Bowery at Midnight (Banner Productions, Monogram, 1932)

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

Last night, after we watched the stunning I Walked With a Zombie, my husband Charles and I ran a bootleg DVD of the 1942 film Bowery at Midnight I had just acquired for $1 at a library sale in North Park. Somewhat to my surprise I noted that I already had a post on this film on moviemagg, albeit from 2009 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/06/bowery-at-midnight-banner.html), and this time around Charles actually said he liked it a little better than he had when i’d shown it to him before. Bowery at Midnight is my choice for the best of Bela Lugosi’s nine films for Monogram and Sam Katzman’s Banner Productions, though as I’ve written before about these films any use of the word “quality” in connection with them must be prefaced by “relative.” They are all actually pretty bad, though when Tom Weaver asked several friends and critics to rank the Lugosi Monograms in order of “quality,” I was sufficiently struck by the concept that I wrote my own ranking and appended it to the end of my comments on Ghosts on the Loose, an alleged “comedy” featuring Lugosi with the East Side Kids and, as the female ingénue, a young and just ordinarily attractive Ava Gardner (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/12/ghosts-on-loose-bannermonogram-1943.html). I ranked Bowery at Midnight because its plot by Gerald Schnitzler and an uncredited Sam Robins, rips off elements from three much better movies. One is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (a mad professor who runs an institution and uses it as a front to commot murder), one the Lon Chaney, Sr. vehicle from 1926, The Blackbird (about a crook who runs a mission as a front for his crimes; in Chaney’s film we start ot by thinking “The Bishop,” the cripple who runs the mission, and “The Blackbird,” the crook whose ill-gotten gains finance it, are brothers, but midway through we learn they’re the same person, and the climax occurs when the cops catch up to “The Bishop” just as he realzies he’s been posing as a disabled person so long he’s really become one), and The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (based on a hit play starring Otto Kruger, though Edward G. Robinson starred in the film, and it’s about a psychology professor who decides to study criminal behavior by becoming a criminal himself and organizing his own gang).

Bowery at Midnight casts Bela Lugosi in two separate identities: as respected Professor Brenner, who teaches a college class on abnormal psychology; and as Karl; Wagner, who runs the Friendly Missioni in the Bowery district of New York City and secretly uses it as cover for his real enterprise, which is running a criminal gang. Schnitzler’s script is such a relentless pile of surrealistic plot gimmicks i’m tempted to joke that Bela Lujgosi probably was sharing a lot of his drugs with him (though accounts differ as to just when Lugosi became an addict, and the version I find most credible is that he got hooked after he was prescribed opiates as painkillers when he was playing Count Dracula for the second and last time in the 1948 spoof Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, six years after he made this film). Let’s see what you have to believe to accept this film at face value: Karl Wagner leads his crimes personally and always leaves behind a corpse of one of his fellow gang members at the scene (wouldn’t word get around the underworld so Wagner would have a hard time recruiting competent help?), whereupon Doctor Brooks (Lew Kelly, who’s made up to look so much like Boris Karloff I was wondering whether Monogram had thought of recruiting Karloff to play the role – only Karloff’s stint at Monogram had ended in mutual disgust two years earlier, and when this film was made he was on Broadway playing Jonathan Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace on stage), who lives in a sub-basement under the basement of the Friendly Mission.

Dr. Brooks is shown clearly and unmistakably as a drug addict – usually a bozo-no-no in films of the Production Code era – and though he’s a drunken and drugged-out wreck he’s also such a fantastically talented medico we’re supposed to believe he’s figured out a way to bring all Wagner’s victims back to life – either that or Wagner is such a bad shot he’s just wounded, not killed, them. Though Wagner is paranoid about anyone finding out about his other identity as Brenner (and vice versa), Lugosi wears the same character makeup as both and doesn’t attempt to alter his features the way Lon Chaney did in The Blackbird, which means he’s vulnerable to being recognized whenever anyone from one of his lives sees him in the other. The person who does that is Richard Dennison (John Archer), a student in Brenner’s abnormal psychology class and the boyfriend of Judy Malvern (Wanda McKay, who didn’t have much in the way of acting chops but was attractive and personable on screen), who is studying sociology and has volunteered at the Friendly Mission to learn more about homeless people. At the end Wagner has his latest recruit, Frankie Mills (Tom Neal, the one truly good actor in this film besides Lugosi, who just four years later would star in Edgar G. Ulmer’s vest-pocket film noir, Detour, at PRC),shoot and kill Dennison, but the skills of Dr. Brooks actually bring him back to life and pave the way for a reconciliation with Judy at the end – while Wagner is lynched by the revivified corpses of all the victims he had killed and Brooks had brought back to life.

Bowery at Midnight is a truly bizarre movie in the slapdash Monogram way; the story doesn’t make a lick of sense, and it’s never made clear why Lugosi as Wagner has a map of Australia on the wall of his office, but Charles liked the so-called “Droste effect” of Lugosi’s multiple offices, As Wikipedia defines it, “The Droste effect), known in art as an example of mise en abyme, is the effect of a picture recursively appearing within itself, in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear. This produces a loop which mathematically could go on forever, but in practice only continues as far as the image's resolution allows.” Though the multiple offices in Bowery at Midnight aren’t literally Droste effects, there is a private office behind the main hall of the mission, a sub-office in the next room separated by a locked door, a third office behind the previous two where Dr. Brooks literally brings back Karl Wagner’s victims from the dead, and a last room in the sequence in which Brooks keeps his revivified people, each one under a grave with a hinged door that can be opened from inside, from which they all emerge at the end to lynch Wagner.