Movie Review: Bowery at Midnight (1942)
Synopsis: During the daytime, Professor Brenner is a noted expert teaching a college class in criminal psychology. At night, he runs a soup kitchen in the Bowery neighborhood of Manhattan, where he recruits men to help in his criminal endeavors, often killing them after the job is done (or as a distraction during a daytime robbery). What Brenner doesn't know is one of his accomplices, the drug-addicted Doc Brooks, has been conducting experiments on the bodies of the men he has killed.
Who's in it? The movie stars Bela Lugosi, John Archer, Wanda McKay, Tom Neal and Lew Kelly.
Review: I've had Bowery at Midnight in my movie library for several months and, while I did start watching it at one point, I just now finally got around to seeing the entire movie this morning. While I wouldn't describe this as one of Bela Lugosi's better movies, it still turned out to be a reasonable choice.
Professor Brenner (Lugosi) was an intriguing character, running a criminal enterprise from a soup kitchen while successfully maintaining a double life that included a respectable job and even a marriage to a woman (Anna Hope) who had no clue about his nocturnal activities. It established him as a cold, calculating and highly intelligent character.
His habit of killing his henchmen added an entertaining twist to the film. In addition to showing Brenner's ruthlessness, it put him in a position where one of his own men could attempt their own violence just to stay alive. Between that and Doc Brooks' (Kelly) secrecy about what he was doing behind a locked door in the basement, it set up all sorts of ways for the movie to end and kept it from becoming predictable.
The other wildcard was his soup kitchen assistant, Judy (McKay). I thought it was a bit interesting he'd hire someone who didn't know about his criminal enterprise, and I wondered what kind of role she'd end up playing, especially when her boyfriend, Richard (Archer) went missing not long after meeting Brenner at the soup kitchen.
My biggest complaint about the movie, other than maybe wanting to see a bit more of Brenner's wife (to better establish how she could be so clueless when her husband was never home and was buying her expensive gifts), was the ending. It seemed a bit rushed and completely skips over how Richard, who appeared to be dead and, later, possibly a zombie, seemed to be perfectly OK right before the end credits. It was almost as though the film cut out some important pieces of information to meet the hour-long runtime. Either that, or the writers didn't have any way of explaining it so they just didn't.
Final Opinion: Lugosi does a great job creating a villain who is as intriguing as he is ruthless. I did, however, feel like the movie's short runtime kept it from feeling as complete as it could have been, with a rushed ending and some elements that could have been explored in a little more depth. An extra half hour could have made this film a lot better.
My Grade: B-
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Here are some reviews of other movies starring Bela Lugosi:
Movie Review: The Thirteenth Chair (1929)
Movie Review: Mark of the Vampire (1935)
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