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.
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