Nobody makes high-quality cinema the way people with axes to grind make high-quality cinema. Case in point: Red Midnight, a captivating thriller from 1966 that makes a convincing case for urban planning through domestic terrorism.
Some of your universe's critics are unpersuaded. For example, reviewer Blastoff Tokicksville writes, "This one could have stayed lost." Reviewer Vaccinia writes, "this is so bloated with filler that it is probably safer to just give a blanket suggestion to avoid and not watch." And reviewer MelvinvtHof writes, "This was very hard to sit trough [sic]."
Read on for the truth about Red Midnight...
The film opens with an ominous text card describing the Cold War of the 1960s and 1970s, ending with this warning: “The cities in the United States appeared to many as a dry, vast, forest woodland, dangerously vulnerable to a torch.”
The first text cards dissolves to a second, more specific card: “A group of men and women banded together under the leadership of one man to warn the people and tell the story. This man two months before Pearl Harbor had written the story of the possibility of such a surprise attack, but the warning went unheeded.”
Visually, the film opens with a shot of a clock reading midnight on a church tower as ominous, ominous drums play ominously on the soundtrack. Then there is a shot of bubbling water turning red. In medias res, we watch two men fighting as a man and woman lie dead in the dirt. “Where’s the bomb? Where’s the bomb?” one man asks.
The other man replies, “It’s too late! It’s too late!”
Fortunately for the audience, a narrator speaks. Ominously. He says, “What are they fighting about? Somewhere in the United States, a foreign country’s nuclear device has fallen into the hands…of an American.”
There is a sudden nuclear explosion!
After this shocking opening, the film cuts to a room where a man hangs up what is known colloquially as a “princess telephone.” The man is Joe Hyder. He speaks directly to the audience: “I’ve been broadcasting for a good many years. Among my affiliations are NBC Monitor as a reporter. The story that you are about to see could happen, in part or in total. There could be a warning here, ladies and gentlemen. When you leave the theater, look about you.”
Mr. Hyder, who was a real newsman in New England, does not tell the audience what to do once they look around. (However, he will appear later as a radio broadcaster in the film.)
After an innovative title sequence which presents the credits as newspaper headlines that burn away to reveal the next title, the filmmakers cut to a mansion overlooking a lake where boaters and water skiers recreate. A third narrator (after the first unseen narrator and the photogenic Joe Hyder) explains that people were having fun boating and skiing on the lake on a nice Sunday afternoon. Then, shockingly, a water skier falls down. He is quickly rescued by a party of boaters. Ominously, the new narrator tells us, “The only thing American about this party was the flag on the back of the boat. It looked like anything that could have happened in any of our fifty states.”
The boat carries the man to shore, where he is carried up to the mansion. One of the rescuers is Gordon, a doctor. He examines the injured man and concludes that the man has a broken cervical vertebrae. The bearded man in charge of the house, however, tells him nobody can leave the house, even though the man needs a hospital. Thus begins a conspiracy in which the people in the house, who are plotting against the United States, must isolate both Dr. Gordon and the woman with bright red hair who also helped rescue the injured man (one of the conspirators). Additionally, a black man named Web is kidnapped along with Dr. Gordon and the woman.
In what can only be described as an erotic scene, the redheaded woman is given a man’s shirt to cover herself as she slips out of her wet bikini in front of the man guarding her.
During his medical ministrations, Dr. Gordon hears the injured man cry out deliriously about atomic bombs all over the country. Then the man dies. Dr. Gordon confronts the bearded man, telling him he is responsible for the man’s death, but the bearded man warns him: “You have walked into something you shouldn’t have. It’s really unfortunate for you. So therefore please don’t cause any disturbances, or else you shall be found on the beach…extremely dead.”
Later, Web attempts to escape up a staircase, but he is karate chopped into submission. The evildoers aim to drown both Dr. Gordon and Web in a swimming pool which is being filled with water, then dump their bodies into the bay. However, they are rescued at the last minute, apparently because the bearded man has a growth on his neck. The narrator explains the doctor’s plan: “Because the man is ill, he gets the chance. If he could buy some time to do something to save the country… What to do is to talk him into an alternate plan during pain, when anyone listens. The pain is as stark and realistic to the doctor as the operation is to the viewer. With great personal discipline, the only time men like this will listen is during a time of pain.”
