User Reviews

A nice short (55 min) "B" picture with a good cast of MGM stock players. Robert Young is pleasant and keeps this murder mystery in proper perspective.

For me, the real highlight was seeing Sidney Tolar playing the police honcho who conducted the investigation. It's the only time that I have ever seen him in any role other than Charlie Chan. To hear him talk that tough New York police lingo without a Chinese accent was fun for me. If I had no other reason to watch this film, Tolar, alone, would be sufficient.

Being of such short duration, the movie moves quickly. It's a good thing because (and I say this with reverence) this flick has "B" movie written all over it. Enjoy............

This is a fairly entertaining programmer featuring Robert Young in his early screen career. He is again teamed with Florence Rice, an up and coming actress who never quite made it in the big times, though she showed potential. Of interest is Ted Healy as Police Sergeant Magee (yes, another dumb detective/policeman role). Healy was the comic responsible for introducing The Three Stooges to the world. That may be a blessing or a curse depending on how much you like Moe, Larry, and Curly.

"The Longest Night" is a compact comedy thriller with the entire story taking place on one night (hence the title) at one location, a department store, except for the opening sequence which takes place on the street. Sidney Toler, in his pre-Charlie Chan days, has the meaty part of Captain Holt, the one in charge of the investigation when a murder occurs in the store. The cast includes an assortment of character actors including the often corny Olin Howland as a floorwalker.

Thought there is much attempt at humor, most of it is lame by today's standards. Many of the supposedly funny lines fall flat; even the slapstick seems forced. This film would have played better with less comedy and more thrills and chills.

Taken as a short murder mystery, "The Longest Night" works. Taken as a comedy, it falls on its tush.

Store clerk Eve Sutton is the lookout for her comrades as they steal from the department store. Her sister Joan Sutton reports her suspicions to her supervisor Mrs. Briggs. Store owner's son Charley Phelps is taken with Joan. When Mrs. Briggs' dead body is found, the police investigators descend upon the store and round up everybody.

Fifty minutes is not really a full film but it's not a short either. It has the form of a whodunnit in a locked room. Only it has non of the tension. The attempted comedy is not funny. If anything, it loses any tension with the bumbling cops routine and the ridiculous actions. The cops don't call for backup. They don't try to barricade the civilians in a safe room. It's a lot of bad character work as people are literally getting murdered and nobody seems to behave realistically. It needs to be a slapstick Scooby Doo whodunnit adventure if it decides to be an actual comedy.

Longest Night, The (1936)

*** (out of 4)

Surprisenly effective mystery from MGM runs just 50-minutes but there are plenty of smiles and drama along the way. A department store owner (Robert Young) shows up at the store to do some business when one of his workers is found strangled to death. The cops are called in and they demand that everyone there remain in the store until they can find the killer who in return keeps killing more people. THE LONGEST NIGHT is the shortest film I can think of that MGM made around this time but no matter what the length is, the film remains an entertaining little gem thanks in large part to some nice characters and performances. Even by 1936 this type of mystery film had ran its course but it's easy to see why studios made them since they could do them cheap and it probably wasn't too hard to turn a profit. The actual story here, outside taking place in a department store, really doesn't offer anything new or original as we get the typical story of a wide range of characters being thrown together and one of them is the killer. The nice thing here is that it's never obvious who is doing the killings or why and I really enjoyed how the film slowly gave out clues and pieces to what's actually going on. Another major plus is that the cast members are so entertaining that you can't help but have fun with them. Young is as charming as always and he has some nice chemistry with Florence Rice who plays one of the worker's whose sister might be involved in the crime. Ted Healy and Sidney Toler are both in fine form here so fans of theirs will enjoy seeing them here. Julie Haydon, Leslie Fenton and Samuel S. Hinds. At just 50-minutes there's really not too much time for a lot of plot but I think that's a good thing because the film is extremely fast-paced and this help builds up some nice drama at the end. There's also not any boring dialogue to slow things down so this is a good example of the running time fitting the story and had they forced ten or twenty more minutes worth of footage it's doubtful the film would have been as entertaining.

This is the type of film that ran on late night TV in the early 50s. The difference from then to now is that this 55 minute film would been placed into a 90 minute time slot and interrupted at every reel change with 8-10 minutes of commercials. Considering that its MGM, the acting and plot are inane but production value quite good. It would be fun to have the Mystery Science Theater crew commentate.

Even though this murder mystery starts off silly, it ends up being quite a fast-paced movie with lots of action and entertaining sequences. A murder takes place in a department store, and until the murderer is discovered, everyone is locked in with a few policemen all night. There are two sisters, Florence Rice and Julie Haydon, one of whom is dating a jewelry thief, Leslie Fenton, as well as a kleptomaniac, Etienne Girardot, and both the old owner of the store and the new buyer, Paul Stanton and Robert Young. Will police chief Ted Healy be able to find out who's guilty and why?

How do you keep everyone entertained in one room of a department store? By opening up the rest of the department store, restoring a previously unused elevator, and having the lights go out! Robert Young is busy wooing Florence, but since Julie is implicated, he's got a bigger job on his hands than to score a date for Saturday night. Before long, everyone's gone from suspect to detective and have to work to prove their innocence at the expense of someone else's guilt. Check this one out if it appeals to you!

I have to say that I really enjoyed this film. I generally don't go for old movies, especially those in black and white, but this one really caught my attention. I found this film entertaining even though it seemed like some issues were left unresolved, but all in all it was definitely worth watching. It also ended the way I wanted it to, which is a plus!

Department store owner Robert Young (as Charles "Charley" Phelps Jr.) arrives to consider selling his asset, then stumbles upon a strangulation victim. He orders a lockdown and cooperates with lawmen Sidney Toler and Ted Healy. Connected to the victim is pretty Florence Rice (as Joan Sutton), who provides Mr. Young with romance. She is the sister of beautiful Julie Haydon (as Eve), who helps boyfriend Leslie Fenton (as Carl Briggs) rob a warehouse in the opening sequence. All are suspects, some are victims. "The Longest Night" is so short you don't have time to wonder who may be guilty.

**** The Longest Night (10/2/36) Errol Taggart ~ Robert Young, Florence Rice, Sidney Toler, Julie Haydon

Robert Young is at the department store for the first time in five years to sell it. He is distracted by some of the goods on sale and clerk Florence Rice. He is delayed when a corpse tumbles out of his private elevator and the police come to investigate.

Robert Young may have been one of the stars at MGM, but with more stars than there were in heaven, he was not of the first magnitude. In this, the shortest of any MGM feature, there are a lot of character actors to fill up its 51 minutes, and lots of gimmicks on display, but not much for the bland Young to do. Even the support wind up fairly bland, with Ted Healy as a cop, Sidney Toler as a (Caucasian) police captain, Samuel Hinds as the store's manager and Etienne Giradot as a kleptomaniac millionaire. It's undistinguished and painless.

"The Longest Night" is a great and entertaining motion picture. Set in a department store, the participants include two sisters, the young owner of the store, annoying little brats, a kleptomaniac, a murderer and assorted cops. The movie had suspense, thrills, romance and laughs. What more could you ask for? Its short length meant a sad lack of screen time for the lovely Robert Young. But, as the saying goes, always leave them wanting more!!

B-movies were short and relatively low-budgeted films intended as a second film in a double-feature. Usually, there was an A-movie, some more prestigious and larger-budgeted film as well as the B....along with various shorts (such as a cartoon and/or a news reel) shown at most theaters during this era. Many of them were made by small studios like Republic or Monogram and many more were made by practically microscopic studios that actually didn't own their own studio space but rented it from a larger studio and filmed mostly at night. But what many folks don't know is that the biggest studios ALSO made Bs, and "The Longest Night" is clearly a B...and it is from MGM...the largest and fanciest studio of the era.

So why is "The Longest Night" a B? Well, at only a paltry 51 minutes, this alone would make it a B-movie. But it's also a fancy B (almost a B+ film if there was such a thing), since it's cast has some A-list actors, such as Robert Young who is in the lead.

"The Longest Night" is a murder mystery. Apart from westerns this was probably the most common genre for Bs. A few of these mysteries were very good. Most, sadly, are filled with cliches and are very formulaic. Despite "The Longest Night" being a higher-budgeted B from MGM, I'd place it in the latter category...being mostly formulaic and cliched.

What are some of these cliches and formulas? Well, in this case you have the typical idiot cop investigating (Sidney Toler is particularly one-dimensional here), his even stupider sidekick (Ted Healy is practically sub-human in his stupidity and uselessness), a smart civilian who for no discernible reason is practically Sherlock Holmes (Robert Young) as well as predictable scenes, such as one where someone says "I didn't kill her, but I'll tell you who did..."....and a shot rings out and kills them!! In other words, no matter how enjoyable all this is, it's also predictable and a bit silly. This clearly is NOT a thinking person's mystery and it obviously was hastily written. On the plus side, however, the cinematography is unusually good and the film is slick looking and enjoyable. Overall, a very mixed bag.

Robert Young is likable in the romantic thriller. Florence Rice is, too, as the worker in his father's store for whom he falls. A couple murders are committed. The police, including Sidney Toler, investigate. (Almost the whole thing takes place on the premises of the store.) During the period such B-movies in this very overworked genre usually are still turning up clues, this solves the mystery. Very unsatisfactorily, I might add.

