Review of Lady at Midnight

A strange woman in a hat appears to a little girl in the middle of the night and is later found dead. No, the little girl isn't a 40's version of Rhoda in "The Bad Seed", but a cute kid, one of the few not to grate on the viewer's nerves with precociousness. Richard Denning and Frances Rafferty are her adoptive parents, caught up in the threat of losing their precious daughter (Lora Lee Michel) who seems much more natural than other little girls on the screen in the 40's, even box office favorite Margaret O'Brien. The mystery of what happened to this woman makes Denning and Rafferty fear that they may end up losing their daughter, but if the dead woman was her mother, then how would that happen, unless one of them was the killer? And why would a dead woman's will asking that her daughter, adopted by a couple years before, be returned to the orphanage be considered legal and binding?

A bit perplexing in detail, but this is a puzzle with some pieces difficult to fit...at first. Second string studio B movies often utilized more difficult stories for the audience to easily figure out. Eagle Lion released dozens of films like this each year, basically taking over where PRC had stopped. In supporting parts, Ben Welden provides comic relief, while Nana Bryant, Jackie Searl and Ralph Dunn provide more complexities to the story and mystery surrounding the dead woman. Fortunately this doesn't stretch out the complex plot to a running time where it becomes convoluted and senseless.