

With no plot continuity, half of the movie comprised of stock footage, and coupled with high school drama club performances, Midnight Phantom (which has no relevance to the story) is an unmitigated disaster. I gave it a 2 rating only because of Reginald Denny from The Shadow movies fame.

This is the creme de la creme of awful. It is the slowest moving, dullest thing on four legs. The first third of the film takes place in the office of the police chief, a windbag who calls people in and berates them for various reasons. He apparently is under fire from politicians. There are so many substrains, most of which are unrelated and have nothing to do with a plot. At one point the young male lead kills his own brother and is then not allowed to marry the chief's daughter because he didn't disclose his connection to a criminal. If you watch the film, you'd know that he just found out as the guy was dying. There are others. The chief has a secretary half his age, the daughter of one of the ugliest women I've ever seen. The old lady is a policewoman and insists the chief marry her daughter because the two have been seen together. Then there is this hilarious scene where a series of prisoners are paraded in front of criminologist Reginald Denny. He comments on their criminal appearance (shifty eyes and lack of ambition, for example), and tells what their traits are. He hits on all cylinders. Reefer Madness has nothing on this one. I'm so happy I got to see it and would like to watch it with friends. It's so sincere and so awful.

Ludicrous dialog! Impossible plot! Execrable acting! Looks like it was shot in one afternoon. How can you not love a movie where someone says "When the lights went out, I held up the glass table top between us. So you're poison dart missed me!" In the scene right after the police chief has (hysterically) dressed down all of his subordinates and they're all filing out of the room, you can hear someone, presumably the director, shouting "Now call back Silverstein" just before the chief says "Inspector Silverstein, a word with you please." A highlight has a "professor of criminology" accurately guessing the offences of criminals in a line up based solely on their appearance. These ultra-cheap movies of the 30's and 40's, made by companies long out of business like PRC, Reliable Pictures, Chesterfield are ghoulishly fascinating, when they're not the routine westerns that were made by the hundreds. The interesting thing is when they feature a name actor (this one has Reginald Denny!) at some really low point in his/her career. You have to wonder, where were they shown? What did audiences of the time think of them? When we hear that half the films made before 1950 are lost, I suspect that most of the lost films are of this calibur and aside from the weirdness value, it's no great tragedy, though there were the rare gems in this bunch....

It's difficult to know who to recommend this poverty row obscurity to. While it's technically a mystery, it barely functions as such due to the way in which it's structured. For the first three-quarters of the film you could be forgiven for wondering where exactly this movie is going. We are introduced to an array of characters who work for a police chief. We are made aware that all of these people have a grudge of sorts against the man. But, aside from a brief car chase involving cops and robbers, the narrative is basically a lot of melodrama; that is until, with fifteen minutes of the movie remaining, the chief is murdered in a darkened room populated by all of the cast members. So the mystery only lasts for about ten minutes before the killer is unmasked and we are treated to the very pointless epilogue. It has to be said, however, that the amazingly inept plot structure is the only thing that stands out about this film.

Midnight Phantom is almost a movie about nothing. Even the title is ridiculously misleading and meaningless. It clocks in at just under an hour so it is at least mercifully short. I can only recommend this to poverty row completists, although I would be surprised if there is such a thing.