Midnight Manhunt

Released Jul 27, 1945

1h 3m

Comedy

Mystery & Thriller

List

Reviews

Audience Score

Fewer than 50 Ratings

Two reporters (William Gargan, Ann Savage) search for a missing body in a wax museum.

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Audience Member

Colorful characters liven standard missing-corpse plot--Fun old movie!!

Rated 3 out of 5 stars

02/22/23

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Audience Member

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 about newspaper reporters and the police. Nobody here found greater fame in Hollywood. George Zucco is appropriately sinister as a pistol-packing hoodlum, while Leo Gorcey serves as comic relief. 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 uniformed 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. A quarter of a million dollars worth of diamonds is at stake in this 64-minute melodrama. The villain wants to recover the body so he can dispose of it. The reporters want to find the body so they can get a scoop for their papers. The police want the body because he is a missing criminal. This is the kind of serviceable nonsense that insomniacs would find tolerable.

Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars

01/17/23

Full Review

Audience Member

Great little "B" film from the 1940's, good cast, a nice balance of crime drama, comedy and mystery. Very typical of the period, that is part of what makes it enjoyable. Leo Gorcey makes a rare appearance outside of the Bowery Boys.

Rated 3 out of 5 stars

01/30/23

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William C. Thomas

Director

William Gargan

Pete Willis

Ann Savage

Sue Gallagher

Leo Gorcey

Clutch

Don Beddoe

Max Hurley

Paul Hurst

Murphy

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Synopsis

Two reporters (William Gargan, Ann Savage) search for a missing body in a wax museum.

Director: William C. Thomas
Screenwriter: David Lang
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Production Co: Pine-Thomas Productions [us]
Genre: Comedy, Mystery & Thriller
Original Language: English
Release Date (Theaters): Jul 27, 1945, Original
Release Date (Streaming): Jan 23, 2017
Runtime: 1h 3m

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