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Surprisingly, Eddie Muller has admitted that there are some movies out that that might not be quite noir. At least, that's the impression I got when he presented one of his Noir Alley selections a few months ago, a movie called Between Midnight and Dawn. It's closer to a police procedural than a true noir, but at least you can see why Muller might have selected it for Noir Alley.

Mark Stevens is the nominal star here, playing Officer Rocky Barnes, a patrolman for the Los Angeles Police Department. He's on the night shift together with his partner and good friend Dan Purvis (Edmond O'Brien); indeed, the two served together in World War II and that's given Purvis a bit of a hard edge. There's all sorts of crime that the two could deal with, although they'll ultimately deal with one particular criminal.

Meanwhile, while the men are in uniform driving around in cop cars, there are women working for the force doing things like dispatching the cops. Rocky really likes the voice of one such radio dispatcher, and would like to find out who is behind that voice. Luckily for him, he eventually hears the same voice taking dictation for his commanding officer, so he finagles his way into the office to try to meet the woman. That woman is Kate Mallory (Gale Storm), and Rocky tries to get her to go out on a date with him.

Ulimately, Kate goes out with both cops, and the threesome winds up at a nightclub run by notorious gangster Ritchie Garris (Donald Buka). He's the sort where everybody knows he's really a notorious gangster, but nobody is actually able to do anything about it because he's so good at keeping the authorities from figuring out how he's actually breaking the law. Except that he's about to get too big for his own britches.

Garris' new scheme involves getting people into big gambling debts, and then having them sign ridiculous loan deals and putting up big private property like cars and houses as collateral. When the gamblers keep gambling, they won't be able to keep up on the payments, and Garris' loan company will be able to repossess the property. This leads to a murder that sets the crime half of the plot in action.

But there's a second plot as well, and that's Kate's relationship with the two cops. Both of them are smitten with her, but it's Rocky who has a much stronger desire for her. However, that desire isn't mutual at first. The reason is that Kate's father was on the force as well, and he was killed in the line of duty. So she doesn't want to get into a relationship with any cops, lest the man she falls in love with should suffer the same fate.

Between Midnight and Dawn is an effective enough little programmer, although it was apparently toned down quite a bit from what the producers originally wanted; thank the Production Code office for that. The two leads cops of course have to be virtuous with the bad guy getting it in the end, and that does admittedly remove a bit of the tension from the movie as opposed to having an antihero. So while Between Midnight and Dawn is watchable, there's also a reason it's not a particularly well remembered film.