☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Midnight (1939) – M. Leisen
I
thought I had thoroughly mined the screwball comedy genre (popular in the ‘30s
& ‘40s) but I had missed this prime example, directed by Mitchell Leisen
but written by Charles Bracket and Billy Wilder (all responsible for other
screwballs with other partners).
Claudette Colbert (herself no stranger to the genre) plays a broke
chorus girl just arrived in Paris (after losing all her dough in Monte Carlo) who
allows a sympathetic taxi driver (Don Ameche) to drive her around from nightclub
to nightclub looking for a job. No luck,
but there are sparks between them – nevertheless she flees, winding up in a
posh society piano recital (hosted by Hedda Hopper!) where she catches the eye
of John Barrymore and ends up playing bridge with his wife (Mary Astor), the
man trying to seduce her (Francis Lederer), and another friend. To avoid being thrown out of the event, she
claims to be the Baroness Czerny (taking the taxi driver’s surname off the top
of her head). Soon, she finds herself
employed by Barrymore to continue playing the Baroness in order to divert
Lederer’s attention away from Astor – but when Ameche (the real Czerny) shows
up, chaos ensues. As it always does in
screwball comedy. Somehow too each film in
this genre challenges us to guess who ends up married/not married or divorced/not
divorced – and Midnight offers as complex a conclusion as any.
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