Midnight Manhunt (1945)

This one is rather boring and could have been better if they left out the lame comedy (mainly from Clutch Tracy) and turned it into a pure mystery-thriller! This one really is "stagy" and seems to drag in lots of places. For me, the only parts that are somewhat good are with George Zucco and he's not in the film all that much it's mainly the other cast members that take center stage or should I say center "stagy"?! This one is a case of who has the corpse now and takes place mainly in a wax museum or Sue Gallagher's (Savage) upstairs apartment, which is above and within the wax museum.The film is "okay" I guess but definitely NOT Zucco's nor Savage's best film - this might be their worst film or pretty close to it.3/10

This was the only film Leo Gorcey made outside of the East Side Kids series which would soon become the Bowery Boys after a year or so. He plays a worker at a museum that displays dummies of gangsters. The stars are William Gargan and Ann Savage as a couple of reporters mixed up in the mystery which takes place during one late night a murder takes place. I'll just now say this was quite a compact thriller with plenty of good humor to liven the proceedings. Among the players is someone from my favorite movie-It's a Wonderful Life, a Charles Halton-who was Carter, the bank examiner in IAWL- who has quite a lot of screen time here as the easily tired owner of the place! So on that note, I recommend Midnight Manhunt.

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.