Midnight is one of a couple dozen films of the period that I have a hard time writing about. It’s in the top tier of my personal canon and one of the reasons I began this blogging project. It’s almost perfect in my eyes, synthesizing everything that was good about Hollywood comedies of the interwar period. The brilliant screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett; the gorgeous photography by Paramount’s top cameraman of the era, Charles Lang; wonderful performances by Claudette Colbert, John Barrymore, Mary Astor, and Don Ameche; the soundtrack by Frederick Hollaender, the legendary Weimar-era Berlin theater and cabaret composer; and the (to my mind undervalued) direction by Mitchell Leisen, together made something that shows the genius of the medium and Hollywood studio style while creating a comedy that has a place among the great comic works of the past.
The film’s reputation has been muddied a bit by the in-group gossip surrounding the hostility between Wilder and Leisen. Like Preston Sturges and the case of Easy Living — a film Sturges wrote and Leisen directed –, Wilder said he was driven to insist on directing his own screenplays because of his anger at the way Leisen apparently diminished, cut, and generally disrespected his script. A lot of invective came out the mouths of Wilder and Leisen — a good deal of it homophobic on Wilder’s part — and given Wilder’s deservedly higher reputation there has been a feeling for a long time that somehow Midnight could have been better if Leisen hadn’t wrested control from the writers. I’ve suggested that a similar take on Easy Living is wrong-headed — in that case, Leisen not only didn’t mar Sturges’s script, he added a lot of visual style and object comedy that help make it a great film. The same can be said, in my opinion, about Midnight. Neither Wilder nor Brackett ever gave examples of how Leisen harmed the writing, and if one discounts all the noise and gamesmanship surrounding it, the pace and humor of the film seem flawless. Wilder claimed that he fought with Leisen over every cut the director suggested and that’s why the film came out so well. Maybe. Wilder was one of greatest screenwriters — and comic screenwriters at that — that Hollywood ever produced; Leisen made only a few memorable films. But let’s give credit where credit is due — Leisen’s hand didn’t diminish anything, in my view, and his visual style (building on Lang’s photography) creates much of the film’s magic.
And magic is the operative word. Midnight is one of the best examples of how the comic spirit operates through the image of marvelous reality — a zone of fiction where comedy overlaps with fairy tales. The film comes out of the distinctive culture of modern comedies based on fairy tales, the sort of enchanted irony of which Lubitsch was the master in American film. Midnight is a Cinderella tale, as its title and many allusions in the dialogue make clear. It’s of a piece with other Lubitschean fractured fairy-tales — Ball of Fire‘s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Ninotchka‘s Ugly Duckling, Love Me Tonight‘s Brave Little Tailor, and the obvious Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife and The Good Fairy — arguably The Merry Widow fits here, too. Fairy tales have been used in Europe for over 300 years as bases for sophisticated, oblique engagements with gender and power. From the court of Louis XIV to Angela Carter and her contemporary epigones, they’ve also been regularly retold in risqué, and even pornographic, versions. It’s a commonplace of psychoanalytic and feminist theories of the tales that they are ultimately about sex, domination, and maturation, themes not so distant from comedy’s main themes. Transforming folktales into elegant ironic parables was an especially French courtly practice that was later picked up by opera. It was eventually adopted by Austro-Hungarian comic playwrights and filmmakers, whose lightness and superficiality were given a kind of pedigree by the archetypal status of the stories. From one angle, the frivolity of these ironic fairy tales deprived them of their collective-unconscious gravity; from another, they injected some saving wonder into the anxiety and panic of a bourgeois public dealing with the disruptions of capitalism. This French/Austro-Hungarian love of the ironic fairy tale is a core aspect of the Lubitsch style.
That said, Midnight is not a Lubitsch film. Wilder and Brackett wrote three scripts for Lubitsch, but they are quite different from the Samson Rafaelson scripts on which Lubitsch himself collaborated. Even though they are all set in Paris — the fairy-tale Paris of eroticism, luxury, la différance, style, and comic class friction — the Wilder-Brackett scripts tend toward the gritty, the wisecracks have sharp edges, and the shadow of poverty always looms in the background.
