Rent Midnight Menace (1937)

An Eye Upon the Near Future - and Beyond - Midnight Menace review by CH

How many who enjoy Danny Green as a crook in Alexander Mackendrick's The Ladykillers recall that he appeared, again as a heavy, in a film which was the first upon which that celebrated director worked? This was Midnight Menace (1937), its initial story supplied by Macendrick. Three years before enemy bombers appeared over London, this is exactly what happens in the film - albeit robot controlled and on behalf of a fictional country rather than Germany.

The plot - seemingly fantastic as it is, even more presciently making use of a flatscreen television screen on a wall - is the usual one of a few, working on a tip, against both mighty forces and those who, more preoccupied with England's fate in the Test Match, dismiss such fears as scaremongering.

One reporter has been driven fatally off the road by the enemy agents in the opening moments, and his sister (Margaret Vyner) who is also on the newspaper soon works in tandem with its political cartoonist (Charles Farrell) who finds that adversity requires more of him than ink and pen as he comes up against sinisterly smooth diplomat Fritz Kortner (familiar from Pandora's Box).

All this is the stuff of derring-do, of hiding off smart corridors and in low alleys as events turn skywards, searchlights picking out the planes. That so much of this is the work of models does not lessen an impact which also owes something to much-populated scenes redolent of League of Nations meetings subverted by the demands of arms manufacturers set to prosper yet again upon war breaking out anywhere.

A film which should be better known.