The Longest Night

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............

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.

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.

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.

Longest Night, The (1936)

*** (out of 4)

Surprisenly effective mystery from MGM runs just 50-minutes but there are plenty of smiles and drama along the way. A department store owner (Robert Young) shows up at the store to do some business when one of his workers is found strangled to death. The cops are called in and they demand that everyone there remain in the store until they can find the killer who in return keeps killing more people. THE LONGEST NIGHT is the shortest film I can think of that MGM made around this time but no matter what the length is, the film remains an entertaining little gem thanks in large part to some nice characters and performances. Even by 1936 this type of mystery film had ran its course but it's easy to see why studios made them since they could do them cheap and it probably wasn't too hard to turn a profit. The actual story here, outside taking place in a department store, really doesn't offer anything new or original as we get the typical story of a wide range of characters being thrown together and one of them is the killer. The nice thing here is that it's never obvious who is doing the killings or why and I really enjoyed how the film slowly gave out clues and pieces to what's actually going on. Another major plus is that the cast members are so entertaining that you can't help but have fun with them. Young is as charming as always and he has some nice chemistry with Florence Rice who plays one of the worker's whose sister might be involved in the crime. Ted Healy and Sidney Toler are both in fine form here so fans of theirs will enjoy seeing them here. Julie Haydon, Leslie Fenton and Samuel S. Hinds. At just 50-minutes there's really not too much time for a lot of plot but I think that's a good thing because the film is extremely fast-paced and this help builds up some nice drama at the end. There's also not any boring dialogue to slow things down so this is a good example of the running time fitting the story and had they forced ten or twenty more minutes worth of footage it's doubtful the film would have been as entertaining.