Bowery at Midnight

Authorized by the Estate of Bela Lugosi

Wallace Cox's Bowery At Midnight (Monogram 1942) is a linchpin of the so-called "Monogram Nine" -- a run of small-studio starring pictures tailored to the marquee value and generous artistry of Bela Lugosi. The bigger studios, of course, were still keen upon exploiting the Lugosi mystique, but they no longer had the gumption to deploy him as a topliner.

Taking a vital cue from rival studio PRC and The Devil Bat (1940), producer Sam Katzman's Monogram-affiliated partnership enlisted Lugosi to deliver a sustained body of work. Katzman often voiced regret that his outfit was insufficiently well-heeled to "give ol' Bela the best that he deserved, but he seemed to enjoy working on these little pictures of ours. O' Bela -- what a menshch!"

Bowery At Midnight is suffused with that cold grey weirdness so characteristic of its studio. The film presents Lugosi in three guises -- an opinionated psychologist, a grandfatherly do-gooder, and a snarling boss-mobster. Lugosi conveys particularly well a detached personality conflict raging between the questing intellectual and the murderous gangster. All this, and an incidental campaign to raise the dead, too!

-- Michael H. Price
Author of Forgotten Horrors