Midnight Lace (1960) Movie Review & Film summary, Cast

Sub-Hitchcockian mystery yarn directed by David Miller. Doris Day plays a woman newly married to her family company’s chief executive (Rex Harrison), who, walking home through the London fog one night, hears a weird, puppet-like voice threatening to murder her by the end of the month. She spends the next hour and a half spiralling into hysteria as the threats continue, and red herrings multiply: Roddy McDowall as her housekeeper’s cash-hungry son; John Gavin as a jut-jawed but war-haunted building foreman; Herbert Marshall as one of the company’s shifty-seeming executives; and Anthony Dawson as a scar-faced weirdo whom a bobby would arrest on general principle.

I guessed the actual culprit only about an hour before he’s revealed, in a clumsy finale that tries to recreate one of Hitchcock’s danger-in-high-places climaxes, but forgets to put the heroine in actual peril from anything other than her insistence on wearing high heels whilst traversing a girder, the villains being lamely snared. Though she delivers a fair performance, Day’s sexless persona, braying voice, and chipmunk cheeks make for an irritating heroine, with astoundingly bad fashion sense – she gets about looking like one of those old lady flappers from Thoroughly Modern Millie.

Or perhaps I kept thinking of Millie because of Gavin’s posing here (in between bouts with an English accent that often turns Irish) in trench coat with pipe constantly in mouth, was just the sort of stilted role he gamely satirised in that Julie Andrew vehicle. Myrna Loy adds some under-utilised zest as Day’s aunt. The film makes sure to borrow Dawson and John Williams from obvious model Dial ‘M’ for Murder, Marshall from Murder!, and Gavin from Psycho to beef up the Hitchcock stock. It is intriguing to ponder if the killer’s recorded Punch-voice taunts inspired Saw’s trickster.