Midnight (1933) opens promisingly with the camera lovingly panning across numerous faces in a courtroom before settling on a nice close-up of Humphrey Bogart. Unfortunately, from here on, our interest takes a gradual nosedive – especially when we discover that Bogie's big climactic scene is not going to be played on camera at all but simply reported to us by Miss Sidney Fox. True, it's not Sidney's fault that Bogie is wasted, but she herself is rather colorless in this one – and at least one of the two directors bypasses Sidney altogether and allows stagey O.P. Heggie to collar the limelight. But it's Helen Flint's movie. In the small but vital role of the condemned murderess, she is utterly convincing. Available on a superb Image DVD. Incidentally, this is a 1933 production. The movie was produced independently and shown to various distributors before being picked up by Universal in 1933; and Universal was mostly interested because they had Fox under contract. Universal applied for the copyright in 1933, and said copyright was granted to Universal on January 2, 1934.
Review of Midnight