Here’s how the paradigm of the comic fractured fairy tale generally works. The main characters — hero, heroine, fairy helper, fairy villain, etc. –, as well as the main magical objects and events, are brought down to earth. They are “disenchanted” by being embedded in the familiar, urbane, modern world where their fairy-tale templates are given realistic deniability: they can be explained as either the “real” bases of the fantasy (in other words, they’re metaphors), or they can be seen as familiar characters and events “possessed” by the archetypes. A good comic fairy tale walks the tightrope between these two ways of seeing. The audience can see the characters as ridiculous readouts of old types or as pixillated creatures with a fantastic ability to adjust to the rules of the marvelous world, which happens mightily to resemble ours.
But the irony and comedy require more. The well known motifs of the fairy-tale have to be somehow detached from their original aura through a whole toolbox of ironic inversions. Whatever was an innocent given in a tale has to be made the result of worldly forces; and every well-known, expected action or event has to emerge as a surprise. The specific magic of these tellings relies on the audience recognizing that the diegetic reality and the metanarrative marvelous are the same. The famous wit of Lubitschean storytelling depends on distraction, in its old Latin sense of pulling the audience’s attention away from the main line through indirection, understatement, and ellipsis. As Wilder himself put it, Lubitsch expects the audience to make the connections, even when the characters aren’t particularly smart. (I have more to say about this in my notes on The Merry Widow.) It isn’t just a matter of creating witty dialogue and visual narrative effects; it’s in the structures of the stories.
No stories are more ingrained in culture than fairy tales. An artist parodying a fairy tale can be sure that any deviation from the canonical storyline will carry a lot of meaning. And while the canonical telling may change over time (as Disney’s Cinderella supplanted the Victorian versions), folks carry expectations from their childhood that basic motifs and the chronology of the story won’t change much, even when they’re repurposed. The Beast may be transformed from an ogre to an aristocratic wounded soul, Beauty from a desperate manipulator to a good hearted soul-saver, but the innocent order of events generally remains intact. Lubitschean urbanity scrambles the storyline by creating ellipses, reordering events, and reassigning roles — comedy and satire take possession of the tale. The storyteller is sure that the audience remembers the tale with a combination of nostalgia for childhood innocence and the condescension of experienced adulthood. Which means the audience is ready for an adult “re-enchantment” of wonder in ironic romance. Naive wonder goes through worldly disillusionment, and then, presto, wonder is resurrected on adult terms. Wilder and Brackett were the American acme of this style, even when they weren’t writing for Lubitsch — as in Howard Hawk’s Ball of Fire (in my view one of the greatest comic screenplays ever written) and in Midnight.
In Midnight, Cinderella appears in the form of Eve Peabody (Claudette Colbert), a down-on-her-luck chorine from the Bronx, a would-be gold digger who had come to Europe to land a rich get and ends up blowing the earnest break-up bribe from a rich paramour’s mother at the Monte Carlo roulette tables — a Camille without tears. All this is backstory. (Eve’s surname invites yet another archetypal tale: The Princess and the Pea — in the film’s world, she is the Pea itself, Baroness Peabody, one little being who causes general discomfort and discombobulation.) She arrives on a rainy night in Paris in a third-class carriage with nothing but the gold lamé gown on her back. A degraded, destitute orphan she is not; but she’s headed downhill fast and she’s a beautiful woman a long way from home with no family and few options. Even so, there’s no question that she’s a special being. Lang’s lighting gives the always luminous Colbert an extra aura.
She’s offered a ride right off the bat by a charming Parisian cabbie, Tibor Czerny (Ameche). Learning that she has only one sou to her name, he gives her a free ride and even offers her his place to rest her head. Hesitant, attracted by his gallantry but wary of entanglement with the spirit-rich but money-poor driver, Eve flees his cab and is marvelously given entry to a high-class soirée in a palatial Paris residence.
The soirée is hilarious. Eve crashes it by faking the pawn-ticket for her bags in Monte Carlo as an invitation card. It’s a brilliant comic inversion: the pawn-ticket becomes her magical pass; the token of all she has lost is transformed into a charm of access to riches. But quickly the fake entry is discovered and a search for the interloper begins. Thinking that she is about to be unmasked before the crowd of high society elders, she attempts another escape but is waylaid by a group of younger cynical socialites and impressed into a game of bridge. With her back to the wall, Eve improvises a new identity for herself. Since her real name has been announced as belonging to the interloper, she can’t identify herself, so she uses the first name she can think of, Czerny, which the others elaborate until she has become the wife of the Hungarian Baron Czerny, one of the “oldest names in the Almanach of Gotha.” She’s transformed into “Baroness Czerny.” Still penniless, she can’t pay the bridge debt she has incurred and is once again on the brink of being exposed. Enter a fairy godmother — or rather its ironic, inverted equivalent: a Magical Sugar Daddy, the Parisian magnate Georges Flammarion (Barrymore), who instantly sees through her improvised impersonation and decides to subsidize it. Observing the attraction that Eve exerts on his wife’s lover, the sleazily debonair heir-to-a-champagne-fortune ladies man Jacques Picot (Francis Lederer), Flammarion devises a plan: the talented, beautiful gold digger will seduce his wife’s lover away from her; Eve can then marry the sort of rich man she originally intended to catch, and save Flammarion’s marriage. Win-win.
