Midnight Manhunt (1945)

Did you people see the same film I saw?

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Blistering performances.

Conventional Wisdom seems to indicate that this film retains some charm and entertainment value, in spite of its cheap jack budget, inconsistent tone, weak jokes and plot holes you could drive The Super Chief through (keeping with a 1940's reference).I'll have to go along. This low budget programmer was entertaining to watch in spite of itself. Everyone in the cast seems to be having a good time in their roles, and giving their all in spite of what was probably a one week long production schedule. The plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but that's part of the fun of the whole thing. Leo Gorcey does his usual thing with the street-wise attitude and a malaprop polysyllabary. My favorite Gorceyism involves Ann Savage's character, who lives in a "flea-bitten dump" of an apartment above the wax museum where most of the plot unfolds. The hero says that she's "gone upstairs for the night," to which the Gorcey character adds, "That's right. She is retarded for the evening." There are worse ways you could waste an hour, and Alpha Video sells many of them. This is one of the better flicks that they have scraped up from the bottom of the barrel. I would recommended it especially if you like Gorcey's malapropisms and the 1940's era "snappy" patois. You get plenty of "Why I oughta..." and "Say, what's the big idea?" You even get a character getting into a cab and spouting, "The Chronicle, Driver, AND STEP ON IT." I was waiting for one of the reporters to grab the telephone and holler, "Hold it chief, I've got an exclusive! STOP THE PRESSES!" or at least a paperboy hollering "EXTRY! EXTRY! READ ALL ABOUT IT!" Too bad I got cheated there, but this movie is a bit of fun, overall.

After Scared Stiff, Ann Savage played the feminine lead in Midnight Manhunt, in which she is relentlessly put down by charmless William Gargan – not one of my favorite leading men by a long chalk. David Lang's script is one of those affairs in which a collection of not overbright characters get themselves involved with murder and missing jewels on the flimsiest of pretexts. As a time filler, this little "B" is overladen with dialogue but still plays with reasonable celerity, thanks more to the sterling efforts of an A-1 support cast led by Leo Gorcey and Charles Halton than to any input from dull, relentlessly plodding, over-emphatic direction from co-producer William C. Thomas (of the Scared Stiff Two-Dollar Bills).

There isn't much to say about this one. It involves a body (which should be decomposing) being dragged around by a series of people. There are a couple of reporters who use absolutely no common sense in the process of trying to use the body to get a scoop. There's Leo Gorcey, playing the Bowery Boys character, with the malapropisms and the general insensitivity. George Zucco is running around, trying to get his hands on the body. Keeping a low profile probably would have protected him, but this doesn't occur to him. Everything is silly and far fetched and probably played well in a theatre on Saturday afternoon as a bit of escapist drivel in the forties.

The sole reason to watch this B-movie is the cast of veteran actors which includes George Zucco and Leo Gorcey, and who give the material more care than it deserves.The plot concerns the "now we see it, now we don't" game thats played with the corpse of a murdered man. The man was a notorious killer who had been missing for five years before turning up near a wax museum. I won't spoil what happens since despite all the flaws can be quite entertaining if taken on its own terms.The film suffers from two problems. The first is a cheapness that, while not truly bad, makes the wax museum seem more like a cardboard dive then a real place. The other problem is that the script, while containing funny lines, moves everyone around in a rather awkward manner as if they had to fill out several sections of the movie until its time to move to the next location. Neither problem is deadly, rather they are annoying in the "If they just didn't do that this would be so much better" sort of way.If you should see this on TV or on the bargain video rack, by all means venture to dive in, since while its not the best of its type, its pretty damn good thanks to the great cast.