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| Publicity picture of Alice White circa 1931 |
Director: Frank R. Strayer
Main Cast: Aileen Pringle, Alice White, Hale Hamilton, Robert Elliott
"A sophisticated, expensively-dressed group of people gather in a spooky old mansion to watch the first performance of a play. The highlight of the production is a realistic on-stage murder, wherein the victim is shot point-blank, right through the heart, as the clock strikes 12. The audience applauds enthusiastically as the 'victim' falls dead, but the applause subsides and gives way to screams of terror when it turns out that the murder is for real! With everyone in the mansion under suspicion - including, naturally, the butler - the cops are baffled, and even more so when the primary suspect ends up as victim number two. 'This isn't a murder case, it's an epidemic!' moans one of the detectives. Intricately plotted, and with a genuinely surprising solution, Murder at Midnight is far and away superior to your average low-budget mystery. Poor 'blonde dumbbell' Alice White was often given short shrift by bluenosed reviewers who found her coarse, but she is really quite amusing in this above-average whodunit from Tiffany Productions, which came with surprisingly sturdy production values and a good screenplay by W. Scott Darling and director Frank R. Strayer. So good, in fact, that Darling used it again in 1939 as Mr. Wong in Chinatown and for the 1947 Charlie Chan mystery The Chinese Ring. Neither of the remakes, however, employed White, whose starring career fizzled in the early '30s." - www.allmovie.com
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