Leave me! Or my pet vampire will avenge me!
Midnight Limited (1940) is a story that missed its genre. Presented as a thriller/romance, the fact that the audience knows what’s coming really rather ruins the anxiety.
Because we know the good guys will win and the bad guys will lose.
The Midnight Limited is an overnight passenger train running from New York City to Montreal. On one run, the emergency stop signal is pulled, and a man disappears into the night. Another man is found in his room, tied up and robbed of a large sum of money. And a female passenger, Joan Marshall, is robbed of some legal papers of paramount importance.
The story then turns into a police procedural, as the railroad police, represented by personable ace detective Val Lennon, begin the lengthy process of tracking down the thief. The detective is busy romancing Joan on the side as well. But when one of his men is killed during a second robbery, things turn deadly serious.
We soon discover the ‘finger man’, who points out and arranges the robberies; his cohorts; and moving on to the how the robber / murderer disappears into the night isn’t hard to guess.
Far more anxiety could have been generated by leaving those questions hanging, by even making Joan a possible suspect. But they didn’t. They dolloped a bit of racism into the story, and left it at that.
And it’s not an unclever story. It’s just not told properly.
In case you have an hour to waste:
