After Midnight

.... people met during muggings. I guess New York has always been like this save for a decade or so in the 1990s. But I digress.

Mary is a waitress in a restaurant so she gets off work quite late. One night she is confronted by homeless Joe Miller, who holds her up with a piece of lead pipe. He then gives her the pipe and turns his back on her and she hits him with it and gets her money back. So we can see why Joe is homeless and unemployed in the roaring 20s as he can't even manage to get armed robbery right. Strangely enough, she also takes him to her apartment to tend his wounds rather than call the police. Somehow, knowing her motivates Joe to look for a job. He gets a job at a filling station and plans to save for a taxi. This strange relationship blossoms into romance and the pair decide to marry after Joe can save up enough to buy a cab and Mary has saved one thousand dollars.

But some misunderstandings mess up this relationship. Mary's sister Maizie decides to buy an expensive evening gown instead of pay the rent, she goes out to a company function, and receives one thousand dollars in her company's stock. In the meantime Mary goes looking for Joe and sees him in a bar with a couple of girls and thinks he has gone back to his old life. So Mary decides to try the party girl life too since it took her years to save one thousand dollars and Maizie got the equivalent in just one night of partying. Complications ensue, although none of them are that interesting or unexpected.

Lawrence Gray did do some silent work before he became a film song bird for a couple of years after the talkies came in while musicals were still popular, but he usually played the clean cut type or a playboy, not a poor homeless guy turning to crime like he is here. If the print had been better this would have been a good showcase for Norma Shearer's silent era talents, but it is better than nothing. The current print is 55 minutes, so I'm not sure if any footage was lost.