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Customer Reviews of Captain Midnight

The Bell Tolls for Captain Midnight....
Dave O'Brien leaps into battle against evildoers as the famous radio adventurer Captain Midnight. Midnight seeks to protect a scientist and his daughter from invention-stealing bad guys out to wreck America's defense effort. The bad guys, lead by Ivan Shark and his daughter Fury, stoop to new lows as they battle the Captain and plot to destroy our war effort.

O'Brien fills the role of Midnight well, despite looking and sounding a bit like a young Richard Anderson (Oscar Goldman from "The Six Million Dollar Man").

Dorothy Short as the scientist's daughter, Joyce Edwards, is mostly suitable as a sort of love interest for Midnight, but mostly useless in every other capacity. She brings the helpless-girl-who-gets-in-trouble-in-almost-every-chapter to heights never dreamed of by Noel Neill, who played Lois Lane in the classic Superman TV series. Short's continual screaming and helpless antics drag the serial down a bit. Far better (and a better choice for the Joyce character!), is the evil daughter of Ivan Shark, Fury, played by Luana Walters.

Joseph W. Girard plays the gruff but concerned Major Steele, who lets Cap walk all over him (apparently, in Midnight's army, being a "mystery man" means a captain outranks his commanding officer). Guy Wilkerson and Sam Edwards lend a hand as Captain Midnight's pals, who, like Captain Midnight and all the crooks, share the strange inabillity to retain their firearms when they get their foes cornered.

Ivan Shark, played by James Craven, is a great villain. He is a master of disguise, and has a fabulous secret lair. Several things fail Craven however, as his personal "Arab" outfit to hide his features is discarded about half-way through the story. Also dropped is the gang members going by numbers and not names. Worst of all, Shark's purpose and motivation for trying to wreck America's defense plants is never very clearly explained. As he sneers his evil way through confrontations with Midnight, all the while operating his dubious death traps, there never seems to be any connection with the Germans or Japanese, an element that would have added to the believability of Shark as an anti-American fifth-columnist villian.

One gets the sense that this serial (released in early 1942) had originally been more about a gang of rogue, criminal aviators who are after the scientist's new bombsight to serve their own ends. That would make sense, seeing as how the oft mentioned but never seen defense plant attacks were probably incorporated into the story post-Pearl Harbor.

The serial is pretty good overall, with moderately suspenseful cliffhangers and some good tricks, secret hideouts, and fights. It's probably two or three chapter too long, though, and things can get a bit tedious after a while. Probably Columbia's best effort, but it's no Republic serial, for sure.