The Midnight Warning

Reviewing this movie is a bit tricky. First, it was made in 1932, and we can't expect too much. The acting is stilted, and the dialogue.... is sometimes.... a bit stiff. Then, part of the detective's success depends on his super-duper binocular-glasses, which is more than a bit goofy. They look like something out of the back of a comic book, circa 1955. Between the set-up and the climax scene at the end, it drags, and I found myself pausing it and browsing web sites for a while.

The end of the action, as mentioned in some other reviews, is actually pretty harrowing, if you imagine watching it in a dark movie theatre in 1932. The scene seems to come out of nowhere in this otherwise standard genre film. If the rest of the film had been up to that standard, it would have been a much better production.

Finally, the denouement is a surprising twist - it doesn't work out anything like you'd expect in the genre. Let's just say it's far more ambiguous than Hollywood usually produced. I'd say it's worth watching if you're a fan of the genre and films of the early talkie era. Just don't expect too much - I don't know how another reviewer gave this nine stars. Different strokes, I guess.

"After a young couple and the woman's brother check into a hotel, the brother turns up missing. While no one at the hotel seems to know where the man is, let alone acknowledge he was even there, the woman decides to hire an investigator to look into the matter. The investigator, his assistant and the young couple find some strange circumstances at the hotel, which lead them to a shocking discovery," according to the DVD sleeve's synopsis.

Ah… it's the old vanishing relative plot. This one moves along quite nicely, thanks to writer John Thomas Neville beginning his version from an interesting angle: hotel patron Hooper Atchley (as Steven Walcott) calls upon an old friend, investigator William Boyd (as William Cornish), after finding a human ear bone in his fireplace. Then, Mr. Atchley collapses… The unraveling mystery is engaging; and, the movie works as a filmed stage play.

Columbia Pictures model Claudia Dell (as Enid Van Buren) gets to play frightened in a mortuary, and Robert Harron's brother John ("Johnny" Harron, as Erich) has a good expositional scene explaining his involvement in the intrigue. Forgotten film veteran Phillips Smalley (as Dr. Bronson) is another asset. "Midnight Warning" obviously needs Alfred Hitchcock's direction, and a more satisfying conclusion (see "The Lady Vanishes").

***** Midnight Warning (11/15/32) Spencer Gordon Bennet ~ William Stage Boyd, Claudia Dell, John Harron

"Eyes of Mystery" is actually a rerelease title for 1932's "Midnight Warning," from Mayfair Pictures Corporation, an independent outfit that produced or distributed nearly 40 titles in seven years. William 'Stage' Boyd is back in detective form ("Murder by the Clock"), supported by Poverty Row stalwarts Huntley Gordon, Hooper Atchley, and Henry Hall ("gosh all fish hooks!"). While the plot clearly echoes the true events depicted in Terence Fisher's "So Long at the Fair," this was perhaps the only period in early Hollywood that they could produce a conclusion in this vein, some two years prior to the notorious Hays Code. Claudia Dell was used to midnight mysteries, with future roles in 1935's "Midnight Phantom" and 1944's "Meeting at Midnight" (aka "Black Magic"), a Monogram Charlie Chan and, sadly, her final film.

It all starts with detective William 'Stage' Boyd and Doctor Hooper Atchley looking at a human tympanus bone discovered in a hotel room. Atchley collapses. When the hotel doctor comes in, he suggests something wrong with Atchley's liver. In actuality, Atchley has been shot through a window.

Although the editing by Byron Robinson avoids the endless shots that director Spencer Gordon Bennett was so fond of, this is a poor movie. It's 35 minutes into this 61-minute movie before anything approaching the actual mystery is even discussed, because every time a new character enters the scene, everything that has gone before has to be recapitulated to him or her. It's dialogue heavy as a result, with some good performers standing around speaking in emphatic tones. The cast includes Claudia Dell, Phillips Smalley, and Lloyd Ingraham. None of them succeed in making this short second feature moving at any speed.

Supposedly based on a real incident which occurred at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. This film fits into the "Pre-Code" genre, only because the "baddies" are not brought to "justice" at the end. The acting is pretty good, although I have to smile when I remember that William "Stage" Boyd was shortly afterwards involved in a famous Hollywood sex scandal, which temporarily ruined the career of William "Hopalong Cassidy" Boyd when his photograph was erroneously printed in a newspaper along with the scandal story; I can understand why reporters thought it was the "Hoppy" Boyd & not the "Stage" Boyd! A bit too talky at times, but an interesting film nonetheless.