Night Intruder (1938) User Reviews

My First "Your True Adventures" Short

[utgard14 · 5/10 · 19 December 2013]

Floyd Gibbons was a war correspondent who lost an eye in WWI saving the life of a soldier. He went onto a successful career on radio and a brief career in Hollywood, starring in and narrating a series of short films. The "Your True Adventures" series features Gibbons, dubbed the Headline Hunter, presenting supposedly true stories to the audience. I have no idea if they were real but it seems so, as they reveal one of the actual people involved at the end and she seems authentic enough. This is my first Gibbons short. He has a good presence and a great voice so I can see why he was successful on radio. He died the year after this was made of a heart attack.

This story is about four women playing bridge downstairs when the world's stupidest burglar breaks in upstairs. It's obvious this was the early part of the night, as lights are on all over the neighborhood and a kid across the street from the house is studying in his room. He sees the burglar and alerts his mother, who calls the police. Then she calls across the street and lets them know. Now we have lots of suspense as narrator Gibbons tries to scare the pants off of women across the country that there are vicious criminals lurking mere feet from sleeping grandmas.

It all sounds pretty silly and I guess it is presented in a fairly overwrought manner. Still, it's quaint entertainment to pass a quarter hour.

"Let's scare some spinsters at the theater . . . "

[oscaralbert · 6/10 · 15 March 2015]

. . . seems to be the premise of "THE HEADLINE HUNTER" FLOYD GIBBONS' in the "YOUR TRUE ADVENTURES" episode entitled NIGHT INTRUDER. Mr. Gibbons, as host of a FORENSIC FILES-style crime recreation show, intrudes upon the "action" with frequent comments intended to heighten the suspense. However, most of Floyd's observations are ludicrously at odds with what the audience is seeing on the screen. It's clear that the "professional" cat burglar (who also happens to be a would-be mad-dog "killer") is neither. He has one life (not nine), and he's a slow-moving inept loser who has home-invaded a dwelling in which a tablecloth for a bridge game is considered to be a prized "valuable." Floyd's idea of the proper response to having this prowler in semi-retirement upstairs is for the quartet of self-proclaimed old maids to hunker down on the first floor, continuing on with their card game. Perhaps if the Herbert Clutter Family of Holcomb, KS, (see IN COLD BLOOD) had just been playing Monopoly during their similar real-life experience, they'd still all be alive today!

Annoying Characters Ruin Film

[Michael_Elliott · 30 June 2012]

Night Intruder (1938)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Floyd Gibbons hosts and narrates this entry in his "Your True Adventures" series. In this entry, four women are playing bridge in the living room when a burglar breaks into the second level. A neighbor witnesses the crime and calls the police but it's going to take a bit for them to arrive so the women are in danger. NIGHT INTRUDER is a pretty bad short for a number of reasons but the biggest problem is that the four women are just so annoying and dumb that you really can't help but root for the burglar until you realize that he's just as dumb. Now, I really don't know how true this adventure is but there's no doubt that everyone involved are doing some pretty dumb things. Through the narration we're told that this burglar is a lifelong expert but if so I wondered why he would rob a house knowing there were people inside it. Then, there are the women, who just act so silly that you can't help but see them as a silly stereotype and this is backed up by the narrator claiming that woman, not men, would be scared of running into a burglar at night. At just 11-minutes the film seems twice as long and while I can't speak for the rest of the films in the series this one here simply doesn't work.