A tough crime nugget here that is part
romance, part buddy movie and part police procedural. It adds up to something
pretty good. The title refers to the night shift when the cops have to deal
with the scum, the hoodlums, the punks, the gangs that come out after dark.
It is their job to keep them in check. The cops are the good guys in this
one. Back in 1950 that is how the police were almost always portrayed in
films.
Purvis (Edmund O'Brien) and Barnes (Mark
Stevens) are partners on night patrol whose friendship goes back to Guadalcanal
as marines. Every night it is something different - delinquents with guns.
Stink bombs thrown through broken windows and murder. Sometimes the good
guys win, sometimes they don't. Into their lives comes a good girl - the
daughter of a cop killed on duty - and both men become attached to her. But
it doesn't really go down that potential pitfall that I was dreading fortunately.
She is played by Gale Storm who was one
of Monogram's biggest stars - Monogram being a low-budget film studio. She
made a bunch of films for them but her success came later as a singer (selling
over a million records) and in TV. She had two big shows in the 1950's -
My Little Margie and then as they often did back then, a show named after
her - The Gale Storm Show. My mom was a fan of that one.
O'Brien who has never appealed to me that
much though he was quite popular back then is terrific in this film playing
his character very naturally going from Mr Nice Guy to a sudden rage against
the creeps he has to deal with. In fact, everyone does a good job with dialogue
that feels real. Also doing nicely is Donald Buka as the main killer, Gale
Robbins who is his girlfriend and sings a couple songs and Roland Winters
as the mob boss - he played Charlie Chan a few times at the end of the run
for the Chinese Detective. Winters needless to say is not Chinese.