As the doctor performs gory surgery on the man’s neck, he suggests that a better plan would be to burn down America’s cities so the U.S. could not adequately respond, and so it would not launch a counterattack against the villain’s unnamed country.
Of course, the suggestion works. The bearded villain asks the doctor for more details about his plan to set fire to selected cities. They take the doctor on a road trip in a nice convertible to view America’s cities, which are constructed mostly of wood. When the villain asks the doctor why he is helping him with this plan, the doctor admits that he wants to help so that America does not become a nuclear holocaust. Its cities have faced disasters in the past and recovered. “The San Francisco earthquake, the Chicago fire, and so forth.”
After the drive, the doctor continues with his plan, drawing with a marker on a piece of card stock. He explains that it would be easy to destroy the fire engines across the country, which are unprotected. “Knock out the few fire engines,” the patriotic doctor says, “the fire units unprotected and unsuspected as they respond to any major blaze, but the people begin to panic as they will, causing confusion, traffic snarls, and so forth. At late evening, madness and panic, turning into a red midnight, and you have the destruction of a city. Multiply this by 50 or more major cities, and you have the destruction of an entire nation. This is the plan you can substitute for your atomic destruction.”
The villain agrees to the doctor’s plan, but if it doesn’t work, he will use the atomic bombs anyway.
Of course, the villain lets the doctor go back to his business, as long as he doesn’t tell anyone. Back at his office, Dr. Gordon, Web, and the redheaded woman (who is soon revealed to be the doctor’s wife) talk about what to do. It turns out the doctor is interested in using the destruction of America’s cities to improve the American way of life. “We’re talking about slum clearance,” the doctor explains.
“Oh, not that again,” says the redhead. “You know you can’t win. People like the slums.”
“They are making progress,” Web pitches in.
“Not enough.”
The redhead says skeptically, “The doctor has dreams of accommodating more people in new apartment buildings with green parks and expressways separating congested areas. He’s always afraid of a major fire getting out of hand.” Then she suggests sex to the doctor, but he appears uninterested.
During the discussion, the unseen narrator tries to justify the doctor’s apparently treasonous acts. The narrator intones, “To those of you viewing this story, you must visualize and realize the doctor’s attempt to put an end to all those terrible anti-half-wars that kill people just as dead as the famous wars, and an end to riots and fire dangers, and make it a national effort to rebuild the cities…at least a national effort to end the wars, and maybe an international concern, where the effort should lie.” The narrator goes on, suggesting fires could happen at any time, and anyone could be responsible.
Later, the redhead visits the bearded villain and his bevy of bikinied sunbathers. She wants him to stop dealing with her husband the doctor because he is now obsessed with the project of burning down American cities. But the villain has been watching her and knows she is cheating on the doctor, even though she is British, which the villain believes means she’s cold. After she jokes about British women being like frozen dinners (“you heat and eat”), he threatens her with the information about her affairs: “Who is Tom Cuisine? Yes, and let’s see, these other names. Dick, Harry, and my agent, Paul. Want some dates?”
Humorously, she pushes him into the swimming pool.
Later, she makes love to one of her many boyfriends (possibly Tom Cuisine) by another poolside, after she tells him to make love to her and he begins rubbing what appears to be perfume on her back.
The filmmakers then cut to a demonstration of how to make a firebomb with a wristwatch, some batteries, and a sponge. The villains plan to drive around the city in cars and throw bombs out of the roof, which they have opened using a blowtorch (presumably, buying a convertible would be too expensive for the saboteurs). “Nothing will delay them with this widespread confusion,” the villain says, somewhat confusingly.
Then various members of the cast go to a nightclub, where the film’s audience is treated to a show that involves African dance, a woman dancing on a bar flanked by British suits of armor, and go-go dancers with grim expressions on their faces. Here, the doctor’s black friend Web Fleming is revealed to be a famous singer, so of course he performs an entire song onstage with the band Larry B’ee and His Honey Cones. Not to be outdone, one of the villain’s female bikini models also sings a song while she is dancing with the doctor. As a climax, the doctor’s redheaded wife jealously gets up on stage and does an impromptu striptease. This causes the doctor to say, “I’ve had enough, I’m leaving.” He exits the club but the villain has him followed.
