Midnight

Do modern audiences still care about the graces of fine screenwriting?  Does there still exist a consensus audience, or are we just isolated viewers / consumers?  It doesn’t matter to us … we still value the films of Billy Wilder as great entertainment from a singular personality … a playful and mischievous personality.

Before he earned the chance to direct, Billy Wilder spent several years as a star writer at Paramount. Did anybody there ever see his films made in Europe?  A long-ago FILMEX ‘Billy Wilder Marathon’ opened with the 1931 German romp that launched his German screenwriting career, Emil und die Detektive.  Wilder shared direction and writing on the 1934 French comedy  Mauvaise graine, which bears the mark of his enthusiasm for exotic cars of the period. At Paramount, Wilder’s fortunes got a big boost when he was paired with a more conservative writing partner. Charles Brackett provided good taste and a sure command of English, which Wilder had yet to fully master.

Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife saw Brackett & Wilder adding their own flavor to the style perfected by Ernst Lubitsch’s writers. Their oft-cited contribution to screenwriting is the ‘meet cute’ scene, which suggested saucy possibilities when Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert buy a pair of men’s pajamas together.

The Brackett & Wilder team didn’t slow down for a minute. Just three pictures later they’d be writing for Lubitsch, confecting  a nigh-perfect comedy for Greta Garbo. But the first film that put the writers on the same level as their mentor is 1939’s  Midnight, a feather-light romantic comedy directed by Paramount’s prestigious house director Mitchell Leisen. Bios of Billy Wilder emphasized Wilder and Leisen’s ongoing creative feud, which persists in an anecdote re-told endlessly on TCM intros, the oft-cited  cockroach incident. Wilder detested Leisen’s changes to his screenplays. The discontent fueled his ambition to follow the career path of Preston Sturges, and graduate to writer-director.

I remember student and biographer David Chierchetti championing Mitchell Leisen’s films at UCLA. Several are among the finest shows Paramount turned out in the period:  Hands Across the Table,  Easy Living,  Remember the Night. Leisen’s  No Time for Love may be just another vehicle for Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray, yet it also delivers solid entertainment. For Midnight Leisen was given a great cast and a lavish budget to make magic with Wilder & Brackett’s dialogue. It’s a safe bet that Billy was on the sidelines, thinking “I should be directing this.”

Like their Oscar-nominated  screenplay for Howard Hawks, Brackett and Wilder’s  Midnight uses the structure of a fairy tale. The story of an American showgirl stranded in Paris is not a standard Screwball comedy and neither does it veer into Sturges slapstick. It is a good ‘disciple of Lubitsch’ effort, with perhaps a little more emphasis on the class divide.

American showgirl Eve Peabody (Claudette Colbert) has lost everything gambling in Monte Carlo. She arrives in a Paris rainstorm with no luggage, wearing an evening gown. She manages to talk cabbie Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche) into helping her look for work, with no success. Eve is attracted to the charming Czerny but ditches him after he offers to let her stay at his place. She ends up slipping into an exclusive salon holding a piano recital. Hostess Helene Flammarion (Mary Astor) is soon alerted to a gate-crasher, but Eve’s deception has already been detected by Helene’s husband, Georges (John Barrymore). Two more swells in tuxedoes zero in on the attractive Eve. The suave Marcel Renaud (Rex O’Malley) needs a fourth for bridge, in a private room. There Eve instantly gets the attention of the handsome ladies’ man Jacques Picot (Francis Lederer).

The quick-thinking Georges sees his own opportunity with Eve. She’s astonished when he backs up her claim to be the wife of a ‘Baron Czerny;’ accompanied by Jacques back to her ‘room at the Ritz Hotel,’ Eve is further amazed that one has been booked in her name. The next morning, luggage identified as hers arrives. The blizzard of ‘Cinderella’ madness is explained when Georges arrives to invite Eve to a house party at this country estate. He wants her to romance the flighty (but fabulously wealthy) Jacques Picot, to break up Picot’s affair with Georges’ wife Helene. The amazing plan is not only the path of least resistance, it’s along the lines of what Eve had in mind in Monte Carlo in the first place. Jacques isn’t unattractive …

The only problem is the taxi-man Tibor back in Paris, who is convinced that he has found the woman of his dreams. His taxi colleagues have helped him trace Eve to the Flammarion estate, and he’s on his way to claim her. What he doesn’t realize is that the inventive Eve and George are able to improvise almost any ridiculous deception … such as insisting that Tibor is the ‘crazy’ Baron Czerny, who does eccentric things like pretending to be a taxi driver.

