Even though I cannot for the life of me wrap my mind around the concept of a coffee that puts you to sleep Jack Benny's The Horn Blows At Midnight is not as bad as the reputation it has. A reputation by the way that Benny himself gave the film. It was a running gag on his radio and television show that Benny forsook movie making because of the bad reviews the film received.Seeing it today it's not as bad as all that, in fact it has a few funny moments. Benny is a trumpeter in a radio studio orchestra and he falls asleep during the announcer's commercial for Paradise Coffee, the coffee that makes you sleep. In his dream Benny becomes an angel playing trumpet in a heavenly orchestra, larger than anything Leonard Bernstein ever directed. He gets an assignment from one of the bosses Guy Kibbee to blow his heavenly trumpet at midnight to signal the utter destruction of a minor planet the natives call Earth.Needless to say Benny bungles the job and the film is his effort to complete his assignment. Kibbee's not pleased and he sends Alexis Smith down from heaven to babysit Jack. Later on Kibbee himself shows up. There are a couple of fallen angels played by Allyn Joslyn and John Alexander who like the life they've got on earth now. And there's Reginald Gardiner who's a musician and a society burglar with his assistant Dolores Moran who Benny interrupts mid crime and a host of other familiar movie faces which in itself is reason enough to watch The Horn Blows At Midnight.Jack plays some tribute to Harold Lloyd with some stunts at the climax involving some great height. There's a gag involving a human pendulum that was later used with other familiar faces in It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Jack also becomes rocket man at one point, clearly copying Bob Hope being shot out of a cannon in The Road To Zanzibar.Don't believe the hype about The Horn Blows At Midnight, you might actually like it.

Absolutely inane film starring Jack Benny as a trumpet player who dreams that he has been sent down to earth to end it by blowing on his trumpet.The writing here is absolutely ridiculous as the film turns mostly into a slap-stick farce, with all sorts of silly situations created by Benny and his cohorts.Watch for Ethel Griffies, of all people, to briefly kick up her heels. Franklin Pangborn, with his usual sneers, provides some comedy relief, and Reginald Gardiner is just too Reginald Gardiner to play a villain here.Alexis Smith is wasted as Benny's fellow angel,and Mike Mazursky is his usual heavy-handed henchman.Margaret Dumont's comic gifts are also wasted here, as she appears briefly in two scenes.

Well, just because this movie isn't nearly as bad as Jack Benny always made it out to be, doesn't mean it's great. It's not. Indeed, it's highly flawed. But it's still mildly funny and mildly enjoyable.It had some good, creative ideas. The conception of Heaven was very interesting, with the notion that heaven is truly heaven for the entire universe and that Earth is just one tiny, insignificant planet even from Heaven's point of view. And I thought that the celestial- sized orchestra was brilliant, both in conception and execution; the camera work where we keep moving deeper and deeper into this endless orchestra was delightful. I loved the protagonist's completely naive take on life on Earth, and the schtick with the elevator was a nice touch.But what sinks the movie, really, is just poor writing. There are some laughs, but not nearly as many as there could have been. There's a fine supporting cast that is largely wasted-- especially the great Margaret Dumont (she deserved better than to have her main gag be that she falls in a hole). And the whole outer-story about falling asleep during the commercial is just an utter waste of time: it adds nothing to the story, and really detracts from it by letting us know up front that the whole angel story is just a dream anyway. Much of the comedy seems heavy-handed and forced; for instance, why is Jack's trumpet playing *so* frightfully horrible during the pre-commercial rehearsal? How could he even have gotten a job as a musician playing *that* badly? It's stupid and doesn't even make sense. Contrast that with the way Benny always played bad violin on radio and TV: his lack of skill was much more subtle and underplayed, he didn't deliberately flub every note. And as such, it worked much better and was much funnier. The humor here too often seems to be aiming at 6-year-olds.And, of course, the ending renders the entire proceedings pointless and unsatisfying.But again, when the humor is allowed to be a little more subtle, the film can inspire some laughs, or at least genuine chuckles. There are worse ways to spend your time.Finally, for those who don't realize it, the "Cliffside Park", over in "Joisey", is a direct reference to "Palisades Amusement Park", which was a big deal park just outside of New York in New Jersey. I used to love to go there as a child.

This film is often maligned in the critical press as being so bad that it was a terrible bomb (and was facetiously by Benny himself in his later radio and TV career, as the biggest bomb of his career. He was using it for comedy, playing it for laughs.)However, it was not a bomb at all, and was a modest success when first released in April 1945.The real reason this movie bombed at the box office was timing. It was released right at the end of World War 2, after Hitler had ravaged almost all of Europe, and Japan had made a colossal mess out of the South Pacific, and then WE nuked TWO of their cities to stop them!People then were very sensitive about issues like life and death, Heaven and Hell, even in a comedy context, in America. Almost every family had lost someone near and dear to them in the War, and they didn't want to be reminded of these kinds of things even in a Hollywood movie, at least for a few years until STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN (1947) in beautiful Technicolor starring David Niven and Kim Hunter proved that the postwar era had begun.If only WB had waited until the fall of 1945 to release this, it would have fared much better at the box office and with movie critics far and wide, and given Jack Benny something to be proud of, instead of a long-running gag in his later years. Dejael