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Movie Review: The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945) [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-08-26

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SPOILER ALERT!

The Horn Blows at Midnight is a dream movie. Athanael (Jack Benny) plays third trumpet in a band. Just before the beginning of a live broadcast, he falls asleep during a commercial for Paradise Coffee, a decaffeinated brew that lets you sleep. He starts dreaming and does not wake up until the last few minutes of the movie, when he falls off his chair. Elizabeth (Alexis Smith), who plays a harp, asks him what is wrong with him. He says, “Elizabeth, I just had the craziest dream. You know, if you ever saw it in the movies, you’d never believe it.”

Well, the audience for this movie didn’t believe it, of course, because they knew all along it was a dream. But the more important consideration was whether they liked it. In general, audiences do not like dream movies, presumably because it means that what they are watching is not really happening. This is something of a paradox, because that is true of most movies, even those without dreams in them. After all, Hollywood has sometimes been referred to as the “dream factory.” Nevertheless, the audience can get into a movie they know to be fiction and experience it as something real, but when they know the movie is someone’s dream, they tend to lose interest.

Brief dreams are not a problem, of course, and they may even enhance our enjoyment of the movie, as in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). It is the longer dreams that test the audience’s patience. That is why most dream movies do not let the audience know until the end that what they are watching is a dream, as in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Woman in the Window (1944). Even so, we feel somewhat cheated at the end. Laura (1944) was originally intended to be a dream movie, and director Otto Preminger even filmed an ending making it explicit, but he wisely left it out of the movie. In The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), we are never really certain whether the ghost is real or dreamt, and this allows us to tentatively accept what we are watching as real. But in The Horn Blows at Midnight, the dream begins early in the movie, which we know to be such right from the start, and it goes on until just before the end.

A link between reality and the dream comes in some remarks Athanael makes in the beginning. He tells the first and second trumpet players, who correctly blamed him for playing the wrong notes during practice, that they will be punished someday for snitching on him. When Elizabeth tries to console him for having to be just the third trumpeter, saying that at least he is making money and eating, he replies, “I’m an artist. I wish I’d never heard of food or money.” He continues: “It’s an ungrateful world, Elizabeth. If I had my way, things would be different. There’d be a lot of changes made.”

And that brings us to the second weakness of this film: it is a Heaven movie. Even apart from the movies, Heaven is a problem all by itself. No conception of Heaven ever really sounds all that appealing. Because it is hard to take Heaven seriously, movies about Heaven tend to be comedies. This provides them with a certain amount of immunity from criticism. But that cuts both ways, allowing them to be subversive without seeming to be so, and that is the case with this movie.

Typically, as little time as possible is spent in Heaven itself, as in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) or A Guy Named Joe (1943), allowing the events on Earth to reflect the influence of Heaven. In fact, in the movie Heaven Can Wait (1943), we never even get to Heaven. The protagonist spends most of his time in Hell recounting his sins. Because this is a comedy, we are not supposed to take Hell any more seriously than Heaven. In general, Heaven movies suffer from the same problem as dream movies, which is that audiences know that what they are watching isn’t real. So, when the movie is a dream about Heaven, as in the case of The Horn Blows at Midnight, it is a movie about something that does not really happen, about a place that does not really exist. Stairway to Heaven (1947), which holds the record for the most time spent in Heaven, is a movie that may also be a dream, but we are never sure one way or the other. That uncertainty allows us to regard what we are watching as possibly real. In The Horn Blows at Midnight, on the other hand, there is no uncertainty in this matter at all.

Anyway, Athanael dreams that he is an angel who plays a trumpet in the heavenly orchestra. The dream is a wish-fulfilling fantasy, in which the “ungrateful world” he referred to earlier is selected for destruction, owing to its unworthy inhabitants, and he is to destroy it himself by blowing the first four notes of the Judgment Day Overture on his horn exactly at midnight. So, he is sent to Earth, in accordance with the general principle that it is better to move the story out of Heaven as quickly as possible. As an angel, he knows nothing about food or money, as per his wish while he was still awake. He doesn’t seem to know anything about sex either.

The first and second trumpet players in real life are fallen angels in the dream. They try to keep Athanael from blowing his horn. Oddly enough, we are expected to pull for Athanael, even though he wants to destroy the world, while pulling against the two fallen angels, who are trying to save it, though for selfish reasons, of course. If a man commits a murder, he is evil. If he goes on a rampage and kills a dozen or so, he is a mass-murderer. And if he is like Hitler or Stalin, who were responsible for the deaths of millions, he is a monster. Athanael is trying to kill every last person on this planet, but since his orders come from Heaven, that makes it all right.

As another religious incongruity, five minutes before midnight, when Athanael is supposed to blow his horn, he meets a woman on the roof of the hotel. She is crying because the cad she was in love with no longer wants to have anything to do with her. Athanael assures her that everything will soon be all right, that her troubles will all be over with once she is dead. But she misunderstands what he is saying and decides to commit suicide by jumping off the roof. Athanael stops her, telling her that suicide is a mortal sin. So, it’s all right for God to kill her and everyone else on this planet, but if she beats him to the punch and kills herself just a few minutes earlier, she must spend eternity in Hell.

It is to be noted, however, that the orders to destroy the world do not explicitly come from God, as if to hold him innocent. This is typical. We almost never see God in a Heaven movie. The only exception is in The Green Pastures (1936), and that is because we are to understand that movie, not as portraying God and Heaven as they really are, but as conceived of by African Americans, understood to be a childlike race at the time that movie was made. And we do hear the disembodied voice of God in the blasphemous satire Bedazzled (1967). Other than that, it is always some administrator that gives orders and makes decisions, so that whatever evil ensues, God can be held blameless. In this movie, the orders come from the Deputy Chief of Operations. So, does he get his orders from God? No, that would be too close for comfort. He gets his orders from the Front Office. We never see the Front Office.

Apparently, there are thousands of planets with people on them, but Earth is an inferior planet, a six-day job, practically slapped together. The inhabitants have been warned about their evil ways through various natural disasters—”quakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, droughts, plagues, everything”—but to no avail. So, they must be all be killed. Normally, Heaven has a demolition expert for such things, but he is busy destroying one of the larger planets. So, as one of the trumpet players in the heavenly orchestra, the one least likely to be missed, Athanael has been selected for the task.

The Deputy Chief points to pictures of two angels, Doremus and Osidro, corresponding to the first and second trumpeters in real life. He says they were sent to Earth on a mission some time back, but instead of performing the task they were assigned, they were unable to resist temptation and decided to stay on Earth. Indirectly, this is an admission that Heaven is so boring that the two angels have chosen the pleasures of Earth over the so-called rewards of Heaven, even though it will mean they must go to Hell eventually. When Doremus and Osidro realize that Athanael has arrived to bring about Judgment Day, they try to tempt him by taking him to a swinging party, assuring him that all that talk about Hell is just propaganda, otherwise there would be nobody left up there in Heaven.

Of course, neither the Deputy Chief nor Athanael dares to utter the word “Hell,” but refers to it only as the “other place.” Doremus and Osidro likewise avoid that word. This is typical in Heaven movies. Everyone knows that the vast majority of mankind will burn in Hell for eternity, but it is not proper to speak of such things in a Heaven movie except in hushed tones, with euphemisms and circumlocutions, so as not to embarrass God.

I suppose Athanael is redeemed by the fact that in his wish-fulfilling dream, he falls to his death before he can blow his trumpet and end the world. Perhaps he unconsciously realized that killing everyone on this planet would be wrong, even if that is what God wanted.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/26/2182410/-Movie-Review-The-Horn-Blows-at-Midnight-1945

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