Night Editor *** (1946, William Gargan, Janis Carter, Jeff Donnell) – Classic Movie Review 10,602

Director Henry Levin’s nifty, well set-up 1946 Columbia Pictures B-movie black and white film noir thriller Night Editor is based on a popular radio programme about the graveyard-shift police beat reporters at fictional newspaper called The New York Star.

Hal Smith’s screenplay is based on a Night Editor radio programme episode called Inside Story by Scott Littleton.

Charles D Brown plays the editor of the New York Star, Crane Stewart, who tells a story about a cop involved in a murder investigation as he plays a game of poker with his friends. William Gargan then stars in the film’s prolonged flashback set in the early 1930s as Police Lieutenant Tony Cochrane, who is cheating on his wife with adulterous socialite Jill Merrill (Janis Carter).

The duo park at lovers’ lane by the beach and witness a man bludgeoning his girlfriend to death with a tyre iron, but can’t report the crime without revealing their cheating. What’s more, Cochrane has to investigate the killing unable to tell anyone he witnessed the crime.

It was planned as the first in a series of Night Editor films, but it is a shame that no more were made.

The radio programme ran from 1934 to 1948 with Hal Burdick as the night editor, followed by a short-lived TV series in 1954.

The cast are William Gargan as Police Lieutenant Tony Cochrane, Janis Carter as Jill Merrill, Jeff Donnell as Martha Cochrane, Coulter Irwin as Johnny, Roy Gordon as Benjamin Merrill, Charles D Brown as Crane Stewart, Paul E. Burns as Police Lieutenant Ole Strom, Harry Shannon as Police Captain Lawrence, Frank Wilcox as Douglas Loring and Robert Kellard (as Robert Stevens) as Doc Cochrane.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,602

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