One Dangerous Night (Columbia, 1942, releaned 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9:50 I ran another old-time “B” mystery movie on YouTube: One Dangerous Night, not to be confused with One Mysterious Night which we’d seen a few nights before. This was in the Lone Wolf “B” detective series instead of the Boston Blackie “B” detective series, though the Lone Wolf (Warren William) and Boston Blackie (Chester Morris) were both reformed jewel thieves who faced representatives of the official police who weren’t convinced they had truly reformed. Most of the movies in both series featured spectacular jewel heists, usually also involving a murder, in which the police at first suspect Our Heroes until Our Heroes come through and solve the crimes themselves. One Dangerous Night begins with a dramatic scene in which Eve Andrews (Marguerite Chapman) is driving frantically at night when her convertible car has a tire blowout. She’s anxious to get to a particular address and hitches a ride from Michael Lanyard, the Lone Wolf, and his valet Jamison (Eric Blore, who gets so much screen time my husband Charles joked that it seemed like a vehicle for him). The Lone Wolf’s biggest problem with Jamison is that the valet keeps wanting to steal valuable jewels and the Lone Wolf is all too aware that if any valuable jewels go missing from anyone whose path has crossed his, he’ll be suspected and end up in prison. Jamison steals a diamond-encrusted silver handbag from Eve and the Lone Wolf insists on returning to the house where they dropped her off so they can return the stolen bag.

What they don’t know – but we, the audience, do – is that Eve was one of three women who came to the house to meet Harry Cooper (Gerald Mohr), with whom they had run up gambling debts in the old days when Cooper ran a casino which the three women – Eve, Sonia Buddeny (Tala Birell in a nice hard-as-nails performance that’s the best piece of acting in the film) and Jane Merrick (Mona Barrie) – used to gamble. All three of them have important relationships that would be jeopardized if it came out that they had gambled at an illegal casino: Jane is the star of a play called Murder Will Out and the revelation that she once visited a casino would destroy her promising acting career. Sonia is the wolfe of a stuck-up doctor, Eric Buddeny (Gregory Gay), and Eve has an important social position that would also be jeopardized by the revelation that she’d hung out at a casino. When Lanuard and Jamison return to the home where they’d dropped off Eve, they find the place deserted except for Cooper – or, rather, his corpse, since just as he was presenting his demands to the three women (he wanted them to give him valuable jewels in exchange for his silence), the lights went out in the house and they heard a shot, which killed Cooper. Naturally the official police, Inspector Crane (Thurston Hall) and his typically stupid sidekick, Detective Dickens (Fred Kelsey, who made a career of playing dumb cops), immediately suspect Lanyard and he has to investigate and solve the crime himself to prove his innocence.

Lanyard learns that the night he died Cooper was scheduled to fly out of town on a plane with a woman, who turns out to be Patricia Blake (Margaret Hayes). Lanyard and Jamison are kidnapped by two crooks working for Arthur (Louis Jean Heydt – once again, why didn’t this charismatic, attractive and talented actor become a star? Why did he spend his whole career trapped in the salt mines of character parts?),who wants to keep the late Cooper’s blackmail racket going. But they escape with the help of Sidney Shannon (Walter Ashe), a gossip columnist who works the Broadway beat. Patricia shows up at the airport not knowing that Cooper is dead until she’s told that just as she’s about to get on the plane to meet him, and in the end it turns out that [spoiler alert!] the killer is Sidney Shannon, and his motive was jealousy. It seems he was married to Patricia Blake and he was understandably upset that she was going to leave him, especially for a criminal. It’s hard to avoid comparing One Dangerous Night with One Mysterioius Night since we’d seen both under similar auspices and both were Coilumbia “B”-series detective films featuring ex-crook characters in the lead, but One Dangerous Night is a considerably better movie even though its director, Michael Gordon, hardly has the auteur reputation of Budd Boetticher.

Gordon was an all-arounder whose most famous credits are the 1950 Cyrano de Bergerac with José Ferrer and the first Doris Day-Rock Hudson movie, Pillow Talk (1958). Gordon again worked with Doris Day in the 1964 film Move Over, Darling, with her, Jmaes Garner and Polly Bergen in the roles originally intended for Marilyn Monroe, Dean Martin and Cyd Charisse in the never-finished 1962 film Something’s Got to Give, itself a remake of the 1940 film My Favorite Wife with Cary Grant, Irene Dunne and Randolph Scott. This hardly seems like the best background to direct a mystery film with shadowy noir atmospherics but in One Dangerous Night – his first featire – Gordon turns in a marvelously professional job. It also helps that the script for One Dangerous Night by Donald Davis, Arthur Lipp and Max Nosseck (a German refugee who three years later turned up at Monogram to direct the film Dillinger after the Production Code Administration finally lifted its decade-long ban on films about the notorious real-life gangster) is a whodunit, and while the man generally considered the greatest suspense director of all time, Alfred Hitchcock, almost totally avoided whodunits, One Dangerous Night works a good deal better than One Mysterious Night, in which it’s all too obvious from the get-go who the bad guys are. It’s ironic that Warren William and Eric Blore ended up acting together in a series of crime films after they were in some of the best musicals in the 1930’s – William in Gold Diggers of 1933 with Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler and numbers directed by Busby Berkeley, and Blore in several Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies – but they’re fully professional here and they fully rise to the challenge. It’s also the first film in which Ann Savage appeared, though only in the minor role of Patricia’s sidekick Vivian, and she would have to wait for Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1946 film Detour to be in a film which showcased her (and, even more than Heydt’s, it’s baffling that Ann Savage didn’t become a star after her acid-edged performance in Detour).