Midnight
I ended up with a couple of DVDs in my hot little fist, and store manager Rachelle suggested I do some movie reviews for the Blackfly Gazette.
Actually, I’ve reviewed a number of movies in this rag, but they’ve almost always about old classics I stumble across online. With a few rare exceptions, most modern movies are tedious, dumbed down Hollywood corporate schlock. In my humble opinion.
Anyway. I took home “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” and “Thin Ice.” Marigold Hotel turned out to be a perfectly pleasant way to spend a couple of hours watching a veteran team of terrific older actors do their thing.
Thin Ice is a so called “Black Comedy” and it compares itself to the Coen Brothers’ dark and witty flick “Fargo.” I gave it a shot but Fargo it is not. Sigh.
At any rate, I already had a movie I was dying to tell everyone about….a delicious, delightful and sparkling romantic comedy from 1939 called “Midnight.”
Midnight hails from the era of the classic madcap romantic comedies such as “Bringing Up Baby”, “It Happened One Night”, “Palm Beach Story” and so on. These rom-coms are all wonderful movies, are justifiably famous and are on every classic movie buff’s must see list, but I had never heard of Midnight and came across it by sheer luck.
It is yet another vintage movie that the copyright has expired on, so it’s in the public domain and you can watch it on youtube.
Midnight is a take on the Cinderella tale, and the title reflects the fact that midnight comes for every would be Cinderella!
Our heroine is one Eve Peabody from Brooklyn, who arrives in Paris one rain soaked night in a third class coach from Monte Carlo. Eve is played by Claudette Colbert, who looks absolutely fabulous and has spot on comedic timing.
Eve went broke playing roulette in Monte Carlo, so she hocked her luggage and got just enough money to get to Paris, where she hopes to make her fortune. She arrives with just the clothes on her back, which is a gold lame` evening gown, and her tiny beaded clutch which contains only her pawn ticket stub and 25 centimes. The Peabody fortune!
I didn’t know much about Colbert’s career, so I looked her up after I watched this movie. It turns out that she was one of the most highly paid actresses of her era, and she refused to ever be filmed looking anything but perfect. She knew more about lighting than the crew, and she also had a quirk about her face.
She had a tiny bump on the right side of her nose from a childhood mishap and so adamantly refused to ever be filmed or photographed from her right side!
But back to the flick. There’s a gauntlet of Parisian taxi drivers clamouring for fares as the passengers disembark from the train.
Which is where we meet our hero, one Tibor Czerny as played by a dashing and drop dead handsome Don Ameche.
I only knew Ameche from films he’d made when he was much older, such as “Trading Places” (He was one of the wicked brothers) and “Cocoon.” I had no idea he was so gorgeous as a young man!
Tibor offers Eve his cab, but she has no money. However, she presents Tibor with a deal….she tells him of her straightened financial circumstances, and that she needs a job. If he takes her around to look for a job…she instantly re-invents herself as a blues singer… she will pay him double the meter rate plus a great big daddy tip once she lands a gig. It’s a wager, double or nothing! Tibor says no thanks.
But when he doesn’t acquire an actual paying fare, he goes after Eve, who has taken off into the downpour. Still looking terrific, I might add. He tells her to get in, he’ll take her deal.
But no tip for you now, she quips.
They make the rounds of every café and bistro for Eve to audition… but no job offers come. Our plucky heroine asks to be taken back to the station so she can hang out till morning. Tibor is, of course, quite smitten by the plucky Eve by this time…and who wouldn’t be?
He takes Eve for a cheap supper and offers her a place to crash, no strings attached. She is clearly attracted to Tibor as well, but had bigger plans for her future. The dialog sparkles and is full of delightfully witty repartee.
She sneaks off into the rain when Tibor is busy gassing up the taxi, and the adventure really kicks into high gear.
Nice sneer, eh?
Eve finds herself in a snooty music recital… but she’s just happy to be in out of the rain sitting in a comfy chair surrounded by rich people. She has seated herself next to wealthy banker George Flammarion, played by John Barrymore, the immortal stage and screen actor. He suspects something is up, especially when the doorman finds the pawn ticket and alerts the snobbish hostess that there’s an impostor in their midst.
Eve attempts to slip out, but is shanghaied by Marcel to be a fourth at a game of bridge being played in another room by other refugees from the dull recital.
Saved again! And a card game! Our Eve is a gambler, remember. And then we meet our other key players…Helene (Mary Astor) is the wife of George Flamarion, and she’s been canoodling with handsome playboy Jacques (Francis Lederer)
The game commences, and fickle Jacques takes a decided fancy to Eve, much to Helene’s chagrin. George comes in the room to visit….and quickly spots that his wife’s lover has been distracted by the lovely Eve.
More tasty plot development ensues, in which Eve says her name is “Czerny” and she becomes mistaken for a Baroness from Hungary.
Mssr Flammarion develops a plan to get his wife back, by setting “Baroness Czerny” up as bait for the playboy. He plays Fairy Godfather and offers to bankroll Eve so she can snag rich Jacques for herself….and so she suddenly goes from having nothing to having a suite at the Ritz, a chauffeur and a wardrobe full of some truly wonderful outfits.
Seriously, women knew how to dress back then! The hats, the gloves, the beautifully cut fashions.
She takes the deal. And what about Tibor? He’s a man in love, and he marshals the entire fleet of Paris taxi drivers to look for his girl. How far could she have gotten with one gold dress and a pawn ticket? His fellow cabbies had seen her at the café with Tibor, as well, so they know what she looks like.
One of the cabbies spots Eve in her limousine and engineers a little fender bender to get a closer look. When Jacques indignantly identifies her as Baroness Czerny , the cabbie, no fool, puts two and two together and alerts Tibor. Who promptly sets up a ruckus at the Ritz until the doorman tells him where the Baroness was headed off to.
Our intrepid hero rents himself a tuxedo and crashes the party at the estate…by announcing himself as “Baron Czerny.” Incidentally, the Freudian significance of Eve having used his name to play her game has not escaped sharp as a tack Tibor.
The scramble as Eve and George attempt to preserve their ruse just keeps getting better and better….and now here’s a supposed husband showing up like a joker in the deck!
Jacques purrs: “I eat husbands.”
And while Don Ameche looked quite tasty in his raffish cabbie outfit, he is totally yummy in a coat and tails! He will definitely not end up as a snack for Jacques!
I am surprised that this flick is not more well known, as are all the other reviewers commenting about this movie online. There is just so much to savor in this story, which I am leaving out so I don’t give away too much, tempting as it is to describe each clever twist in the plot.
Some back story though….John Barrymore ultimately drank himself to death, and was in the latter stages of his decline when he made this movie. According to the scuttlebutt, he couldn’t remember his lines for this movie so read them off cue cards.
According to him, however, he couldn’t be bothered to learn mere movie dialog as he was a classical actor! Whatever went on, he is nonetheless a total hoot to watch. Drunk or not, he is wonderful in every scene.
Mary Astor as Helene could have been turned into an unpleasant shrew, but she is surprisingly sympathetic even when she’s being catty.
And in this movie, her “BFF” is a gay man, Marcel, who helps her as they plot to derail Eve’s campaign to win Jacques.
No one is a one note character in this….even though this is fantasyland everyone is a fully formed person and the actors are all very generous with each other in the scenes. Everyone sparkles, even bit characters. The movie has heart.
They really really don’t make them like this anymore!
Francis Lederer enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the movies and passed away at age 100 in 2000. He was one of the last surviving Austrian-Hungarian veterans of the Great War.
Midnight is just 90 minutes long but is 90 minutes of non-stop fun. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
Stephanie Kelley
