Midnight Manhunt (1945)

Lack of good storyline.

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Good movie but grossly overrated

Better Late Then Never

You know you're in for a breezy lightweight comedy during the opening credits of "Midnight Manhunt." The illustrations depict happy, upbeat cartoon characters, while the Alexander Laszlo score sounds bright and chipper. An infamous gangster who has been missing for five years perishes at the hands of a murderous thief. Nevertheless, the gangster manages to survive long enough to leave his hotel and die in an adjacent wax museum. A variety of characters find and lose the body throughout the action in his modest forerunner of the "Weekend at Bernie's" movies or Alfred Hitchcock's "The Trouble with Harry." The saving grace of this mystery-thriller is director W.C. Thomas' nimble pacing. The believable cast adds some humanity to this predictable potboiler. Nobody here found greater fame in Hollywood. George Zucco is sufficiently sinister as a pistol-packing hoodlum, while Leo Gorcey mangles the English language with such abandon that he could be Mrs. Malaprop's son. Here's an example of Gorcey's dialogue: "Do you not never read no newspapers?" When a cop believes that he has seen a dead gangster, Gorcey cracks, "He's suffering from optical delusions." Detective Lieutenant Hurley sums everything up succinctly, "Maybe I'm crazy. I've never been on a case like this before: trying to find a corpse that somebody stole." Afterward, he adds: "Who in the blazes would want a corpse in the first place?" Basically, the David Lang screenplay boils down to somebody meets corpse, somebody loses corpse, and eventually somebody gets corpse back again. This is the kind of serviceable nonsense that insomniacs would find tolerable.

William Gargan and Ann Savage play a pair of reporters for rival papers who were once involved, but now are trying to top each other for a scoop involving the shooting of a man thought to be long dead. George E. Stone starts out the film as quite lively, but right at the beginning he's shot by George Zucco and then Stone has quite an odyssey once he doesn't have a pulse.After being shot Stone staggers over and dies in a nearby wax museum that is run by Charles Halton and his loquacious assistant Leo Gorcey. As it happens Savage lives above the museum. Between Halton and Gorcey wanting to dispose of the body and Savage and Gargan trying to scoop the other this film gets pretty funny at times. And of course there's Zucco who wants the body for his own nefarious purposes.Midnight Manhunt is a great example of some really creative people with little budget turning out a pretty good piece of entertainment. Those creative folks are the fabled B producing team of William Pine and William Thomas. Check this one out folks, you won't be disappointed.

Funny how you don't have wax museum pictures anymore. They seemed to be a staple product back in the day, with pictures like 1933's "Mystery of the Wax Museum" and 1940's "Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum". One might consider 2005's "House of Wax", but that doesn't count because Paris Hilton was in it. "Midnight Manhunt" doesn't have 'wax' in the title, but it gets some mileage out of the theme with the presence of The Last Gangster Wax Museum. I had to scratch my head over that actually, as I couldn't figure out what the reference was supposed to represent. Probably not important.At the center of the story is a corpse, compliments of George Zucco, who murders a fellow criminal to procure a quarter million dollars worth of stolen diamonds. He could have left well enough alone, but for some reason decided he needed to get rid of the body. (It's explained later on for anyone willing to buy it, but I don't have that kind of dough.) This could have been your standard Forties crime programmer, but the presence of Leo Gorcey added an offbeat comic element to it. Gorcey uses a line about having 'optical delusions' that I'm sure I heard in one of his Bowery Boys flicks, but he outdoes himself with this one - "You are now gazin' on the nucleus of a neurotic". Seems he was mixing up his movie genres.The picture's real focus though is on reporter Sue Gallagher (Ann Savage) and her on and off romantic rival Pete Willis (William Gargan). Gallagher discovers the body of mobster Joe Wells on the museum staircase, and figures to cash in on a scoop and a five thousand dollar payoff for proving Wells' whereabouts, dead or alive. It was curious to me how Zucco's character Jelke followed a trail of blood spots from Wells' apartment to the wax museum and the hot shot police force couldn't have done the same. Zucco seemed just a bit too refined to get involved with murder and mayhem here, but all that changed when he used the butt of his gun to knock out Miss Gallagher. I had to replay that scene twice, thinking I had witnessed an optical delusion.

"A dead body is discovered in a wax museum and two rival reporters compete to break the story in this fast-paced, tough-talking crime caper. Renowned criminal Joe Wells is shot in his hotel room and stumbles into a wax museum, where office boy Clutch (Leo Gorcey) sweeps the floor and butchers the English language," according to the DVD sleeve's synopsis, like he does in the "East Side Kid" movies ("I figgered this whole thing out by a process of mental reduction")."Feisty reporter Sue Gallagher (Ann Savage) discovers Wells' body and rushes to file the scoop, but is interrupted when her part-time lover and news colleague Pete Willis (William Gargan) learns of the story. Tensions flare up even more when Wells' killer (George Zucco) corners Sue in search of the corpse, unaware that Clutch has found it and moved it out of the museum!" "Midnight Manhunt" wastes an interesting cast and setting in a careless execution.*** Midnight Manhunt (7/27/45) William C. Thomas ~ William Gargan, Ann Savage, Leo Gorcey