Midnight is one of those buoyant ’30s entertainments that define classic Hollywood magic, a romantic comedy with bright, amusing personalities. Its producer is the former Broadway producer Arthur Hornblow Jr., whose string of top-flight movies included several big hits by Leisen,  Billy Wilder’s directorial debut, and then the big MGM pictures  Gaslight &  The Asphalt Jungle. He was chosen to produce Rodgers & Hammerstein’s movie adaptation of  Oklahoma!  and he helped Billy Wilder get out of a box office slump with  Witness for the Prosecution. Hornblow convinced Paramount to spend big on this show, as seen in its many enormous sets.

The writers must have tailored the dialogue to specific stars. Claudette Colbert is 100% Eve Peabody, a ‘girl on the loose’ who nevertheless has scruples and a sense of self-dignity. Three years later, Colbert would play a similar adventuress for Preston Sturges’ much zanier  The Palm Beach Story.

John Barrymore had all but launched the Screwball Comedy in Howard Hawks’  Twentieth Century, with a character so frantic, the story could barely contain him. His Georges Flammarion for Midnight is not the expected manic egotist or lecher, but an idealized version of his screen persona. He’s quietly crafty and devious, but also a sincere husband who wants only to extricate his flighty spouse Helene from an infatuation with the oily Francis Lederer. This may be Barrymore’s most charming filmic characterization. He conveys big thoughts just by raising his eyebrows.

Don Ameche was one of Hollywood’s most popular stars; Billy Wilder once dropped an in-joke honoring his status as a household name.  ^*  The truth is that Ameche was excellent in every role he played, comic or serious. Ernst Lubitsch would hire him for his Technicolor masterpiece  Heaven Can Wait (1943). In Midnight Ameche is perfect as Tibor Czerny, the cabbie escorting Eve around Paris in the dead of night. When Tibor invades the Flammarion estate, he is even more inspired. We believe it when Eve cannot resist him.

TV host Johnny Carson would trivialize Ameche’s reputation with cheap jokes about old movie stars with ‘funny’ names, like ZaSu Pitts. But the actor would eventually have the last laugh, when John Landis cast him with Ralph Bellamy opposite Eddie Murphy in Trading Places. That led to a minor rediscovery for Ameche, which culminated in the leading role in one of David Mamet’s best features,  Things Change … released almost 50 years after Midnight.

It’s also an interesting role for Mary Astor. Her Helene Flammarion is a snooty elitist, but she remains likable through the devotion of Barrymore’s Georges. He so loves her that he indulges her affairs, and arranges to make it her idea to come back to him. Midnight imagines the hyper-wealthy European swells as spoiled and vain, but not evil. Rex O’Malley’s Marcel delights in encouraging Helene to be petty and decadent; to us Marcel seems a less stereotyped gay characterization, not at all neurotic or included just for laughs.

Another ambivalent character is Francis Lederer’s Jacques, who comes off as too handsome and too too oily in his gallantry — he’s one of those  Continental hand-kissers that Wilder likes to lampoon. Vain and immature, Jacques has the foolish Helene wrapped around his little finger. He’s well insulated from life’s inconveniences by all that money. He can’t imagine Eve not being crazy about him.

Francis Lederer was much bigger on the stage than in film, not counting his role in G.W. Pabst’s classic  Pandora’s Box. He was also known as Franz and František; and was already working in England and America when the German film industry was purged of Jews. RKO imported him to Hollywood but didn’t promote him well. Besides this movie and  Confessions of a Nazi Spy, he’s best known for the late-career horror  The Return of Dracula … a role that now colors our perception of his Jacques Picot.

Hedda Hopper is in to play one of Helene’s wealthy friends, and Monty Woolley is an indignant judge. Original reviews were glowing. We haven’t seen John Barrymore more deviously lovable, and so effortlessly funny. This is one of those ‘old’ comedies with jokes that make us laugh out loud. That happened for us three times in Midnight, which we think qualifies as high praise.