When a man called Jelke, aging and with wild eyes, turns a resident of the fleabag Empress Hotel into a corpse, he causes a major problem. The resident was Joe Wells, the biggest noise in the rackets who had a five grand reward on his head. And the biggest problem is that Joe Wells has been dead for quite a while. The second biggest is that the corpse keeps moving around, especially within the dark, creepy Last Gangster Wax Museum. It's hard to tell who is a waxy, dead-eyed manikin and who is a waxy, dead-eyed Joe Wells. But before long two smart-mouthed, competing reporters who used to be an item are going to get the truth.
It only takes 63 minutes for this low-budget B programmer to race through the plot, find a killer, discover the mystery of the mobile body, uncover just why Joe Wells was so mobile, and bring two competing wiseacres to the realization that some forms of cooperation can be pleasurable.
Except for the actors, that's all there is to this brief and dull excursion into low budget comedy mystery. If you're old enough, some of the names, or at least the faces, might bring a smile of recognition. Leo Gorcey plays Clutch, a language-mangling fixer-upper who works in the museum. George E. Stone plays the corpse. Don Beddoe is a detective and Charles Halton is the tired, tired, tired owner of the museum. Halton specialized in roles where looking like a small, aging accountant was a plus. Just to remind us that most B movie actors were capable of something more, watch Gorcey in Dead End (1939), Beddoe in The Narrow Margin (1951) and Stone in Some Like It Hot (1959) or any of the Boston Blackie movies.
Most especially if you're fond of nostalgia are the three leads whose careers were almost exclusively confined to tons of programmers. There's George Zucco as Jelke. Zucco was a fine actor in some good movies in the Thirties, but who, as he aged, settled for steady work in B movies. Occasionally he scored something that could use his talent. Just watch him as a cop in Lured (1947), mysterious and threatening and then a very nice guy, or in The Pirate (1948), perfectly at home in an outlandish costume as the Viceroy. William Gargan is one of my favorites. He almost always played tough, good-natured, energetic guys who always had an angle and a comeback. He plays reporter Pete Willis, a guy who always has an angle and a comeback. And, of course, there's Bernice Lyon as Sue Gallagher, the reporter who lives above the wax museum and who finds the body on the stairway to her apartment. She made 21 movies between 1943 (her first) and 1945 when she made the cheese B classic that put her in the books. She'd be long forgotten except for her memorable film name -- Ann Savage -- and the movie Detour (1945). So I guess Midnight Manhunt qualifies as at least a kinda- noir out of respect for Ann Savage and her over-the-top portrayal of that classic femme fatale named Vera, a woman with sharp nails.
It only takes 63 minutes for this low-budget B programmer to race through the plot, find a killer, discover the mystery of the mobile body, uncover just why Joe Wells was so mobile, and bring two competing wiseacres to the realization that some forms of cooperation can be pleasurable.
Except for the actors, that's all there is to this brief and dull excursion into low budget comedy mystery. If you're old enough, some of the names, or at least the faces, might bring a smile of recognition. Leo Gorcey plays Clutch, a language-mangling fixer-upper who works in the museum. George E. Stone plays the corpse. Don Beddoe is a detective and Charles Halton is the tired, tired, tired owner of the museum. Halton specialized in roles where looking like a small, aging accountant was a plus. Just to remind us that most B movie actors were capable of something more, watch Gorcey in Dead End (1939), Beddoe in The Narrow Margin (1951) and Stone in Some Like It Hot (1959) or any of the Boston Blackie movies.
Most especially if you're fond of nostalgia are the three leads whose careers were almost exclusively confined to tons of programmers. There's George Zucco as Jelke. Zucco was a fine actor in some good movies in the Thirties, but who, as he aged, settled for steady work in B movies. Occasionally he scored something that could use his talent. Just watch him as a cop in Lured (1947), mysterious and threatening and then a very nice guy, or in The Pirate (1948), perfectly at home in an outlandish costume as the Viceroy. William Gargan is one of my favorites. He almost always played tough, good-natured, energetic guys who always had an angle and a comeback. He plays reporter Pete Willis, a guy who always has an angle and a comeback. And, of course, there's Bernice Lyon as Sue Gallagher, the reporter who lives above the wax museum and who finds the body on the stairway to her apartment. She made 21 movies between 1943 (her first) and 1945 when she made the cheese B classic that put her in the books. She'd be long forgotten except for her memorable film name -- Ann Savage -- and the movie Detour (1945). So I guess Midnight Manhunt qualifies as at least a kinda- noir out of respect for Ann Savage and her over-the-top portrayal of that classic femme fatale named Vera, a woman with sharp nails.