The Horn Blows at Midnight

Jack Benny and a magnificent supporting cast help keep your interest in this lightweight, yet highly imaginative, fanciful comedy about an angel in charge of destroying the Earth. Lots of great sight gags and double entendres keep things going. Additionally, the script if rife with sadistic ironies reminiscent of O'Henry and Mark Twain. If you've never seen it, pull up the ottoman and enjoy.

A surreal comedy from Warner Bros., apparently made while studio heads were on vacation. How else do we explain such inspired lunacies as a hotel elevator to heaven, angels with periodic bouts of delirium tremens (likely what the writers were suffering), or a giant coffee service hanging from the side of a skyscraper! Somehow this exotica got from storyboard to screen without the usual deadening hand of studio convention. It's pretty funny too, although the big screen is not the best venue for Jack Benny, whose personal brand of humor shows best on radio or tv. Still, the laughs are there among the general weirdness, and anyone who turns down the sound of the final scene should experience a nightmare of urban existence as frightening as any from vintage film noir, with Benny literally drowning in a sea of caffeine. This is also a chance for men to scope out that heavenly body known as Alexis Smith. Her statuesque bearing was probably a little too stiff for major stardom, but no one ever looked better in a toga or the high fashions of the day. All in all, this inventive little comedy was far ahead of its time, and despite Benny's running radio gag, possesses all the underpinnings of a minor cult classic.

A funny and friendly fantasy from the forties; it shows Jack Benny at his comedic best. The writing is witty and the supporting cast is wonderful. The scene which shows the cast dangling precariously, and hilariously, above Times Square is worth the price of a ticket.

If you have to watch one Jack Benny movie, this one would probably be the one to watch. As other reviewers have noted, this movie bombed at the box office after its release and Benny joked about this fact often in his monologues. Even though it was poorly received at the time it came out, its stands up better now. Its best when watched not just as a comedy but as a parable that has timeless themes, that are not just relevant to the 1940's.

Good versus evil, greed versus generosity, heaven versus life on earth. The "fish out of water" sequences where Jack Benny, as an angel, struggles to adjust to the realities of life on earth, are also very funny and timeless. All that and Jack Benny's warm and funny screen presence make this an appealing picture.

Even though I cannot for the life of me wrap my mind around the concept of a coffee that puts you to sleep Jack Benny's The Horn Blows At Midnight is not as bad as the reputation it has. A reputation by the way that Benny himself gave the film. It was a running gag on his radio and television show that Benny forsook movie making because of the bad reviews the film received.

Seeing it today it's not as bad as all that, in fact it has a few funny moments. Benny is a trumpeter in a radio studio orchestra and he falls asleep during the announcer's commercial for Paradise Coffee, the coffee that makes you sleep. In his dream Benny becomes an angel playing trumpet in a heavenly orchestra, larger than anything Leonard Bernstein ever directed. He gets an assignment from one of the bosses Guy Kibbee to blow his heavenly trumpet at midnight to signal the utter destruction of a minor planet the natives call Earth.

Needless to say Benny bungles the job and the film is his effort to complete his assignment. Kibbee's not pleased and he sends Alexis Smith down from heaven to babysit Jack. Later on Kibbee himself shows up. There are a couple of fallen angels played by Allyn Joslyn and John Alexander who like the life they've got on earth now. And there's Reginald Gardiner who's a musician and a society burglar with his assistant Dolores Moran who Benny interrupts mid crime and a host of other familiar movie faces which in itself is reason enough to watch The Horn Blows At Midnight.

Jack plays some tribute to Harold Lloyd with some stunts at the climax involving some great height. There's a gag involving a human pendulum that was later used with other familiar faces in It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Jack also becomes rocket man at one point, clearly copying Bob Hope being shot out of a cannon in The Road To Zanzibar.

Don't believe the hype about The Horn Blows At Midnight, you might actually like it.