The Horn Blows at Midnight

Another of the movies that I finally got around to watching in order to do a post on here is The Horn Blows at Midnight, another of those movies that's on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.

Jack Benny plays the third trumpet in an orchestra that plays for the Paradise Coffee radio show. The shtick of this show is that it's bedtime music, with an announcer hypnotically droning that Paradise is the coffee that puts you to sleep. As you can probably guess, this idiotic announcer puts everybody in the orchestra to sleep, and our third trumpeter starts having a dream sequence.

He's now in heaven, where his real-life girlfriend down on Earth, Elizabeth (Alexis Smith) is a harp-playing angel. One of the functionaries in heaven, the "Chief" (Guy Kibbee) has been looking at earth with a jaundiced eye. The planet hasn't been doing so well, what with all the war and destruction going on (the movie was released in 1945, a week after Franklin Roosevelt died). So heaven has decided that earth is going to be destroyed, by way of a horn being blown at exactly midnight.

However, the two guys who were sent down to destroy it decided they'd rather be human. Elizabeth just knows that her boyfriend (named Athanael up in heaven) is up to the job and it would give him a boost in status in heaven. So he gets sent down to earth to do it.

Naturally, problems ensue. He gets involved in an attempted robbery which, through a series of circumstances, results in a woman named Fran (Dolores Moran) trying to commit suicide. Our angel tries to prevent this and is successful, but in doing so, midnight passes.

Worse, the two guys who were sent down the previous night, the first trumpeter Doremus (John Alexander) and second trumpeter Osidro (Allyn Joslyn) decided that they wanted to stay on earth instead of destroying the planet. They've learned of Athanael's presence, and are determined to stop it by getting a hold of that trumpet.

Up in heaven, they know everything that's going on, and that earth has not been destroyed. Elizabeth offers to go down and help Athanael, and further complications ensue. Of course, as we already know, this is an obvious dream sequence running almost the entire length of the movie, so we know that the earth isn't really going to be destroyed.

Apparently the movie bombed at the box office, leading Jack Benny to joke about it on his radio and TV shows, much the way Johnny Carson would make fun of Bedtime for Bonzo because his Tonight Show director, Fred de Cordova, directed the movie. Benny joked that it was a terrible movie. But in reality, it's not as bad as he made it out to be. Sure, it's a bit of an acquired taste, and I think Benny really needs to be more of a supporting star with stronger leads around him. But it's no worse than a lot of silly plots for 1940s movies.

For people not so familiar with Benny, I'd start off with To Be or Not to Be, and then maybe go on to George Washington Slept Here. But for fans of 1940s movies, certainly give The Horn Blows at Midnight a shot