The Midnight Man

It opens with a security guard stumbling on a robbery, and essentially concerns the whereabouts of a certain tape.

The satire is two-edged and complete (cf. Furie’s The Circle, also called Fraternity), and it is housed within a hardboiled crime noir to beat them all, every one of them, right down to the ground, for nothing (as has been observed) is what it seems, very little anyway, in a little college town down South where everything is certainly on the up-and-up to all appearances, and the murder of a little coed has a lot of ramifications up to the Capitol, all of them unearthed by a security guard at the college who used to be a Chicago homicide detective until he caught his wife in bed with another man he shot to death then and there, and was sent up, ex-cop, ex-con.

Critics were dismayed by the mazy arrangement and could not see the simplicity of the sendup centered on the girl, whose father is a state senator, and she has a parole officer who was once the wife of a gangster, and the villain’s name is Eddie Lamar.