Bowery at Midnight (1942)

Although not as much fun as such other Bela Lugosi poverty row features as Devil Bat or The Invisible Ghost, Bowery at Midnight provides a decent amount of entertainment over its spare hour-long run time. Aside from Bela, the only other really notable names are actor Tom Neal, star of Edger Ulmer’s fatalistic Noir classic Detour, and our old friend producer Sam Katzman. Man, that guy had his fingers in a lot of pies. Cheap, small pies with thin hard crusts and lacking much filling, but pies nonetheless.

We open on ‘Fingers’ Dolan escaping from prison. This features ‘action’ music familiar to anyone who’s seen Spooks on the Loose. Having coshed (killed?) a guy for his suit, Fingers seeks to blend into the dross of society down in the unnamed city’s Bowery district. Overhearing a couple of your typical Comic Indigents—let’s just say this film is no My Man Godfrey—Fingers heads over to the Friendly Mission for a free meal. By the way, I don’t find the word ‘indigent’ very funny, so I’ll call the indigents hobos from now on. I realize these guys are not in fact hobos, because they don’t travel around. Also, they tragically lack bindles.

The Mission, much beloved by the hoi polloi for providing free meals sans any preaching, is run by Bela. The overall set-up is reminiscent of Dead Eyes of London, aka The Human Monster, a Brit Edgar Wallace adaption that also starred Lugosi as a homicidal criminal mastermind leading a double life. In fact, he does one better here, where Bela actually plays a homicidal criminal mastermind leading a triple life.

Also on hand is the kind hearted and pretty Judy, who performs light nursing duties for those who show up injured. All we see her do is disinfect a couple of minor wounds, so I’m not entirely sure if she’s an actual nurse or not.

The genial, seemingly altruistic Bela clearly—and I mean clearly, the guy’s played by Bela Lugosi—recognizes Fingers. Bela quickly hustles him to his hidden back office, which itself has yet a further hidden entrance to a basement lair. There we find Doc, a broken-down rummy or hophead who used to be a prominent physician, and ‘Trigger’ Stratton, inevitably a gunsel. So we’ve got a safecracker nicknamed Fingers, and a gunman named Trigger. Not the most imaginative bunch, these criminals. The basement also offers a DIY graveyard, the bodies denoted with neat little placards, that’s right out of Arsenic and Old Lace.

Bela is, as you might have guessed, in actuality a crime boss, and Fingers, an old associate of Trigger, eagerly signs on. They rob a jewelry store that night, and Trigger is displeased but regretfully complies when Bela suddenly orders he rub out Fingers. Fingers is also displeased, in case you were wondering.

Bela is one of these Blofield bosses who is constantly killing his henchmen. I’m not sure how he manages to keep recruiting guys—especially if he’s killing them after one job—but there you go. I would have at least dropped in a line about how the recently escaped Fingers was too hot not to get rid of. Fingers’s body is left in the vault, adding a morbid punchline to an otherwise purportedly comic vignette featuring the manager and salesclerk of said jewelry store the next day.

Next we see Bela in a middle class home. He is presenting his wife with an expensive necklace, clearly from the jewelry store job.  Although a homicidal nutbag as a criminal, Bela seems quite legitimately doting on her. She likes the necklace, but would vastly prefer to spend more time together with him. She thinks he’s researching a book when he’s gone each night, obviously having no idea about his extracurricular activities.

Any you may have already suspected, this is an insanely busy script for an hour-long programmer. And we’ve barely cracked the surface. Indeed, for a patently cheap bargain basement flick, a fact amply revealed by the dingy sets, the script is weirdly ambitious in terms of constantly introducing new settings and characters. Many of these, like the jewelry store staff and a briefly seen Police Commissioner, pop up for a single extraneous scene. Hats off, I guess, to the filmmakers for at least trying to keep things moving. Anyway, over the remaining portion of the film we watch as:

