Audience Member
Down right sleazy noir, not great but very entertaining, cult noir for sure, either love it or hate it, I love it
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
05/23/23
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Audience Member
if my mom was around to see this she'd say, cheaters never prosper' and here is an example of it in this noir from the end of the first cycle.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
01/21/23
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Audience Member
I may've been in the wrong mood for this one, as it felt as if it took it forever to really get interesting, but the back half of the movie grabbed my interest a bit more, so I'm giving it a middling rating.
Stick with it, it's worth it.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
02/07/23
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Audience Member
sleazy and low down like every noir should be. janis carter is ridiculously good here
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/09/23
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Audience Member
Neat low budget noir out of the top drawer. Deliciously sleazy femme fatal Janis Carter enjoys the aphrodisiac effects of death and being bad, while the Detective William Gargan cannot resist her, despite his struggles with his own conscience.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/15/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Night Editor should not be considered a noir. Yes, it has many trappings of the noir narrative: the detective in a moral quandary, a femme fatale, heroic figures giving in to temptations, smoke-filled night-time offices and cars parked in lonely ditches. But this story is told via flashback by a seemingly unrelated "night editor" of a newspaper, playing cards and attempting to enlighten an employee who's been giving in to temptations himself. It turns into a plodding, oversimplified morality play, like one of those original stage productions about depression or quitting drugs in non-profit houses performed by non-actors reading their scripts in hand in front of an audience purely comprised of friends and family. Its ending is painfully trite and manipulated, and the only reason it's considered a noir is because it's a B film from the 1950s with the trappings listed above, not because any fatalistic themes or challenging drama comes organically from the material.
Though the majority of the movie is a prolonged flashback set in the early 1930s, absolutely nothing would have seemed out of place in a contemporary story set in the mid-1940s, from music to dà (C)cor to hairstyles to wardrobe. I guess it doesn't matter. I don't think we're supposed to feel the time is important, so no attention is really paid to its details. There's a different, though, between playing with narrative time and ignoring it. The difference is not absolute. Nothing is, in my opinion, when it comes to making a good movie. Sometimes we love certain movies for the same reasons that other ones disappoint us, so here the issue could easily lie more squarely in the realm of the drama's believability than technical points.
The clichà (C) portrayed in so many impressions of old-movie acting seem epitomized in Night Editor. The characters so frequently come off as if they've prepared to change their minds, prepared to feel a new emotion, prepared to experience a big realization, act in response, comprehend, when if the actors and filmmakers want us to be with them on those feelings, they need to be completely instinctive, natural things, particularly in a life-or-death state of affairs involving murder or the outing of devastating secrets. The acting feels so affected and put on, indicating changes instead of allowing them. Janis Carter is intriguing regardless, because she perfectly befits the calculating society dame who gets her thrill by being exceedingly cold and injurious. She's devious, hardhearted and knows how to employ sex to get what she wants.
Based on a radio series, it was designed to launch a film series that never materialized. My guess is that the aim was to create a string of hour-long B films like this one, each a different story our eponymous editor would impart. But what of this editor? What does this outer story have to do with the inner one? William Gargan is the noir protagonist who has everything he wants and is not happy in spite of it all, until he tumbles and sees what he'll lose. That's interesting, but having his story surrounded by a moral present-tense waters it all down, and all the dark austerity of the night scenes and the dimension of cheap, tawdry lives is all rendered insignificant, because by the end, it's as if we've played the parts of children being told an old wives' tale about what naughty things not to do or else.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
01/19/23
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