This morning (Saturday the 20th) TCM is running the notorious flop The Horn Blows at Midnight. Chances are by the time you read you’ll either have already seen it or already missed it, and nothing I can say here will retroactively change that. But I’m going to yammer on about it for a few paragraphs because that’s what I do.
Regular readers of this blog know that “notorious flops” are always ripe for redemptive reappraisals. I’ve personally come out swinging on behalf of the likes of Popeye and Neighbors, my fellow Morlocks have defended the honor of Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate (not posted here, but by Greg Ferrara nonetheless. Go on click the link, you know you want to.)
But The Horn Blows at Midnight offers a special sort of edge case for this sort of approach, as we shall see.
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The Horn Blows at Midnight is a 1945 comedy starring Jack Benny. That’s a straightforwardly factual statement and not even I would waste time challenging it. Legend has it that Horn Blows was such a commercial fiasco that it scuttled the movie career of Jack Benny. The primary architect of this legend was Benny himself, who famously quipped, “When the horn blew at midnight, it blew taps for my movie career.” But this is where I do intend to raise my hand to say, “Uh, no.”
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In the film, Benny plays an angel, Athanael, who is sent from Heaven with the mission to blow his trumpet at midnight to initiate the destruction of the Earth. At first he bungles the bugle-calling mission thanks to some slapstick, but then he falls in with various New York lowlifes—gamblers, hookers, some fallen angels—and becomes so touched by their lives that he decides not to go through with his second chance.
(For the moment I won’t worry about the fact that the film actually, unaccountably, presents this as a dream, because that framing device doesn’t really influence how the rest of the film plays).
The first thing to note about this curious setup is how singular it is. Various critics over the years have speculated that the problem was that audiences had lost their interest in fantasy after the slog of WW2, or that the recent death of President Roosevelt haunted the film’s fortunes. These conclusions are based on the assumption that, barring external cultural forces, audiences would have responded positively to a comedy about angels trying to blow up the Earth.
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Which, maybe they would have, had this film actually set out to explore that concept and its implications. Implications such as: has the human race forfeited its right to survive because of the atrocities of WW2? Does the messy rawness of ordinary life outweigh those global sins?
But the film isn’t really interested in exploring such theological questions—it sort of takes for granted that angels destroying the planet makes sense on the face of it, and just proceeds from there to go have fun with the angel-out-water comedy of Jack Benny trying to makes sense of contemporary Manhattan.
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Given that, you’d think the film would want to get the plot out of the way as much as possible—Benny’s early film comedies like Artists and Models were gloriously anarchic things with only the most threadbare of plots necessary to hold together a bunch of discrete comedy sketches. Paramount specialized in that breed of anarchic early talkies, and they worked wonders for the likes of the Marx Brothers, WC Fields, Burns & Allen, and other comedians liberated from the need to tell a coherent story. But audiences craved more structure—or at least movie execs firmly believed they did—and so the comedian-vehicle film evolved in the 1940s into a new creature. This new beast tended to invoke exceedingly generic plot structures (usually poached from crime films, or sometimes horror pictures) that could, by virtue of their familiarity, be trusted to do the legwork of holding the film together while the comics did their thing.
So it’s already an anomaly that Horn Blows opts for such a plot-heavy structure—enormous swaths of the film are given over the politics of Heaven, the machinations of the fallen angels, and the ways these plot strands swirl around Benny’s oblivious Athanael.
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Let’s pick out one scene as a case study: Having failed to blow his horn at midnight (because he was too occupied saving a desperate call girl from throwing herself off a hotel roof), Athanael comforts himself at a diner by eating everything on the menu. He orders ice cream sundaes, dill pickles, a plate of mussels, spaghetti, and keeps on going with no regard for how these things will taste together. The befuddled waiter watches in disbelief… and then Athanael tries to leave without paying his bill because he doesn’t know what money is.
Let’s be clear: this is unambiguously presented as a comic set-piece. It riffs on the classic Jack Benny characteristics—his otherworldly obliviousness, his fastidiousness, his miserliness—by serving them up in a slightly deconstructed arrangement. If you don’t find this entertaining, then Horn Blows isn’t for you. Except… even if you do find this entertaining, Horn Blows has so very little of this sort of thing, crowded out by the necessary plot mechanics, that you’ll likely leave frustrated.
I’m not going to go any farther in criticizing the film, because that isn’t what I’ve come to do. I wanted to lay out a bit of a taste of the film’s oddball missteps for those readers who haven’t sat through it before, but talking about what’s wrong with the movie implies it was the failure the legend says. Which it wasn’t.
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Like all of Benny’s movies, it made money. It’s hard to define a film as a commercial flop if it turns a profit—although the studio may have expected it to deliver fatter profits than it did. It is a gorgeously appointed production, easily one of the classiest looking comedies of the era. It is full of special effects, impressive set design, careful cinematography—coming on the heels of the cheapie Meanest Man in the West, this is Warner Brothers swinging for the fences.
The legend of its failure began with Benny’s own sharp-tongued quips on his radio show. When the audience laughed at his self-deprecating cracks, Benny’s writers quickly seized on the idea and started to throw additional barbs into other scripts. The running gag got out ahead of itself, and became one of Benny’s go-to punchlines.
Jack Benny: You made Sonny Boy, which was one of Warner Brother’s first talkies.
Al Jolson: And you made The Horn Blows at Midnight, which was nearly their last!
Or, this exchange when Benny tries to get past a studio guard:
Jack: Don’t you recognize me? I’m Jack Benny. I made a movie here at Warner Brothers. The Horn Blows at Midnight. Didn’t you see it?
Guard: See it? I directed it!
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In fact, the film was directed by the great Raoul Walsh. One of the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He directed an astonishing array of classic films—including The Thief of Baghdad, High Sierra, and White Heat. I mentioned the cinematography above—director of photography Sidney Hickox shot this between photographing To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. The music was composed by Franz Waxman—who continued to perform live an adapted version of the score throughout his career. This is no cheapo B-movie, but an A-list production by some of Hollywood’s most talented people.
In the years that followed, Benny seemed curiously drawn back to the scene of the crime. In 1949, he played Athanael again, opposite Claude Rains, in a radio adaptation of the script for Ford’s Theater. This radio adaptation was then turned into a TV play in 1953, with Benny reprising his role for a third time. Hardly the actions of a man eager to run away from his shame.
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For that matter, Benny’s incessant joking about the film’s alleged failure managed to leverage it into the public consciousness better than any other Benny film. Artists and Models may be a demonstrably funnier film, but it’s just a historical footnote today. Whereas The Horn Blows at Midnight seems to have been an inspiration to Neil Gaiman in co-writing Good Omens with Terry Pratchett; it was well-represented in home video thanks to a 1993 VHS release and a more recent DVD edition from Warner Archive.
So we find ourselves at this unexpected conclusion: The Horn Blows at Midnight needs to redemption. It was never a failure in the first place. An oddity, yes, but what a sad and boring world it would be if there weren’t oddities in it.