Twelve Crowded Hours
Twelve Crowded Hours
| 03 March 1939 (USA)
Twelve Crowded Hours Trailers

An ace reporter with a girlfriend nails a numbers racketeer for murders.

Reviews
FrogGlace In other words,this film is a surreal ride.
Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.
Cassandra Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.
Kimball Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.
DKosty123 This is an RKO "B" picture that could have been better, but definitely shows it was made on the cheap. Richard Dix, the lead is a B actor who really had a dismal career. Lucille Ball is the most well known of the script but she really is just in the back ground for most of this movie.We have a reporter trying to chase down some gangsters in one night. Of course the technology is ancient but the old press room is here. The reporter gets into trouble along the way.The script is pretty bad here, and no where is it more obvious than in the times that people are hovering around in scenes jut watching with nothing to say or do. Lucille Ball really did not deserve a role like this one and the entire film is quite forgettable.If you really want to check out a young Lucy, she is very much the only reason to look at this one. There's lots going on, but the viewer path through this film is lacking.
GUENOT PHILIPPE I won't add much to the other comments about this little crime programmer. Like many others of this era, it mixes up comedy, romance and thriller. I am not very fond of all this, but a Lew Landers film is for me always Worth seeing, at least for my Library. I watched it for the second time and the thing that amazed me the most - you will laugh - is the hired killer sequences. The bull - ram - truck driver paid to kill some potential witnesses. The some sequences with him, such as this one, be called at home, when he is among his family, a poor family, is exquisite. Short but pleasant and so surprising. It seems very weird for me to focus on such details, but I am like this. Forget the scenes with Dix and all the gals, you certainly will forget them. The final action scenes are quite good for this kind of production.
MartinHafer While I have always liked Richard Dix, I must admit that this is one of the more ordinary films he made. Dix stars as a newspaper man--one that is frankly too glib and clever to be real. When a coworker is killed, Dix thinks a gangster is responsible and soon steals $80,000 from the crook. Much of the rest of the film is spent with the crook and Dix talking...a lot. Their tough banter seemed stagy and the film went no where for a very long period. By the end, I frankly didn't care who killed who--I was just bored and looking forward to another film.Dull writing, clichéd characters and a complete waste of Lucille Ball in a supporting role (she could have just as well been played by a ball of lint--the part was dull and shallow). While it's not a bad film, it's also not particularly good and seemed to be just another B-movie from RKO.
Neil Doyle Poor Lucy. It's a wonder she ever got any of the big breaks that came her way when you see how she was mistreated at RKO in a bunch of ingenue roles that required not even one-third of her talent.She's barely even visible in this trifle, a gangster movie that has RICHARD DIX getting most of the attention as a newspaper reporter on the heels of a rackets number gangster (CY KENDALL) while Lucy sits on the sidelines and pops up in only a few scenes. Even in the scenes she's in, she's hardly given more than a few lines to speak.The plot is nothing special, just a series of car chases and shootouts that make little sense since none of the characters are anything more than cardboard fixtures. Lucy's not the only one wasted here. ALLEN LANE as her kid brother has virtually nothing to do and DONALD MacBRIDE does his usual turn as an exasperated police officer.Trivia note: JOHN ARLEDGE, who plays "Red", and serves as the juvenile comedy relief, played a dying soldier this same year (1939) in GONE WITH THE WIND. And incidentally, Lucille Ball was sent to audition for David O. Selznick as a Scarlett O'Hara hopeful. Can you believe it???
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