American Gold-Digger, Not-Claudette Colbert’s Midnight   

 

 

 

DVD Review

By Zach James

Midnight, starring Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche, John Barrymore, Mary Astor, screenplay by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, 1939  

 

In 1939 as the war drums were beating incessantly in Europe movie audiences there and in America needed a few laughs, something to take their minds for a couple of hours off the grim work ahead in a world that had been taken over by the night-takers. I mentioned in a recent review of another screwball romantic comedy of the same period that no one could do better than to take in at their local theater the film under review there, Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper’s Ball of Fire, to while away a couple of hours. The same is true for the film under review here, Claudette Colbert’s Midnight (midnight in Paris as it turned out but that film title would be taken by Woody Allen in a later romantic comedy so just midnight here).  I mentioned in the Stanwyck review that when one thinks of romantic screwball comedies from that era one usually thinks automatically of Preston Sturgis (whose Sullivan’s Travels was recently reviewed in this space) or George Cukor (whose The Philadelphia Story was reviewed in this space a while back) but here the lesser known Michael Leisen works some cinematic magic taking a hand at screwball comedy.     

Although the pitter-patter here between the leading romantic interests is not nearly as arch from beginning to end as Ball of Fire it does have a fast-moving plotline. Here are how things developed and you can see why in the end Ms. Colbert either as Eve Peabody or Baroness Czerny was not a gold-digger. American showgirl (which is just a nice way of saying gold-digger if you get the drift) Eve Peabody, played by Claudette Colbert last seen in this space trying to get a damn American-style divorce from MacDonald Carey in Let’s Make It Legal, as she debarked from the midnight train from Monte Carlo in Paris was down on her uppers (broke, okay). Too broke to even to have afforded an offered taxi ride by a smitten cab driver, Tibor Czerny, played by Don Ameche an actor whose work has not been previously reviewed in this space, which she desperately needed to keep out of the rain. But Eve was a resourceful young woman and after playing footsy with Tibor who offered to put her up in his digs, no strings attached, no visible strings anyway, found herself, after she ditched him, drawn into a concert being attended by a crowd, a rich society crowd, of the kind she was trying to crash (in order to finally break out from that Kokomo dead-end she left behind and a big reason why she gave Tibor the quick brush-off).       

That is where the fun begins, the Cinderella fantasy tale come true fun. Everything Eve touched turns to gold; gambling losses got paid off, homeless after nixing Tibor’s offer she found herself in a swanky suite at the Ritz; her pawned clothes from Monte Carlo mysteriously arrived; and she had plenty of new clothes and a waiting chauffer at her disposal. Rags to riches in one night no wonder she kept rubbing her eyes. The mystery was soon solved though. One of the attendees at the concert Eve drifted into was Georges, an ultra-rich Frenchman, played with style and expressive flair by John Barrymore last seen in this space as a feisty wheelchair-bound old pappy to Lauren Bacall raining verbal hell down on Johnny Rico in Key Largo, no, that was his brother Lionel, make that whose work has not previously been reviewed in this space. Georges sensed looking at her maneuvers that Eve soon to turn into Baroness Czerny of high Hungarian society was just who he was looking for to help him get rid of his wife’s lover. This lover, Jacques, nothing but a rich idle playboy at heart had been playing footsy with his wife Helene, played by Mary Astor and I will not be making a mistake here by saying that she was last seen as a femme fatale making Sam Spade go through hoops looking for some goddam bird in the film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Georges despite the loose moral tone of high society then (now too) was an old-fashioned kind of guy who still loved his wife and so he proposed to the newly christened Baroness that she lure Jacques away from Helene. She balked at first but seeing that she could break into that high society and plenty of dough she has longed for she finally consented.           

Of course once she took on the job it was a piece of cake to dazzle Jacques away from Helene after a weekend at Georges’ country estate. Everything looked great. Marriage and the Mayfair swells life full steam ahead. Great until a very determined Tibor showed up and gummed up the works by acting as hubby Baron Czerny. He might have been a poor Paris cab driver but he was determined to make Eve/Baroness Czerny, hell, whoever she was his wife. And after a series of pratfalls and silly antics which had the whole estate and its inhabitants in an uproar he finally got his day in court, literally. More importantly he got his girl, his not American gold-digger girl. If you have to choose between this one and Ball of Fire take the latter. But this one is fun too.