BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Oslo Jargo (Bartok Kinski) Between Midnight and Dawn (1950) (Alert of spoilers) Edmond O'Brien is on the beat as a "prowl car cop" with his partner. It starts out good then delves into personal relationships and avoids anymore gritty noir. There's a decent car chase scene, some bad script continuity like the cops finding the car that shot up one of the main cop protagonists with ease and no stand out villains (think Lee Van Cleef in Kansas City Confidential (1952), Neville Brand in D.O.A. (1950) or The Mob (1951), William Conrad in The Killers (1946) and Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death (1947).) The ending is ridiculous as well, since one lousy main bad guy (Donald Buka) takes a young girl hostage and one hundred cops show up with searchlights.Edmond O'Brien is his usual big-mouthed self, annoying us plenty; he's better as a villain.Still, worth a look for the old city view (Pacific Electric Building, Los Angeles, California (1905)) and lovely Black and White Film.City That Never Sleeps (1953), a Republic Pictures noir with Gig Young as a cop on the beat, is a lot better.

Spikeopath Between Midnight and Dawn is directed by Gordon Douglas and adapted to screenplay by Eugene Ling from a story by Gerald Drayson Adams and Leo Katcher. It stars Edmond O'Brien, Mark Stevens, Gale Storm, Donald Buka and Gale Robbins. Music is by George Duning and cinematography by George E. Diskant. Stevens and O'Brien play two prowl car cops, long time friends who fall for the same woman (Storm), but that could never come between them. That's the job of rising crime boss Ritchie Garris (Buka)... On the page it looked as if it easily could have got bogged down by romantic threads and buddy buddy cop formula. Thankfully that isn't the case. Finding its way into a number of film noir publications, it's a pic that only just qualifies on account of certain narrative thematics and the night time photography of the always excellent Diskant. On its own terms anyway it's a damn good policer, one that is handled with knowing direction from Douglas and features the reassuring presences of Stevens and O'Brien, both of whom play cops with different attitudes to the job, but both believable and never played as trite good cop bad cop fodder. In the lady corner are Storm and Robbins, the former in the middle of our twin testosterone fuelled coppers, and the latter the gangster's moll. Both sultry and beautiful - even if Storm is sporting a hairstyle that equally is both distracting for the character and does her obvious sexiness no favours, but both the gals are written with thought and performed as such. Then there is Buka as scumbag Garris. This character clearly has ideas above his station, something which our coppers gleefully like to remind him of. But Garris is a nasty piece of work, which ultimately leads us to a thrilling and suspenseful finale. Buka (The Street with No Name) really should have had a bigger noir/crime film career. Sometimes funny and laced with choice dialogue, this still also manages to impact with dramatic, suspenseful and attention grabbing scenes. This a film that's easy to recommend to lovers of 40s/50s policer movies; it's also pretty bloody for the time. There's a great crew behind this and they don't let anyone down. 7/10

dougdoepke No need to recap the plot.The opening scenes suggest this will be a tough-minded buddy picture, with the great Eddie O'Brien and a good-natured Mark Stevens playing the two prowl car cops. Fortunately, this buddy part is convincing. Add some jarring action scenes from much underrated Director Gordon Douglas, and there's considerable to recommend. Trouble is the later romantic parts shift the mood into none-to-convincing light-hearted comedy. To me, the shifts are noticeable, weakening the movie as a whole. Plus, I'm inclined to think Gale Storm is miscast as a police dispatcher, much too malt shop and glowing. Maybe it's the My Little Margie factor, for which she was perfect. Nonetheless, there are a number of nice touches, such as the funny looking little boy, some good snappy lines, along with songbird Gale Robbins to add atmosphere. All in all, the 90-minutes doesn't fit easily into any category. It's mostly a crime drama, yet lacks the moral ambiguity of true noir. Still, any chance to catch Eddie O'Brien, one of Hollywood's best actors, makes the movie worthwhile, along with the great action scenes.(In passing—can't help noticing the similarity of this 1950 screenplay to 1952's The Turning Point. And that's down to even O'Brien as the luckier of the two buddies, William Holden being the other buddy. I wonder: could it be that Hollywood would actually recycle a plot just two years later—then again, do mosquitoes bite.)

disinterested_spectator Most of us understand that when we watch an old movie, allowances must be made for the times in which it was produced. There are some people who refuse to do this. They will hold a movie made fifty years ago to the same standards we have today, being outraged when, for example, Walter Neff in "Double Indemnity" says he has a "colored woman" come in and clean his apartment once a week, as if he should have known to say "African American" in 1944 when the movie was made. On the other hand, there are times when even with the best will in the world, we find ourselves appalled at what we see or hear in an old movie, as is the case with "Between Midnight and Dawn."In a way, the sexism of this movie is the only thing remarkable about it. Otherwise, it is a routine story about a couple of cops taking on some mobsters, about which little needs to be said. And as for the sexism, I am not referring to the difference between the two cops regarding women who associate with hoodlums. Dan thinks they are no good and hates them, while Rocky believes that some of them are just frails, basically good girls who have been led astray. At the end of the movie, when a gangster's ex-girlfriend takes a bullet to keep Dan from being killed, he realizes he was wrong and that his deceased partner was right. That aspect of the movie was the best part.It is the interaction between the two cops and Kate, who works for the police as a radio communicator. When they finally meet her, both men take a fancy to her and ask her to go to dinner with both of them, which must have seemed just as odd when this movie was made in 1950 as it does today. She declines their invitation, saying she has to work late, but they keep pressuring her. What they are doing borders on sexual harassment by today's standards, but by old-movie standards, she is wrong-headed for not going out with them, and they are right to keep pushing her. It is all supposed to be cute, but it is a little cringe-worthy.But it gets worse. At the end of the evening, she tells them she has no intention of going out with either of them again, because she does not want to become involved with a policeman. Her father was a cop, and she saw how her mother worried he would be killed, and eventually he was. But her mother does not respect her opinion, and the two cops do not take "No" for an answer, so the mother rents the other half of the duplex she and Kate live in to the policemen, her mother's way of playing cupid. And as they move in, they purposely make lots of noise, singing and hammering, until Kate goes to see what is going on.I know that the scene is played for laughs, but not only did I not laugh, it was at this point that my ability to make allowances for old movies gave way to sheer revulsion. Could it really be that audiences in 1950 approved of this behavior on the part of the mother and the two cops, and thought that what they did was appropriate? In any event, as per the usual wrong-headed-woman trope, Kate finally falls in love with Rocky and agrees to marry him. Rocky is killed by a gangster later in the movie, but Kate tells her mother that even though her worst fears were realized, she was still wrong-headed about not wanting to date cops, because otherwise she might have met Rocky earlier, and they could have had a few years of being happily married anyway.Then, to really cap things off, when Dan admits he was wrong about the gangster's girlfriend at the end of the movie, Kate puts her arm through his and they walk off together, giving us just a hint that they might end up getting married eventually, which is pushing it, since Rocky was only recently killed.Well, enough of that. I said earlier that the outrageous sexism in this movie is the only notable thing about it. That is not quite true. Clint Eastwood once said that before Sergio Leone made "A Fistful of Dollars" (1964), movies never showed the person shooting and the person being shot in the same frame. He was wrong about that, there being several movies before 1964 in which shootings were filmed that way. This movie is one of them, there being two such scenes, one near the beginning and one near the end.