Midnight Limited

By the humble standards of Poverty Row, this is a fairly intriguing mystery offering, despite a script that often seems to be marking time rather than getting on with the plot. A major fault here is that none of the leading characters are so much as "filled in", let alone developed. At movie's end, we know as much about the leading man as we did at the beginning—namely zilch. True, a more appealing hero than John "Dusty" King would have certainly have helped. Edward Keane—in a rare, major role—proves no great shakes either.

The heroine is also little more than a cypher, but fortunately she is so charismatically played by charmingly vivacious Marjorie Reynolds that our almost total lack of any knowledge at all as to her likes and dislikes, her background and personality, seems not to matter. True, the script stratagem that cements her into the plot is most obtrusively unconvincing, but nonetheless I'm not complaining on this score. What does upset me is that an opportunity for a first-class little "B" has been thrown away by inadequate scripting.

Another minus is that all the exterior train footage is so obviously stock material—and rather ancient stock material at that! This lessens the movie's appeal for train buffs. And the usual racist "humor" with the eye-rolling porters doesn't help matters either. Tighter film editing was certainly called for. Any volunteers?

This is a far cry from "The 39 Steps," which preceded it, or "Twentieth Century." That one also came first but of course is a hilarious comedy with a great, brilliant performance by John Barrymore; it's not a mystery.

Marjorie Reynolds is appealing as the heroine. John King makes a good investigator. Then he opens his mouth and sings. "The Singing Detective" this also is not.

The dialog is strangely wordy and improbable in many cases. People have been given real mouthfuls to speak. But the plot is a decent one. It moves along nicely. And I had no idea who the villains were going to turn out to be. Usually I can either tell or I've got lost in too many characters.

Here, though, the characters are nicely delineated. And the ending comes as a surprise. At least it did for me.

"Midnight Limited" was a 1940 B film out of Monogram - well, I suppose writing Monogram and B film is the same thing. It stars John King and Marjorie Reynolds.

What to say about the plot...well, Reynolds is on a train when the compartment next door is robbed of $75,000 in diamonds, and her papers that prove she and her mother are entitled to an estate are taken when the perpetrator sees her looking out her door.

She gets a fair look at him and insists on helping the lead detective (King) find the criminal.

There were scenes in this film that were absolute dead space - like the interrogation of the crew and passengers - a 61-minute movie and that part alone seemed like 61 minutes.

It also seemed to me that the police could have done a better job of rounding up this guy faster.

Then it was over. Pleasant cast, with the always lovely Marjorie Reynolds who had better things ahead for her. Well, there really was no place to go but up after this.

A fiend robs passengers on the train, then gets away. One of the victims, Marjorie Reynolds, saw the man, but no one will listen to her until she goes to the office of John 'Dusty' King, who's in charge of the department and agrees to let her help them in their investigation because otherwise, it would all be Mr. King declaiming his speeches like the boy stood on the burning deck. Miss Reynolds and the other actors are at least adequate when Mr. King is not around, but anytime anyone is in a conversation with him, suddenly they sound like they're telling him that curfew shall not ring tonight. Mr. King was not just a bad actor. He made other actors, good ones, bad.

It's surprising because the director of this movie was Howard Bretherton. He was not a great director, but he was among that brotherhood who graduated from the editing booth. He could turn out a cheap feature quickly and usually make them pretty watchable. Such directors rarely shot scenes that would be removed by the editor; the skill was called 'cutting in the camera'.

Against actors who can't speak in any way that makes sense, the best director struggles in vain. While Bretherton toiled mostly in B Westerns, he was on his way up from here, first to Republic and then Columbia. He would retire from the Big Screen in 1952, spend a few years directing TV and die in 1969, aged 79.

While on a train trip to Montreal a woman is robbed of some valuable papers and man is robbed of some jewels by a man who comes in the night and shines a light in their faces. The robber then disappears off the train and into the night. The woman, needing the papers to collect an inheritance goes to the police. who then direct him to Val Lennon, who is investigating a rash of robberies on the train. The woman hooks up with Lennon and they begin to look into the robberies, which soon turn deadly.

Almost coldly clinical, even if the film has some romance and a musical number, this film didn't really work for me. The film is much too talky for an hour long mystery (The interrogation scene early on seems to go one for an hour instead of 5 or 6 minutes) and there are times when very little actually happens despite "movement" (how many trips are actually made?). It also doesn't help that the script seems to clue us in as to whats going on much too early simply as a means of keeping us interested. The cast, of B movie and supporting stalwarts is quite good, though they seem to be simply running back and forth needlessly instead of actually solving a mystery.

You can try it if you catch it on TV but otherwise I'd skip it.