Flammarion is always marvelously around to provide escape hatches precisely when Eve is on the precipice of exposure. He underwrites the Baron Czerny story (he appears to know the real Baron Czerny in Budapest); he sneaks a big wad of francs into her purse so she can pay her bridge debts; he secures a palatial suite for her at the Ritz under her new name; he provides her with a high couture wardrobe, a Rolls-Royce avec chauffeur, and invites her to spend a grand fête weekend at the Flammarion estate in Versailles.
At first dazzled and confused, Eve gradually understands the plan, approves it, and apparently forgets about Tibor. He, meanwhile, thinking she must be desperate on the streets of Paris, organizes his cabbie colleagues to search for her. The hunt for Cinderella is on. Instead of being lost on the streets as he imagines, she’s discovered in a Rolls-Royce and staying at the Ritz. Tibor extracts from the hotel’s doorman that she has gone to Versailles through a manifestation of collective cabbie honking, and he’s off on a rescue mission.
Like many comedies, Midnight follows an ancient three-part design: plans→ counterplans→ festive sorting/resolution, much beloved by Hollywood at the time. (You can see it in films on the spectrum from The Awful Truth and The Lady Eve to The Philadelphia Story.) The action begins with a subversive plan by overconfident protagonists; in Part II, the targets of the initial plan initiate a counterplot, reversing many of the motifs and elements that were set up in the original plan. The more sophisticated the plotting, the more plans and counterplots are put in play, intersecting and interfering with each other. The sorting-out generally occurs in one of the institutional reconciliation events that have marked comedy since ancient Athens — a banquet, a party, a civil celebration, or a trial.
In Midnight‘s counterplan, the maleficent Helène Flammarion (Mary Astor), jealous of her Jacques, cannily suspects that the Baroness is not all she appears to be and sets to work to out her. She procures Eve’s suitcases from the Monte Carlo pawn, and finds a photograph that appears to include Eve among a bevy of chorines. At the big dance party (the counterpart of the fairy-tale’s ball) she calls her high-class guests together to denounce, humiliate, and expel Eve.
Just when Eve and Flammarion believe that their gig is up — and midnight has struck for Cinderella and the Good Fairy — the arrival of the Baron Tibor Czerny is announced. Tibor appears in tails and white tie, dignified and supremely confident, saving the situation for the clueless Eve exactly as Flammarion had done in Paris.
Tibor has come to rescue her and her story and to take her back to Paris with him. Eve almost accepts and confesses her love, but still the pull of reality is too strong. In the process, Tibor reveals that he is in fact the eighth cousin of “that diabetic idiot,” the real Baron Czerny, which makes him more of a Baron than Eve is a Baroness.
Frustrated and disgusted by Eve’s indecision — should she choose worldly satisfaction by marrying the adoring Jacques or soul-satisfaction by marrying Tibor, whom she loves? — Tibor decides to reveal his true cabbie self as well as Eve’s true identity to the Versailles crowd. He reappears in his taximan garb with his cab. But Eve forestalls the inevitable disaster — joining the crew of just-in-time situation-saving tricksters — by alerting the Flammarions and their guests that Baron Tibor is liable to fits of insanity and violence, having delusions of being a low class worker. Each time Tibor tries to say the truth he is met with indulgence and tolerant pats on the back. He’s eventually knocked unconscious with a pan of gravy. When he comes to, he reminds the still dithering Eve that she can’t marry Jacques before she gets a divorce from the Baron — that is, himself.
TIBOR: Don't forget, you're married to me!
EVE: I'm not married to you.
TIBOR: Jacques Picot thinks you are. You're in a fine mess. You've got to get a divorce from a man you aren't even married to.
Thence begins the sorting out — in this case, the divorce trial — a real divorce of a fictional marriage — presided over by a puffed-up moralizing Molièrean judge (well-played by Monty Wooley). Wilder and Brackett milk to the max the inspired absurdity of divorcing someone you’re not married to in order to truly marry them . (It reappears in characteristically original form at the end of Sturges’s The Lady Eve.)
