My suspicions were immediately aroused when Eddie Muller, in his intro, opined that the star of this film is its cinematographer, George Diskant. Uh oh, I thought. Guess we're in for some flat writing. And I was not wrong. How flat? Well, let's just say that were it not for an interesting queer spin on the anger of the patrolman played by Edmund O'Brien, an interpretation advanced by Eddie in his outro and with which I generally agree, there is nothing going on below the surface of this first buddy cop movie. And it's not as if the surface is all that scintillating either! Take away Diskant's night time, noir-ish camera and some well handled violence from director Gordon Douglas (as per usual) and it's basically a character desert in Eugene Ling's pallid screenplay, with caricatured, one dimensional villains, floozies, street kids and cops other than O'Brien vying with an extremely dull romance between Gale Storm and Mark Stevens. C plus.
Review of Between Midnight and Dawn
