NFR Project: 'Midnight' (1939)

 

NFR Project: ‘Midnight’

Dir: Mitchell Leisen

Scr: Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder

Pho: Charles Lang

Ed: Doane Harrison

Premiere: March 24, 1939

94 min.

Midnight is an excellent and elegant screwball comedy, with much of the flavor of a classic French farce. It’s set in a Paris that seems equally divided between working-class cabbies and high-society figures. Its tale of love and money, and how the two don’t go hand in hand.

Claudette Colbert plays Eve Peabody, a down-on-her-luck American showgirl who arrives in the City of Light on a train, possessing nothing but the gold lamé dress on her back. She is quickly taken up by a friendly cab driver, Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche), who gallantly drives her around town to look for a job.

Unable to accept his help any further, she escapes him and makes her way into a society soiree. Desperate, she fakes belonging to this upper-crust group until she is noticed by an aging toff, Georges (John Barrymore). Georges notices that Eve draws the attention of Jacques (Francis Lederer), who is currently in the middle of an affair with his wife (Mary Astor). Georges schemes, and sets up Eve as a wealthy baroness, asking her to seduce Jacques as a way of getting him away from Georges’ wife.

Meanwhile, Tibor searches for her relentlessly, enlisting the aid of an army of cabbies to find her and report back to him. He finds that she has gone to Georges’ country estate for the weekend. Renting evening wear, he turns up at the chateau and declares himself to be Eve’s husband, “Baron” Czerny. Now all the characters are wrapped up in the throes of mistaken identity and conflicting affections.

The script is the creation of that stupendous screenwriting team, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder (this film is only the second of their 16 collaborations). The script went through the usual round of studio-dictated rewrites – surprisingly, the rewrite request came around to Brackett and Wilder as well. They simply retyped the manuscript and sent it in, and were highly praised for their inventive rewrite.

The farcical photoplay in inhabited by comedic experts – Colbert and Ameche are top-notch, and Barrymore steals every scene he’s in. Eve Peabody is a modern Cinderella, but all the money in the world can’t sway her heart – she loves Tibor and can’t be without him. Mitchell Leisen does a smooth, professional job of directing. It’s not a film that leaps out at you, as do many of the more significant films of that year, but it is lovingly crafted and wittily wise.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.