Rent The Midnight Story (1957)

Home Cooking - The Midnight Story review by CH

“She's a real live, livin' doll.” No, it's not the Cliff Richard song. Two years earlier, in San Francisco, one of a group of querulous Italian-Americans had praised Tony Curtis's dancing partner (Marisa Pavan) this way in The Midnight Story (1957).

And she certainly is. As for Tony Curtis, think of him in the Fifties and there inevitably come to mind the same year's Sweet Smell of Success - and Some Like It Hot (1959), where he himself tried to be a livin' doll. The Midnight Story is in the shadow of these, and shadows it contains (along with hills if not cliffs). It opens with a priest caught in an alleyway at night, and killed; the rosary is between his fingers when he is discovered.

This is filmed in cinemascope, alas, for this late noir is very much one of confined spaces; happily, it is in black and white to match the nuns' outfits at the orphanage where Curtis grew up and was helped by that priest, who found him a job in the police.

He is shaken by the killing, and, although in the traffic department, suggests he help the homicide team; his offer declined, he turns in his badge and goes underground in pursuit of the man (Gilbert Roland) whom he saw in a strange state at the priest's funeral. Roland combines fishing with selling his catch is a restaurant while sharing a house with his cousin (Marisa Pavan) and her widowed mother (a strong, ever-aproned turn by Argentina Brunetti). In a manner typical of noir plotting, Curtis coins a story sufficient not only to get him a job with Roland but become so much a part of the household that he falls for Marisa Pavan.

Love and detection are uneasy partners. No need to say more about the course of events, Curtis frequently conferring with his erstwhile, otherwise stumped colleagues. Except one has to pause to credit a key, brief turn by a potential witness: Peggy Maley is here the archetypal flowsy blonde married to a man whose night shifts mean that she does not have to shield her roving eye. One could watch her in anything.

Joseph Pevney is not widely known as a film director. He worked mainly in popular television series whose audiences took scant notice of the figure behind the camera, but he should be esteemed for here bringing a noir turn to the domestic drama which was the work of Edwin Blum, who certainly knew what he was about: he had written Stalag-17.