Midnight

Although Hollywood's golden year of 1939 is best remembered for Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, it was also a banner year for sophisticated screen comedy, and Mitchell Leisen's Midnight is a deliciously prime example. Screenwriters Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett were in peak form when they concocted this smooth confection about Eve Peabody (Claudette Colbert), an American showgirl in Paris who is out of work, money, and luck when a handsome cabbie (Don Ameche) offers to drive her around the City of Light to search for employment as a nightclub chanteuse. Nobody's hiring, but Eve has a better plan: posing as a Hungarian countess, she smuggles her way into Parisian high society and suddenly finds herself in the lap of luxury, commissioned by a wealthy aristocrat (John Barrymore) to seduce a French playboy (Francis Lederer) away from Barrymore's not-so-loyal wife (Mary Astor). While Eve is living it up at the Ritz Hotel and enjoying trips to Versailles, Ameche's on a mission to find her and declare his true love.

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

The original title of this Cinderella-inspired screwball comedy was Careless Rapture, a heading that signified the devil-may-care euphoria long distinctive of its genre. However, when Paramount released the picture in 1939, its filmmakers had changed its name to Midnight -- the historic hour that Cinderella's party ended -- and skillfully marked the conclusion of screwball's carefree heyday. At the turn of the decade, and on the eve of World War II, even comedies were moving farther away from Depression-era escapism (which gave birth to screwball) and closer to the postwar skepticism that gripped American film way into the '60s. Mitchell Leisen's Midnight survives as a harbinger of this change. As film critic Molly Haskell points out, Leisen's work is the transitional link between the fairy tale Paramount of the '30s and Billy Wilder's acerbic output for the studio in the '40s and beyond. In this initial collaboration between the two filmmakers (Wilder and partner Charles Brackett developed the screenplay), Leisen wisely allows the impending pessimism of his writers to pollute the outdated felicity of his genre. The extroverted intelligence of screwball's conventional heroine, here played by Claudette Colbert, is supplemented by a worldly understanding far beyond the usual bawdy wit. When her potential suitor asks what kind of job she desires, the gold-digging Colbert answers that at this time at night, she is certainly not looking for needlework. Beneath this sentiment's sexual innuendo is a sense not of simply sarcasm, but of a fatalism and resignation presaging Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment -- characters all too aware of their place in the world. In fact, it is the knowledge of their position in the universe that is made strikingly obvious to all of Midnight's characters. Wilder and Brackett's script does not hesitate to remind them and the audience of the war about to ravage Europe -- at the height of the film's shenanigans, a French judge gravely derides the main characters' tomfoolery in the midst of world turmoil. Contrasted with Leisen's sumptuous direction (he was a filmmaker who often mistook opulence for refinement), this outlook exemplifies the notable metamorphosis of the screwball comedy from insouciant to mordant. Midnight, thus, is much more than an amusing diversion; it is remarkable as a turning point in the annals of film history. ~ Aubry Anne D'Arminio, All Movie Guide