The Midnight Story (1957)

The Worst Film Ever

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This is vintage Tony Curtis when he acted in notable films like "Sweet Smell of Success" with Burt Lancaster and "The Defiant Ones" with Sidney Poitier, and this is perhaps the best of them. It all happens in San Francisco, when a Catholic priest is brutally murdered by getting knifed in the back, and immediately the mystery arises: whoever would want to do so such a thing to a priest who was beloved by all? And there are no clues to the mystery whatsoever. Tony Curtis is a cop and has been raised as a an orphan by the murdered priest, he carries the coffin at the farewell service and there meets a fellow Italian who appears to be burning in hell. Curtis immediately gets a hunch, the faintest of leads by a mere feeling, and lays down his badge to start a private investigation of his own.What follows is a Dostoievskian psychological drama. Gabriel Roland plays the Italian father who welcomes Curtis as one of the family, and he finds happiness and even a perfect fiancée in the family (Marisa Pavan, like another Natalie Wood as the West Side Story Maria). The character and development of this film is very much like Edward Dmytryk's "Give Us This Day" about Italian immigrants in Brooklyn 1929, but this is more interesting psychologically. The crisis is inevitable, which breaks out into a total tragedy - which proves to have been the only happy solution.It's a tremendous film, and it will remain actual forever and of as lasting an interest as any Dostoievsky novel.

While "The Midnight Story" is not among Tony Curtis' more famous films, it is among his better films. The fact that it's a story told without spectacle (such as in "The Vikings") might just account for it being lesser-known...but it deserves to be seen and appreciated.Joe Martini (Curtis) is a cop who is incredibly upset following the brutal murder of a local priest. This kindly man had helped Joe when he lost his family and Joe is determined to investigate the murder on his own when the detectives can find no leads. So he takes a leave of absence and follows up his one very tenuous lead...a man he saw at the funeral who seemed more affected by the priest's death than anyone else. So, Joe befriends Sylvio (Gilbert Roland) and tries to slowly and casually investigate Sylvio's actions the night of the murder. However, something unexpected happens...Sylvio is so taken with his new 'friend' that he invites Joe to live with him and his family. Now, Joe's in a bind...as he's practically family with the man who MIGHT have killed the priest!The acting is very good in this one and Gilbert Roland and Tony Curtis put in really nice performances. Additionally, the story is well written--with a dandy finale. Well worth your time.

This is really a great early role for Tony Curtis. Curtis plays Joe Martini, a San Francisco cop who got his job on the force through the recommendation of Father Thomasino, and who was in an orphanage from age six after the death of his parents, with Thomasino taking him under his wing and being a father figure to him. So naturally Joe takes it personally when Thomasino is murdered in an alley by an unknown assailant. The priest is beloved in the neighborhood, had no enemies, so the police are stumped. However, they get tired of rookie Joe butting in during the investigation and he turns in his badge so he can investigate on his own.He has one hunch. He was a pallbearer at Thomasino's funeral, and on the way out of the church he sees a man in great distress, his hands clutching a rosary so tightly his fists are bleeding. The man is Sylvio Malatesta (Gilbert Roland), who owns a local fish market. So Joe goes undercover, posing as a guy looking for a job saying that Father Thomasino was going to recommend him to Malatesta, but that he died before he could. Well, it works. Not only does Malatesta give him a job, he invites him to bunk with his family for awhile. So Joe quickly becomes friends with Sylvio, he actually likes him, and in the Malatestas he finds the family he never had.There are a few weird things about Malatesta. Apparently he has walked the floor of his bedroom for years - he still does. And he was once engaged to a girl in Italy during WWII, but then she died and he has shown no real interest in marriage since. So Malatesta is indeed a troubled soul, but his troubles predate Thomasino's death by years, and he has an apparent alibi for the night of Thomasino's murder. Can Joe punch holes in that alibi? Does he even want to now that Sylvio's family has become like his family? Watch and find out.Roland and Curtis are great in this. They have a real brotherly chemistry that makes this film worth watching every bit as much as the murder mystery itself. The only bad thing I can say about the film are the Italian stereotypes. Marisa Pavan plays Sylvio's cousin Anna who plays it over the top with her Italian shrew routine who is either bubbling with anger that comes out of nowhere, slamming doors and throwing things, and then suddenly she is all sweet and doe eyed. It did get tiresome. Then there is Mama Malatesta who acts like a calmed down version of Anna. But besides that, I'd highly recommend this one.

One night in San Francisco's seedy North Beach neighborhood, a beloved priest is attacked in an alley and stabbed to death. A traffic cop (Tony Curtis), who grew up in the orphanage the priest ran, takes the murder particularly hard but sees it as his chance to advance to the homicide squad. At the funeral, he spots a man (Gilbert Roland) so shaken that his rosary has cut into his hand, drawing blood. Curtis follows his hunch that this man knows something about the murder.Posing as a young fisherman fallen on hard times, he gets a job in Roland's crab shack on Fisherman's Wharf. Next, he's invited to live in the home Roland shares with his mother and his cousin (Marisa Pavan – Pier Angeli's twin sister). And for about half the movie, the noirish plot about the murder gets shoved onto the back burner like a kettle of red sauce in favor of an Italian-ethnic family drama (Curtis falls for Pavan, who plays hard to get, and so forth).Though it seems as if director Joseph Pevney has lost track of the suspense story, he hasn't – he interweaves it into the family dynamics. When Curtis finds out information that he thinks exonerates Roland, he's so relieved he asks Pavan to marry him. But at the engagement party, he discovers that Roland's alibi is full of holes....Falling late in the noir cycle, The Midnight Story recalls in its theme of a priest's killing (and in its San Francisco setting) the haunting little noir Red Light, of 1949. Red Light was pretty hard-core, while The Midnight Story is watered down with heart-warming vignettes. Still, it's more than an honorable try. Curtis doesn't make the role as unforgettable as Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success the same year, but he doesn't embarrass himself, either. Roland comes close to overdoing the lusty fisherman, but instinctively pulls short. Pavan, however, looks and acts like Natalie Wood as Maria in West Side Story. Special mention, however, ought to go to Jay C. Flippen, as Curtis' `rabbi' in the police department; one of the unsung stalwarts of the noir cycle, he brightens the screen whenever he turns up because he's sure to polish up a little gem of a performance.