Ellen Wiggins (Frances Rafferty) and her husband Peter (Richard Denning) live with their adopted daughter Tina (Lora Lee Michel). One night Ellen is awakened by the sound of a dog barking and someone walking up the stairs. Ellen wakes up Peter and they go to check on Tina. Tina tells them that there was someone in house. She says that a woman came to visit her.
The next day Peter finds out that a woman was murdered the night before right near his home. The woman was a well-known heiress, Amanda Forsythe. Peter receives a call from John Featherstone (Pierre Watkin) asking to see Peter and Ellen in his office. Featherstone runs the adoption agency that handled Tina’s adoption. He tells Peter and Ellen that there may be someone trying to prove that there was a problem with the legality of the adoption procedure. It seems that someone believes that Ellen wasn’t twenty-one when the adoption was done; therefore, she was not of age and was ineligible to adopt a child.
Ellen knows that the record of her birth and her birth certificate were burned in a fire, but she remembers having a baptism certificate with her date of birth on it. If they can find it, then they can use it as proof that Ellen was of age when she and Peter adopted Tina.
Peters hires a private detective, Al Garrity (Ralph Dunn), to help him investigate. Soon, evidence is uncovered that show that the woman listed as Tina’s mother on the adoption papers may not really be Tina’s mother. Things are starting to point to the fact that perhaps Amanda is really Tina’s mother, and that Tina could actually be the heir to a fortune. A fortune that someone has designs on.
“Lady at Midnight” was released in 1948 and was directed by Sam Newfield. It is an American low budget crime mystery with some fleeting noirish touches.
For the most part the movie is an interesting, though average, little film. The acting is, for the most part, decent. The plot is thin, but the movie is short. It’s not a great movie but worth spending an hour of your time watching, especially if you are a mystery buff and need some diversion.
Lora Lee Michel, who plays the precocious little seven-year-old Tina, was a child star in the late forties. Born in 1940 as Virginia Joy Willeford, Lora was given up by her mother and adopted when she was five by the Michel family. Billed as the next Shirley Temple, Lora was in several films.
Her life became a soap opera when it was learned that Lora claimed her adoptive mother intentionally starved her so she would be small enough to continue her child acting career. After a couple highly contentious trials Lora was given back to her adoptive parents. The judge told them to take her back to Texas and give her a normal childhood. Things really weren’t any better. Lora ended up marrying the first of her four husbands when she was 17. She was only divorced twice.