Midnight

Class distinction, infidelity, false identity... these were daring ingredients for a 1939 comedy, and Midnight (a casebook display of Paramount's shimmering studio style of the '30s) is as fresh today as it was when first released. The silky perfection of the Wilder-Brackett screenplay is expertly served by Leisen (a director who deserves ranking with Ernst Lubitsch and Preston Sturges), and Colbert is merely the brightest star in a flawless cast of screwball veterans. Poking fun at the elite was a Wilder-Brackett specialty, and Barrymore is particularly savvy to the material, giving a performance that's simultaneously sly, desperate, and hilariously inspired. The plot is so elegantly executed that Midnight makes most comedies of later decades look pale in comparison. Gone are the days, it seems, when sophistication, wit, and good taste were an integral part of Hollywood comedy. Midnight offers all of those qualities in abundance, making it a perfect antidote to the crudeness that dominates mainstream comedy at the turn of the millennium. --Jeff Shannon

Lev Raphael, author of the Nick Hoffman mysteries


An unjustly neglected comic masterpiece   March 16, 2003
Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA)
MIDNIGHT is the greatest classic Hollywood comedy that almost no one has seen. Why this isn't better known is a bit of a mystery. The film is well directed, well scripted, well acted, and well produced. The film is directed by Mitchell Leisen, who has been unjustly forgotten for the misfortune of having directed a series of extremely fine films based on screenplays by two writers who would later become famous directors in their own right: Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges. But Leisen put his own distinctive touch on the films he directed, and that is nowhere truer than this superb film. Nonetheless, the screenplay is superb, by one of the greatest writers of comedies in the history of cinema, Billy Wilder. Although he had been in Hollywood for a while, this was the first screenplay in which he truly hit his stride, the first in a series of stellar scripts (including NINOTCHKA for Lubitsch, ARISE MY LOVE and HOLD BACK THE DAWN for Leisen, and BALL OF FIRE for Howard Hawks) that led to his own shot at directing. Charles Brackett worked with Wilder as usual, Wilder functioning as the story originator and gagman, and Brackett cleaning up the Germanicisms cluttering Wilder's sentences. The cast is superb, with Claudette Colbert turning in one of her greatest performances as a young woman determined to capture a rich husband, but who instead inconveniently gets involved with a Parisian cab driver. Don Ameche was never better than in this film playing that Parisian cab driver. Mary Astor, who was extremely pregnant during filming, is her usual superb self, while the rest of the cast is littered with talented veteran character actors. The most bittersweet performance is the simultaneous hysterical and tragic performance by John Barrymore as a drunken dissipated nobleman. No question, the man turns in a funny, funny performance, but it is tragic because the appearance of drunkenness and dissipation was not the result of acting. Barrymore was suffering from advanced alcoholism during the filming, and was only a couple of years away from his premature death brought on by cirrhosis of the liver. The man once known as "The Great Profile" no longer was the extraordinarily handsome man he had been only five years earlier. He is funny, but it somehow seems unfitting that one of the great stage and screen actors of the 20th century should have ended his career as a bit of a buffoon.

The screenplay is if a kind that we no longer see, and was the result of a huge influx of European talent in the 1930s escaping the political situation in Europe. So many great films directed by Lubitsch and Wilder and others put an enormously European twist to love and romance, and in no film is this more true than this one: an adventurous woman trying to scale the social ladder by snaring a man, a gigolo seducing another man's wife, the husband scheming to reclaim his wife with the help of the would-be adventurous, and meanwhile a poor cabbie trying to find the woman he loves. Delicious stuff, and it is a credit to Leisen and the largely non-European cast that they pull the whole thing off so believably. In this film, at least, he manages a European elegance and sophistication that would have done Lubitsch proud.


Excellent Prime Vintage Comedy   January 20, 2003
Fernando Silva (Santiago de Chile.)
This is one of the most sophisticated and funny comedies I've seen in my whole life, thanks to one of the wittiest screenplays ever (by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, et al), deft direction by Mitchell Leisen, expertly paced, with a top cast, the best costumes, very elegant sets, etc.

Claudette Colbert is wisecracking chorus girl Eve Peabody (later Baroness Czerny), stranded in Paris, who is befriended by taxi driver Tibor Czerny (played by Don Ameche, in one of his best roles) and ends rubbing elbows with the "smart-set", with unexpected results. For those who have watched Anatole Litvak's "Tovarich" (1937) on TCM, starring Colbert and Charles Boyer, it has a similar premise, but the other way round, because in the latter Colbert, a Russian Grand Duchess who belongs to that country's Royal Family, pretends to be a maid.

The cast is full of excellent players: John Barrymore who impersonates with great skill, Monsieur Flammarion, a role somehow reminiscent of the one he played in "Twentieth Century" opposite Carole Lombard, but in a much "understated" manner. Mary Astor, as his unfaithful wife is rightly "stiff-upper-lip", high class and disdainful. Francis Lederer is very good as her lover, Jacques Picot, who falls under the spell of Colbert's charms. Rex O'Malley is Astor's wisecracking friend, Marcel Renard.

This movie has definitely the trademark "Paramount Look" and the great settings recreate Paris very well. There are many very funny scenes, especially those at the soirée offered by pretentious socialité Hedda Hopper and the party that takes place at the Flammarion Residence in Versailles, where all the guests dance "La Conga". Unforgettable.


Claudette, Greatest Movie Comedienne Ever, At Her Very Best   December 8, 2002
"Tee" (LA)
This movie is pure heaven!!! Claudette Colbert, the greatest romantic comedienne in movie history gives her finest perforamnce here. It's even better than her Oscar-winning IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT. The movie is both utterly romantic and wickedly funny. Don Ameche is a wonderful leading man for Queen Colbert and John Barrymore is hilarious in easily his best film performance during his later "second lead" film career. The Billy Wilder script is just wonderful but thank Heaven Mitchell Leisen was the director!! Wilder unquestionably would have made a far more cynical film whereas Leisen keeps the romance and beauty flowing through. The clock will never strike midnight for this legendary comedy!!


If Only Life Was Like A Movie   August 10, 2002
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

Wit and sophisticated humor is lost from modern movies but it abounds here with double entendres and quips galore. Claudette Colbert is at her very best as is Don Ameche, Mary Astor and Joyn Barrymore. Billy Wilder was one of the writers and his touches are obvious. Nothing is more fun than to see a poor girl run circles around the rich while being supplied with the clothes, jewels, and Hispano Suiza to do it with by someone else's husband.