Julie Haydon plays Rice's sister. She is said to have been wonderful in the original stage production of "The Glass Menagerie." And she's fine here. But, though it has several plots going on at once, to a degree it's more short subject than full-length movie.

Playboy owner Robert Young and buyer Florence Rice team up in record running time to solve two murders occurring at the department store that Young is the heir to, Janet Beecher and Leslie Fenton are killed, they are mother and son and Fenton has a sweet little racket involving the store.

Trying to get this one done in record time results in a movie hodgepodge. And the comedy of the inept police Sidney Toler and Ted Healy is most unfunny.

5 years later this was redone as a comedy with the Marx Brothers and some songs from Tony Martin and Virginia O'Brien. One of the few cases where a remake vastly improved the original product.

It reminds me of a radio play, where voice, the dialogue carries it. It moves at a fair chip.

The department store, for those of us that remember individually owned ones, the vibe, where you were waited on, just a wonderful background, like a crime in a museum.

Seeing Sidney Tolar is an added bonus.

This film has to be remembered for its record short 51-minute running time and for being the only film that includes the former head of The Three Stooges, the future Charlie Chan, and the future Marcus Welby.

It truly was interesting to see Ted Healy, who performed for a while and made some early talking movies as "Ted Healy and his Stooges," before Healy split up with the Howard brothers and Larry Fine, who seemed to do fairly well without him.

It was fascinating for my first ever look at Sidney Toler playing a role other than Charlie Chan. He was a tough-talking New York police captain and one of the lead roles in this film.

Of course I went for Robert Young's other famous role, his long-running successful doctor drama in the 70s, long after his biggest hit, Father Knows Best ended its comedy run of 11 years, 5 on radio and 6 on TV.

Young was not the biggest star in Hollywood before the television era, but he sure did star in a lot of movies, many of which were very entertaining, and I now include this film as one of them.

The top female role went to Florence Rice, who was a fairly big star in the 1930s and who seems both pretty and a pretty-good actress to me. I recently learned she was the daughter of he legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice, creator of the famous poem about the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, and noted for unwittingly helping a young Ty Cobb advance to the major leagues without knowing he was being tricked by Cobb, who himself wrote letters supposedly from all sorts of people telling about the young baseball wonder.

The story is almost totally focused in a department store about to close for the evening-at 5 o'clock. Retail workers of today would love it if they never had to work later than 6 p.m., I'm sure. The store's P.A. is calling for a Charles Phelps to report to the main office. Phelps is the store's owner, who inherited it from his father a few years back and who has been an absentee owner. He is supposed to sign papers with two men waiting in the store manager's office upstairs to sell the store to them.

Now the major plot actually deals with one of the store's salesgirls (that's what they were called then) who is in love with a young man who is part of a gang that steals items such as jewelry and sells them to stores-including this store-at a great discount. Before long, someone if found murdered in the store shortly after it closed, leaving just enough suspects for Charlie Chan to have fun with, if only he was around.

The sister of the girl involved also works at the store and she enlists Charlie to help her, because he has offered and seems like a nice, if odd, man. Speaking of odd, one of the two men wanting to buy the place is such a kleptomaniac, he keeps lifting items from the store and his partner's wallet, politely giving them back and apologizing all the while.

I'd describe this as a mostly dramatic show with some comedy. It was a lighthearted movie about murder-think of any of a half dozen detective series in the past 40 years including Murder She Wrote, Matlock, and Diagnosis Murder. It wasn't padded with boring portions to fill in a required 85 minutes or so running time like most feature films, thus it never got boring. More than a couple of the characters were likeable-something that is sometimes missing from similar films, including one I just watched, the Fallen Sparrow. Also unlike that film, I wasn't confused by what was happening in The Longest Night. So I happily score it an 8.

As I watched this film I thought that "The Longest Night" was an incredibly short film, and indeed, it is apparently the shortest feature film MGM ever made. Nevertheless, it is an entertaining little murder mystery that's well worth a watch of under one hour.

There is a problem here, however. The director and writers tried to make a film that was both a mystery AND a comedy. There are elements of both here, but it's a mix that doesn't quite work. They might better have made a mystery OR a comedy. There are fine comedy bits here, as well as fine dramatic moments, but they don't mesh.

The performances, however, are quite good. Robert Young may be the only person in the film you readily know, and he is quite good here. And although you won't probably know many of the other actors is this B film, you'll recognize many of them. Two are worth mentioning, albeit in a negative sense. Did either Ted Healy (earlier associated with The Three Stooges") or Sidney Toler (of Charlie Chan fame) actually have any acting ability????? I guess this sounds like a negative review, although I don't mean it to be. This was an entertaining film...and a little different...and worth watching with a t.v. tray and dinner in front of the television. But just once.