Purely Joyful Movie!

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Excellent but underrated film

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

All in all, the programmer's a pretty obscure entry in the amateur sleuth sweepstakes so popular at the time. Here it's radio crime broadcaster John Howard and his spunky wife Margaret Lindsey trying to figure out who put a dead woman in his bed, much to wife Lindsey's chagrin. The trail gets complicated, such that the whodunit part is secondary to colorful byplay. Happily though, Lindsey really shines; in fact, her smile alone lit up my gloomy living room. It's really her spark that carries the proceedings.Then too, the little byplay with the prissy hat designer remains a comedy highlight. Too bad Keye Luke's factotum has to call Howard "master". Still, he shows his jiujitsu skills in spades, and without use of a double that I could detect. Note, the naughty innuendo around finding a strange woman in the marital bed, even if it is a double one. Apparently, censorship relaxed a bit on this one. Note also presence of Roscoe Karns as the humorous cop Cassidy, a role similar to his TV Rocky King, Detective (1951-54). Nothing special about the 57-minutes, even though the cast does its best with what amounts to a murky script that's better in parts than as a whole.

John Howard and Margaret Lindsay star in "A Tragedy at Midnight," a 1942 film from poverty row Republic Studios.Greg Sherman (John Howard) is a radio personality who solves cases that the police have failed to do. So the police hate him. His wife Beth (Lindsay) is a mystery writer. One evening, Beth goes out to visit her sister while Greg goes to a party. The next morning, he wakes up and nudges his wife, who doesn't move. When he looks more closely, it's not his wife, but a dead woman he doesn't recognize. She has a knife in her back.When Beth returns, she thinks he spent the night with another woman and calls the police. Greg escapes and, once Beth realizes the truth, the two of them try to find out the identity of the woman and also who killed her.This is a good mystery, actually, and it goes quickly, perhaps more quickly than intended since I understand the version on Netflix is cut. John Howard and Margaret Lindsay are fine. Howard calls her "Mommy," which William Powell calls Myrna Loy in the "Thin Man" films, so this is an unashamed ripoff. It probably was supposed to be a B version series of films as well, but it didn't happen.Keye Luke plays the couple's servant and he's not what one would call politically correct today.Entertaining.

Let's get over all this stuff about Powell-Loy. Howard-Lindsay hold their own in this Republic gem. I am all for 'the Republic for which it stands'.The plot, not too original but, who cares? It was carried out beautifully by a cast of some of the era's most popular character actors.The dialog, penned by a femme, was great fun and so well handled by John Howard and Margaret Lindsay. Why she never achieved greater fame, I will never know. She has a Lamarr-like beauty, gorgeous from any angle, and when it comes to line delivery excuse me - but - she equals Loy.The chemistry between the stars - and they are that - is beautiful, the dialog is clever and witty.The judo moves were very convincing as delivered by Keye Luke who also was A-plus in line delivery."A Tragedy at Midnight" is thoroughly enjoyable at any hour.

I become aware of Margaret Lindsay fairly recently, (not through her more famous films where she had a supporting role to Bette Davis, but) through the low-budget mystery film series "Ellery Queen", where she played the title character's loyal and smart secretary, Nikki Porter; her presence brightened up those films, and I became a fan. Now I will watch any mystery movie that Lindsay made around that period (let's say, 1935-1945), and she made plenty. But of course most of them are extremely hard to find today, even in DVD-R copies. Luckily, I did manage to get one such copy (of acceptable quality) of "A Tragedy At Midnight", where she is teamed up with John Howard, another actor prolific in this genre (he played Bulldog Drummond several times). Lindsay and Howard play a loving couple (he's a radio detective, she's a writer) who find a dead body in their own apartment (which is actually not quite their own apartment), and go on the run so that they can solve the case and prove their innocence. The two leads do click together, and Lindsay is once again delightful to watch. Keye Luke is also amusing as their jiu-jitsu-practicing butler! The film moves fairly fast and has more than enough twists packed into its short (just under an hour) running time. It's a pleasant watch, but more of an appetizer than a full-course meal. **1/2 out of 4.