Midnight Manhunt (1945)

That was an excellent one.

Sick Product of a Sick System

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

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.

Weak comedy involving murder, criminals and missing corpses, all with a newspaper and a wax museum setting. George Zucco, the British Erich Von Stroheim, is in the first scene shooting an alleged crime figure and for the rest of the movie, he's hunting down the corpse which walked while still alive into the museum and ends up being lost. The comedy comes in the form of reporter Ann Savage and museum worker Leo Gorcey (of the Bowery Boys series) and their efforts to find the corpse and get it to the police so the murder can be solved. It's all pretty confusing and silly and ultimately it really makes absolutely no sense. For a movie made from the Pine Thomas division of Paramount studios, this proves after "One Body Too Many" and "Scared Stuff" that comedy was not their forte. They did mostly war movies, so it seems out of their element. Savage better the same year when she starred in the film noir "Detour". Zucco comes off unscathed as the villain. Leo Gorcey is, while playing Slip Mahoney, although with a different character name. It's adequate for an hour long time filler with a few amusing lines, but the plot is absurd behind belief.

Ann Savage and William Gargan star as rival newspaper reporters in this wild murder comedy complete with wax dummies, a wandering corpse, dumb cops, and George Zucco at his sinister best.Leo Gorcey is very funny as a helper and general chatterbox at the Last Gangster Wax Museum. He toys around with the electric chair exhibit and tosses off a fair number of Bowery Boys-style malapropisms ("It's an optical delusion"). Zucco opens the picture by creeping into a hotel room, shooting a man and stealing a small case of diamonds; besides the mysterious Zucco and the adventurous reporters, police detectives Paul Hurst (dumb flatfoot) and Don Beddoe (harassed and exasperated lieutenant) are soon also attempting to track down the murdered man's body, which appears then disappears more than once.A silly subplot concerns Savage and Gargan—a onetime romantic couple for whom, as Gorcey puts it, "the milk of romance slightly curdled." Gargan persists in disrupting Savage's efforts toward solving the case and landing the big story, for reasons that are less than clear; their conflict is supposed to be cute but is instead mildly irritating. Overall, it's predictable but still very enjoyable; while the dialog may be lowbrow, it's still moderately clever, and good humor and energetic performances make up for lack of suspense and surprises. Good fun for fans of B movies—or any of these stars.

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.

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.