The Horn Blows at Midnight

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The Horn Blows at Midnight
The Horn Blows at Midnight VHS cover
Directed by	Raoul Walsh
Produced by	Mark Hellinger
Starring	Jack Benny Alexis Smith
Music by	Franz Waxman
Cinematography	Sid Hickox
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release date(s)	April 20, 1945 (U.S. release)
Running time	78 min
Language	English
IMDb profile

The Horn Blows at Midnight is a comedy fantasy starring Jack Benny made in 1945. The film was directed by Raoul Walsh and co-stars Alexis Smith, Dolores Moran, Allyn Joslyn, and Reginald Gardiner. Its biggest claim to fame, apart from its star, is its failure at the box office, and this fact was exploited often for laughs in Benny's popular radio comedy series The Jack Benny Program.

The plot involves the third trumpet player in the orchestra of a radio program, named the Paradise Coffee Program, who falls asleep listening to the reading of the advertisement: "The coffee that makes you sleep." He dreams he is the angel Athaniel, a trumpeter in the orchestra of heaven, who is such a terrible musician he is relieved of his position and sent on a mission to earth. He is entrusted to blow the Last Trumpet at midnight, but complications in the plot ensue when two fallen angels, named Osidro and Doremus, want to continue their physical existence of pursuing pleasures. While Athaniel encounters experiences of mortal life, such as eating food and the need for money, the fallen angels try to prevent Athaniel from going through with his mission by having his trumpet stolen.

The film in comedic fashion comments on the persuasive effects of advertising on the public. It also references The Jack Benny Program, where one of the main comic gags involved the stars' abysmal violin playing. The climax of the film involves most of the characters hanging one connected the next character and so on from the edge of a balcony in a human rescue chain. And then progresses to Athaniel swinging from the bottom of the human rescue chain onto a broken flagpole high over a city street and from there falling off the flagpole into an enormous outdoor advertising sign of an oversized coffee pot pouring into an equally outsized cup (into which Benny's character has fallen) . The cartoonish nature of these scenes is heightened by the music - written by Carl Stalling, famous for his Warner Brothers cartoon scores.