THE MIDNIGHT WARNING

US, 1932, 63 minutes, Black and white.
William Boyd, Claudia Dell, Huntley Gordon, John Harron, Hooper Atchley.
Directed by Spencer Gordon Bennett.

The Midnight Warning is only of historical interest, the type of film made with a small budget for supporting release in the early 1930s.

The film is confined to rooms, with a great deal of dialogue, making it the visual equivalent of a radio program. The staging and some of the performances are more than a bit stilted.

A brother and sister arrive in the US from Sumatra, following up on an inheritance. At a hotel, delegates gather for an international conference and a detective and a doctor are in a room, discover the remains of a human ear in the fireplace, and the doctor is suddenly shot from outside and collapses. Later, there is a further firing from outside.

The sister arrives back at the hotel where the staff act in a very sinister fashion, obviously concealing something. They say they have no knowledge of her brother or her booking into the hotel days earlier. Then she is taken away. In the meantime, a young man, friend of the woman, is unmasked as the person firing through the window but explains to the doctor and the detective the situation.

Eventually, everybody goes to the morgue where the young woman is being confined, the authorities that be determined to intern her as insane. There is a rescue, the confrontation, and an explanation that audiences would not be expecting: that the couple brought the bubonic plague into the United States, the hotel authorities didn’t want the conference to be closed down and so covered everything up, taking the body of the man to the morgue, putting the sister into an institution, rearranging the room, burning the body – hence the burnt ear (which we are told takes longer to burn than the rest of the body!).

All solved. And everything more righteous than it seemed earlier in the film. It is pointed out that a similar plotline was used in the British drama of 1951, So Long at the Fair.