Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 22-February-09
Spoiler Rating: High

Midnight (1939)

Some 1930s and '40s comedies rely on the unsavory notion that in hard times women might as well be prostitutes. Oh, the leading ladies don't stand on street corners, but the idea is that we ought not to recoil when they offer their bodies to finagle money out of tycoons. For example, in Preston Sturges' distasteful The Palm Beach Story Claudette Colbert leaves a gorgeous husband whom she loves to snag a Rockefeller and then tries to throw some cash her husband's way as if he were her pimp. While Midnight places Colbert in a similar situation, its laugh-out-loud humor and underlying goodheartedness make the setup more palatable.

Written by Charles Brackett and an up-and-coming Billy Wilder, Midnight features sparkling dialogue in truly screwball circumstances. Colbert arrives in Paris one rainy night with only the gown on her back. Cute taxi driver Don Ameche agrees to ferry her around while she tries to find a job, and they fall in love before the wee hours are over. Yet Colbert is seeking her fortune from someone who makes more than cab fare, so she runs off while he is buying gas. Before you know it she has passed herself off as a baroness at a high-class soirée and caught the eye of a French dandy (Francis Lederer). She also catches the eye of an older man (John Barrymore) who sees through her and spots an opportunity.

Whiffs of Pretty Woman scent the Midnight air as the older man puts Colbert up at The Ritz and buys her a chic wardrobe. He is not out for sex, though; he hires her to tempt the dandy away from an affair with his wife (Mary Astor). It is a great scam since Colbert can draw a salary from her new employer while securing her target for the long term. There is only one snag: the cab driver has launched a citywide search for his lost love and, upon discovering what she is up to, goes to join her at a retreat near Versailles.

Ameche's arrival among the blue bloods marks the beginning of real hilarity. At first he pretends to be the baron, Colbert's jealous husband, which prevents her exposure as a fraud. After other ploys he decides to come clean, only she has already convinced her hosts that he is insane. "I had warning," she admits of her union with a lunatic in a long line of lunatics. "Why else should his grandfather have sent me as an engagement present one roller skate covered with Thousand Island dressing?" Her scandal-loving audience laps it up and disbelieves everything Ameche says.

The good news is that love conquers greed in these classics, so it only takes a well aimed frying pan, a fake divorce, and a curious French law to set Colbert and Ameche on the right path. (Barrymore and Astor, too, although their reunion feels like an afterthought.) The title alludes to Cinderella's transformation after the ball, and it is a nice twist to this story that she lands a soulmate instead of a prince.

Copyright © 2009 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.