Midnight (Universal Cinema Classics)

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.This film is being co-released with two other films, all of them interestingly linked, MIDNIGHT and EASY LIVING. Billy Wilder wrote the screenplay for MIDNIGHT and directed and wrote THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR. Preston Sturges wrote EASY LIVING and in 1940 would direct his first film, THE GREAT MCGINTY. Mitchell Leisen directed both MIDNIGHT and EASY LIVING. During the late 1930s Leisen directed a string of great comedies, but almost all of them had been written by either Sturges or Wilder. While THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR and MIDNIGHT represented the start of major directorial careers for Wilder and Sturges, the sudden lack of quality scripts signaled the end of Mitchell Leisen career as a great director.

I don't recall why I started out looking for old Don Ameche movies, but based on so many positive reviews here, this was the one I chose first. I am so glad I did. I've watched the DVD at least a dozen time since I received it, and I haven't tired of it. I love the characters, the plot, the settings and costuming.Colbert's Eve Peabody is beautiful, elegant, quick-thinking, and willing to take chances, whatever the consequences. She yearns for financial security but somehow always winds up following her heart instead of her wallet (or clutch purse, in this case). You can't help liking and sympathizing with her even when she seems determined to follow through on her gold-digging plan. She quickly and successfully jumps into the role of faux baroness.Ameche's Tibor Czerny is an honest, determined, non-materialistic cab driver of apparently simple tastes for whom the wealthy are just fares, not people to be envied, until he meets Eve and is utterly smitten with her. She's smitten too, but tries to resist falling in love with yet another poor man, and flees into the lap of luxury. But he'll do anything to find her again, even slide into the role of titled nobility himself.Barrymore's George Flammarion is fabulous - he's hilarious, sly, and desperate to keep the wife he loves, whatever the cost, even to the extent of throwing a comely gold-digger in the path of his wife's lover in hopes of distracting him. As complications arise, he seems to revel not just in having set the so-far successful plot in motion, but in being the only one who truly realizes what's going on and in going along with everything that happens as the situation gets more complicated and fantastic.Astor's Helene Flammarion is very well-played, and her pain at seeing her lover's reaction to Eve seems very real. She quickly realizes her rival will be successful if she doesn't do something, and she scrambles for some way to win the battle for Picot's heart; she's delighted to meet "Baron Czerny" and to set Czerny and Picot against each other in hopes that the baron will woo back his baroness and her lover will return to her.Lederer's Jacques Picot, not often mentioned, is gorgeous and fun to watch, if rather predictable as not so much a villain but a light-hearted playboy whose fancy flits easily from one woman to another -- and you have to wonder about his often-referenced mother. He's a man who needs women in his life, yet you see that none of them will really displace the mother who matters most to him -- until, perhaps, Eve.The beginning build-up gives us time to get to know and care what happens between Peabody and Czerny, before they slip into the world of the refined wealthy who seem to have nothing better to do than host parties, go shopping, and play love games, with the poor couple looking for the real thing. It's easy to just sit back, enjoy, laugh, and root for love. Plenty of sly innuendo and sparkling wit, without the complications from vulgarity, violence, or love-defined-as-hopping-into-bed-at-first-meeting that have the potential to distract from characters, plot, and setting. The cast plays so well off each other. I enjoy them all.This movie is truly joyous, an one reviewer noted. I love it and recommend it.

This is quite simply one of the best scripts ever written. A masterpiece from Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. Mitchell Leisen does a good job with the direction, but it is the script that sparkles at every turn. Wilder shows he is easily up to the standards of his hero, Ernst Lubitsch, and this plays like a companion piece in some ways to Lubitsch's Shop Around the Corner. If you like sophisticated comedy with a sharp cynical edge, Hollywood has rarely done it as well as this. Highly Recommended.

I had never heard of this film until it was recommended to me by Amazon. Now it is one of my favourites. The storyline is typically fantastic and one which has been used in many films - poor girl masquerades as an aristocrat, gets herself in a pickle and falls in love along the way. However, rarely has this basic premise been executed so beautifully. The cast are first rate, without a single false note. It is funny and well crafted, has terrific characters and is just utterly charming. This is a real forgotten gem.

Love this film, which is very funny in its simplicity and innocence. Claudette Colbert is superb and intelligent. I've watched it many times and would highly recommend it.

This is one of the great comedies - Wilder and Bracket script and Colbert, Ameche and Barrymore as well as Mary Astor on top form in a story about a girl fortune hunter in Paris who meets a taxi driver. It is witty, daring and perfectly performed.

Well acted but, I found, slightly disappointing considering the plaudits that this movie has received. Certainly not as hilarious as expected. However,quite watchable.