Sat 13 Feb 2021
A Mystery Movie Review by Dan Stumpf: UNDER COVER OF NIGHT (1937).
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews[5] Comments
UNDER COVER OF NIGHT. MGM, 1937. Edmund Lowe, Florence Rice, Nat Pendleton, Henry Daniell, Sara Haden, Dean Jagger. Screenplay: Bertram Millhauser. Director: George B. Seitz.
Under Cover of Night features Edmund Lowe as a classy cop who matches wits for 24 hours with assorted ambitious academics competing to be named Department Head at a prestigious University. One of them is not above murder, and none of them is above lying, stealing or sleeping around to achieve their ends.
This was written by Bertram Millhauser, who penned some of the better Sherlock Holmes efforts over at Universal, and here manages to make his cast both believably flawed and entirely sympathetic — with the exception of Henry Daniell, who rises to new depths of Nastiness as the Villain of the Piece, a prof who callously tosses a puppy out the window to provoke his wife (on whom he has been cheating while taking credit for her research) into a heart attack.
February 13th, 2021 at 6:18 pm
A couple of thoughts:
Life in academia was never anything like this for me. Maybe Mathematics Departments are immune to this kind of activity? Or did it go on and I never knew?
Also, just how many movies did Edmund Lowe make in which he played a classy cop or detective? I started making a list once, and I ran out of notepaper.
February 13th, 2021 at 6:45 pm
It would be a race to decided who played more detectives or detective adjacent characters, William Powell or Edmund Lowe. Lowe was no Powell, but he could always be relied upon for a good performance in this sort of role bringing more bite to the character than might have been indicated in the script, and here with a decent script doing much better than that.
Milhauser also wrote the screenplay for Lowe’s Philo Vance outing in THE GARDEN MURDER CASE, which he borrowed for the Holmes outing THE WOMAN IN GREEN, that to bring this full circle features Henry Daniell as Moriarity.
February 13th, 2021 at 8:14 pm
David, no doubt that Powell had more of something, but I always look for Lowe and never William Powell. Just a personal note.
February 13th, 2021 at 11:04 pm
Lowe over Powell for me too, but only by the narrowest of margins.
I have been looking for a copy to watch. It’s not on DVD or online (lots of Nick Lowe references, though). It’s said to show up on TCM every so often, so I may have recorded it at one time that it did, but then again I have boxes and boxes of old VCR tapes I really, really have to organize some day. I’ll keep it for now on my want list.
February 14th, 2021 at 7:44 pm
High praise indeed.
No backlash against ‘male actors with center part’ hair, around here.