• Trigger grouses to Doc about Bela’s shortcomings as a boss (something he might have wanted to convey to his “old pal” Fingers before that guy came aboard). Sadly for him, Bela has one of those all but science fictional—in 1942, anyway–closed circuit TVs. Obviously Trigger isn’t long for this picture.
• Meanwhile, we next meet two cop chasing a gunman on the lam as played by the aforementioned Tom Neal. This isn’t the kind of film that inspires many great performances, but Neal is pretty good as the baby-faced, psychotic hood. He also ends up at the Friendly Mission, and predictably ends up taking Trigger’s old job in the most direct fashion possible. I’ll admit that with the first gunman being called Trigger, I was hoping Neal’s character would be named Champion the Wonder Horse. Sadly, that didn’t come to pass. Instead, he’s named Frankie Mills.
• The cops earlier seen chasing Mills include earnest beat officer Pete Crawford and his fatherly detective mentor, who is nearing retirement. Crawford also notes that he’s bucking for a promotion, so that he can get married someday and have a passel of kids. Soon after, and rather astoundingly, despite the two exchanging shots with Mills, the mentor is only slightly injured instead of being tragically killed. I guess that hadn’t become a cliché yet.
• Later in the picture Crawford—who I obviously assumed to be the male lead—is called into the Police Chief’s office. “Turn in your badge!” the bewildered cop is told. But ho ho, it’s because Crawford’s getting his now retired mentor’s detective shield. At this point I was assuming Crawford would end up with innocent, do-gooding nurse Judy. The promotion certainly seemed to be moving things in this direction.
• Bela, Mills and another hobo Bela has dragooned execute a daring daylight robbery of another jewelry store. Lugosi’s ingenious plan? He tosses the hapless stooge off a building right across the street. When the resulting uproar distracts the locals, Mills knocks the store over. In case I haven’t made this clear, Bela’s kind of a dick in this picture.
• Since this plan involves luting several gathering opposite the in-progress robbery, I would have maybe killed the guy a wee distance off, but hey, it worked.
• We see Bela teaching class. His day job/identity is as a respected psychology teacher at the local collage. One of his students is Richard Dennison, an earnest, wealthy young chap who we later learn—rather coincidentally—just happens to be Judy’s fiancée. It’s a small world. Dennison is kind of a prig, though, telling Judy that no wife to be of his should be working in the Bowery among the riff raff. Judy bristles at this, and so I was still assuming Judy would end up with the nice, blue collar cop.
• Oddly, though, Dennison actually mulls over Judy’s points about the plight of the indigent. He talks to Bela—the latter in his professor persona, obviously—and tells him he wants to do his paper on the psychology of the poor.
• This takes him, three guesses, down to the Bowery. After a talk with yet another comical hobo, and then a comical haberdasher, a now poorly-dressed Dennison inevitably ends up at the Friendly Mission. He recognizes Bela, of course. The film’s undisputed comic highlight is when Bela in his thick Hungarian accent tries to throw his student off the scent by saying “You must have me mistaken for someone else.”
• Astoundingly, this ploy fails. Bela inevitable manuevers Dennison to the downstairs lair. By this time the kid clearly smells a rat, although he can’t believe his respected professor means him harm. Sadly, he is mistaken in that assumption. Indeed, Bela, again playing an epic prick in this movie, clearly drags the situation out, letting Dennison know he’s about to die. Mills is happy to oblige, and then he and Bela split to leave the disposal of the body to Doc.
• You might have noticed this picture so far is but a rather antic crime meller. However, about halfway through, Doc has a scene that suggests he has his own weirdness going on. He bed swings up (!) to reveal a secret medical bag and instruments. Later on we see he has one of the supposed graves rigged to also swing up (!) to reveal a secret sub basement. Good grief, who built this place? Even Fu Manchu would be impressed.
• Unlike the hobos and fugitives that are Bela’s normal victims, Dennison was a rich young scion, and moreover one of Bela’s student. With the cops on high alert, our newly minted police detective Crawford is quickly on Bela’s trail. In Bela’s most dickish scene yet, he murders his loving wife just before she can be taken in for questioning. By now it’s clear that both the jig and his double life are up, so there’s not even any real reason to kill her. Just clearing up the plot threads, I guess.
• Meanwhile, Judy has finally grown suspicious, and finds the basement lair. Sadly, she gets caught by Bela directly before he flees town. Before he can kill her, though, the cops start breaking in. Bela and Mills try to escape out yet another secret exit, but the alley has cops in it and Mills is shot down.
• Here we get the payoff to the brief scenes constituting Doc’s side story. He tells Bela he’s got a place he can hide, and sends a panicking Bela down into the subbasement. However, there Bela learns that Doc has brought back to life not only Dennison but also Bela’s murdered former gangland stooges, the ones meant to be buried in the graveyard. Luckily, Doc used to be an actual doctor, so we completely believe that he’s discovered a way to bring murdered men back from the dead. Anyway, exit Bela.
• In one of the weirdest damn codas I’ve never seen, we cut to Judy nursing a nearly fully recovered Dennison. (!) Apparently Dennison and Judy do end up together, so I guess all that stuff about Crawford needing a promotion so he could find a wife didn’t go anywhere at all. Also, the whole “oh yeah, we now have a process to bring even violently murdered dead men back to life” thing is in no way addressed. I don’t know, seems like kind of a big deal. I mean, they’re not even brought back as mindless zombies, which is what I assumed was happening. Dennison seems completely normal, though, so apparently they’re all good as new. Although mostly in prison, I guess, for killing Bela. I will say that “He deserved it, he murdered me earlier,” is a novel defense.
• OK, I might be thinking about all this more than the screenwriter did.