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.
Review of Midnight Manhunt