In another example of the filmmakers’ skill, the movie intercuts between the redhead performing a private dance for the villain in his mansion and the doctor sleeping with the blonde henchwoman. Shockingly, these rendezvous end with the villain raping the doctor’s wife and then having her killed.
Then it is time to begin the firebombing. We watch unseen black-clad agents planting packages around brick buildings. When fires appear and fire alarms are pulled, the villains shoot the first responders. Chaos ensues, as predicted.
A completely new unseen narrator tells us, “A group of men, even one man, in the past, could have set any major American city on fire by planting among the crowded wooden buildings a few incendiaries.” (He pronounces the last word “incenderaries.”) The narration is shown over footage of two winos attempting to extinguish a fire first with alcohol and then with their own urine.
The many shots of fires also allow the filmmakers to include a nude sequence, as a group of topless women climb out of a window onto a fire ladder.
The final act of the film unfolds the next day. Dr. Gordon and Web Fleming, somewhat confusingly, rig an atomic bomb (or perhaps it is a water heater) with a timer and bury it in the sand near the bay. The doctor waxes philosophical: “We would save an enemy from drowning, yet we will kill the same person for wanting to kill us.” (Although not directly explained in the film, it is clear to the audience that the doctor’s extremely sensible plan is to eliminate the threat of nuclear annihilation worldwide by detonating an atomic bomb in Massachusetts.)
After the bomb is buried, Web calls the authorities. After telling them he is not a crank caller, he says, “The fires that were set last night in all the key cities was a plot to destroy America. Yes, and the bomb, the bomb is set to go off on Cape Cod, the first one, at twelve o’clock noon.”
Of course, New England is evacuated. But a very human story occurs: A newly introduced set of characters looks for a little girl who has stayed behind from the evacuation, playing on the beach. The doctor and web see her so of course they rescue her as quickly as they can and carry her to the bomb shelter in the villain’s beach house. Then the villain and his henchman attack the doctor, killing the blonde woman and repeating the scene we saw at the film’s opening. The doctor embraces the dead woman.
Then the atomic bomb explodes (it appears to be near a mountain range rather than Cape Cod, but of course it must actually be the East Coast). In a final ironic twist, the villain, scarred by nuclear radiation, stumbles into the very same pool into which the doctor’s wife pushed him earlier.
In an epilogue, we see that Web and the little girl have survived in the bomb shelter. Web says, “It is two days later.” He breaks through the wall of the shelter because the door is blocked, and he and the girl run away.
Meanwhile, the (unseen) President of the United States addresses the (unseen) Congress. “Gentlemen,” he begins, “it is my solemn duty to bring you a report on the fires that have swept away thousands of our homes, leaving millions homeless and countless others dead and injured.” He adds, apparently as an afterthought, “Then of course there was the atomic bomb explosion that destroyed much of the Cape Cod and neighboring areas. Fortunately, ample warning and evacuation saved almost all lives there. I don’t know, and I doubt if anyone will know, what really happened in all the confusion of the past days. But I will say that America has been hit before by a belly blow that has left us reeling and in pain. But we have always fought back and recovered. I regret that I had to act in ordering instant retaliation. When the bomb burst, and we thought it was to be one of many, but I did.” The President continues to explain that, because atomic devices can be constructed in any shape, the world must regulate the materials that must be used to make them, and they will be regulated, so everyone will be safe in the future.
In the final triumphant scene, Web reunites the little girl with her family while kazoo music plays.
The End
Many, many people may have come to the conclusion that the solution to America's problems is to firebomb all its cities and start over, but only director James Newslow made a feature-length film detailing how to succeed at this endeavor and how to use the results for improved urban planning. And he did it while showing water skiing, neck gore, bikinis, the music of Web Fleming, and the atomic bombing of Cape Code. For all of this, he can only be commended, and we can only lament that he never made another film. Although most of the main characters of Red Midnight did not survive the results of Mr. Newslow's urban planning dissertation, the world of the cinema was deprived of the continuing adventures of Web Fleming as well as those of the mysterious Tom Cuisine, whose presence could have undoubtedly supported a whole series of adventure films. Perhaps in some universe outside of your dull Universe-X there are such films, and audiences in that universe have received what they, and all of us, deserve.