Oof.  This may be the most daft film noir I actually enjoyed.

The movie begins with a priest getting stabbed to death in a dark alley.  Tony Curtis was a ward of the orphanage the priest ran.  Now a motorcycle cop, Curtis presses his superiors to let him go undercover to investigate a hunch he has for who the killer might be.

Let’s break this down, and I’ll add in some more details along the way:

• Curtis is a traffic cop, not a homicide detective
• He has a “hunch” he knows who the killer is
• Said suspect drew the suspicion of Curtis because he was too emotional at the priest’s funeral
• See, this is why men aren’t supposed to cry—it could lead to you getting charged for murder
• The chief of police allows Curtis to go undercover to follow this “hunch”
• Curtis will end up spending a month undercover following this “hunch”
• So, the police department is apparently so well-funded they can pay a traffic cop to go undercover for a whole month to follow-up a “hunch” he has, and he has never worked homicide
• Curtis’s character uses his real name while undercover

Somehow suspending my sense of disbelief concerning all of the above, I found the movie quite compelling.  There’s a pretty decent mystery here, and I was guessing and second-guessing the killer until the end.

The house where Curtis goes undercover has a strong group of supporting characters, though the man suspected of murder looks unnervingly close in age to the actress playing his mother.  Also, he looks old enough to be his sister’s father.  Or maybe they’re just a very close family (*cough*).

The Midnight Story straddles an odd line between a decent, straight-forward thriller and a campy melodrama that doesn’t follow any of the conventional rules of the universe as we know it.  I can mildly recommend it to film noir fans, though I’m not entirely sure why.

Dir: Joseph Pevney

Starring Tony Curtis, Marisa Pavan, Gilbert Roland

Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray