Night Editor

This is a story told in flashback by the night editor of a newspaper to warn off Coulter Irwin (Johnny) from misbehaving away from home. It is the tale of policeman William Gargan (Tony) who is playing away from home with Janis Carter (Jill). One night they witness a murder but Gargan hesitates in pursuing the culprit for the sake of revealing his affair and bringing shame upon himself. The murder is investigated by his homicide team but things don't sit comfortably with him when an innocent man is sentenced to death for the crime. He holds the key to a stay of execution but will he reveal his hand?

The film gets off to a slow start - the first fifteen minutes are actually quite annoying as we have to suffer some crass dialogue from a boy, eg, "I get lonesome sometimes". It's unrealistic dialogue and makes the boy seem like a drip. You can actually see why Gargan is having an affair when we are also introduced to the sickly nice Jeff Donnell (Martha) who plays his wife. If you can get past the rather sentimentally awful beginning, then you will be rewarded as scheming Janis Carter makes an appearance.

As regards the cast, everyone has good and bad moments: Janis Carter is unintentionally hilarious when she loses control of her emotions and begs to see the dead body of the murdered woman, Paul E Burns (Strom) puts on an awful foreign accent from nowhere but succeeds in being likable as Gargan's police buddy, while Gargan himself is a bit too zombie-like on occasion.

Despite the cast being slightly off, the film still works and the story keeps you watching. You may guess the outcome but you will also be entertained by some of the twists.

Columbia Pictures, the home of the Three Stooges shorts,"Batman" serials,"Crime Doctor", "Boston Blackie" and many other programmers, was also the place where many B movies were hatched including this very low budget crime yarn based on the radio program "Night Editor" by Hal Burdick and the short story "Inside Story" by Scott Littleton.

This film version, very tightly directed by Henry Levin, and starring the then aging and rumpled William Gargan, is a definite Noir artifact of the late 1940's.

There's little pity in this compact story of sex and brutality. Unusual for a film of this time period, the femme fatale is depicted as a woman who feeds on cruelty and takes gleeful joy in looking at the battered corpse of one of her previous friends. Murder and perversion seem to function as the only things she truly loves. They are what she demands others give her so she may feed the bottomless emptiness within.

Originally fashioned as a pilot episode for a new continuing series like its radio show progenitor, the film was a failure upon release, but succeeds as a stand alone example of the close ties between sex and sadism in the continuing Noir cycle.

William Gargan and Janis Carter star in "Night Editor," a 1946 B noir.

On a newspaper night shift, the people in the newsroom are told the story of Tony Cochrane, a police officer. This was the first in a planned series of night editor stories, which never happened.

Tony was a married man cheating on his wife (Jeff Donnell) with a married socialite, Jill Merrill (Janis Carter). One night, they're parking down by the beach, and they see a man beat a woman and run away. They both see his face clearly. Tony could have apprehended the man, and perhaps even stopped the murder (though it seemed to have happened very quickly) but he was afraid of being found out and losing his wife, son, and his job.

When the murder is reported, Tony has to investigate, not letting on that he was a witness. By now he's broken things off with Jill. He's surprised to see her name on a list of the dead woman's friends. He confronts her, because he suspects she recognized the man, but she won't tell him the man's identity. Things go from bad to worse.

This was pretty good and effective, with a nice ending. Gargan by then wasn't anyone's idea of a leading man, but was a good playing a cop. Gargan had a laryngectomy in 1960, after which he devoted his time to the American Cancer Society and used a voice box.

Janis Carter is a glamorous femme fatale here and plays a woman devoid of any conscience or compassion. In fact, when she learns the dead woman's face had been bashed in, she wants to see it. The idea is, she's married to an older rich man and likes slumming.

I wasn't expecting much from this two-noir disc from Netflix, but I would up liking both of them.

I just found my newest femme fatal favorite. Janis Carter, who plays an incredibly sexy but psychopathic society woman having a deranged affair with a police detective in the 1946 C-level noir Night Editor. Never saw her before. When she and the detective witness a woman being clubbed to death while they're sitting in a lover's lane, the Carter character suddenly starts yelling, "I want to see the body." Man, when this lady asks for a "date" with her cop lover, you know she's not fooling around. This actress was far more convincing as a dangerous seductress than most of the other actresses playing those roles in the 40s and 50s, with the exceptions of Barbara Stanwick and Gloria Grahame. What a waste that she didn't appear in more and better noirs.

The nifty little B Noir is part of the Bad Girls of Film Noir series. The picture is really worth seeing just to see Janis Carter in action. Her frenetic desire to see the body after this guy had just bludgeoned this girl to death was a scene to remember. But she was really the ice lady that giveth and Janis Carter just kept on giving with her icy grip on the the cop and her ability to out maneuver just about everyone.

I had never seen Janis Carter in a B Noir movie but if this is what she is capable of then some of her others might be worth looking for. The words just one more kiss really take on true meaning with Janis Carter. But watch out for that ice pick.