A special dialectic makes witty and sophisticated quasi-fairy tales like Midnight exemplary vehicles for modern urbanity. The court of Louis XIV knew it, and it was at his Versailles that the modern practice of composing art fairy-tales began. (It’s hard to avoid thinking that Wilder and Brackett had that in mind when they placed Flammarion’s estate at Versailles.) The naive fairy tales, so our modern analysts tell us, were parables of maturation, following child protagonists from innocence, through struggles with experience, to a happy resolution, the mature adult’s synthesis of good intentions and social norms. The “courtly” fairy tales complicate each stage — complicating things is what comedy does best, anyway. In their world, innocence is relative. The innocent protagonists may know a lot about the world; they may be canny and clever. They just can’t see the whole picture, which only consummated romance can reveal. They need their canny resources to get along in the world of experience.
Tibor is an obvious innocent, a gallant Hungarian-Parisian cabbie who considers himself rich earning 40 francs each day and devotes himself to rescuing Eve. But Eve is an innocent, too, in a different way. Her gold digger sensibilities are superficial — she’s actually fleeing from her disillusionment about her parents’ marriage and poverty. She’s an innocent gold digger; she doesn’t initiate any part of Flammarion’s plan, she just plays along. So we are introduced to two characters whose innocence isn’t childlike at all. The complications really get going in the experience/counterplot phase, as each character shifts from a form of innocence to a kind of worldly wisdom. Tibor, who before had shown only a smidgeon of tricksterity (he pays a stranger to call for a taxi, emptying the cabbies’ cafe of potential rivals for Eve’s attentions), unexpectedly shows a genius for improvisation, playing the role of Baron Czerny with ease (maybe as an eighth cousin he has a bit of baronial dignity in his bones), and inventing the fiction of Francie, their supposedly measly daughter back in Budapest. Eve, too, displays a new gift for improvisational trickery (in all her previous subterfuges she played the cards she was dealt), wresting control of the Francie story and concocting Tibor’s history of lunacy.
An interesting thing about Midnight is that this mixture of innocent and experienced traits is true for the blocking characters, too. Helène is clearly Eve’s enemy but the script and Astor’s performance make it clear that she is in love with Jacques and feels a lot of sincere pain of love. Jacques, too, for his part, begins as an elegant gigolo, but his affection for Eve becomes sincere — and he, too, is in pain. (Even Marcel [Rex O’Malley], Helène’s dandy co-conspirator, repeatedly nostalgically recalls his own — complicated, but presumably innocent — childhood.)
It’s a stone wonder that the film passed the Hays Code censors. Think about it. The virginal Cinderella becomes a virtual courtesan, and though one could argue it’s all because of her poverty, she seems very comfortable with the luxuries it affords her. (The role surely influenced Sturges’s Gerry Jeffers in Palm Beach Story three years later — also played by Colbert; Midnight is demonstrably a mighty influence on that film.) It’s part of the general comic magic that Eve shifts from one persona to another with great ease without losing any of her magic. (It’s the sort of role Colbert excelled at — a bit shifty and uncertain but never losing her style and integrity.) This is an important and somewhat neglected aspect of screwball heroines — they’re masterful shape-shifters, female tricksters who instantly adapt to changed circumstances. It’s one reason screwball heroines are always steps ahead of their more rigid male partners. (Think of Jean/Eve in The Lady Eve, Sonia in Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow, Susan in Bringing Up Baby, Lucy Warriner in The Awful Truth, Hazel Flagg in Nothing Sacred, etc. ) They are the core movers of comedy, the self-deprecating and flexible ironists who refuse fixed identities. The ancient Greeks called them eirons, we can call them players. They play the cards they are dealt well, and do some dealing, too.
If all this seems abstract for such a funny and smooth movie, I think it’s important to understand that Wilder and Brackett were the most literary-minded of the comic screenwriters in Hollywood. They knew their Shakespeare and Molière and were able to combine their very different traditions as few writers could. Lubitsch and Samuelson were precursors, but Wilder and Brackett perfected the combination of Shakespearean romantic wonder and Molièrean social judgment. It makes sense that most of the great Wilder-Brackett scripts were written for Lubitsch. At the same time, I think it’s worth considering that it was Leisen’s sensibility that gave the witty and goofy screwball script some of the emotional depth characteristic of serious Hollywood films of the time, but rarely seen in the comedies.
There’s so much more that can be said about Midnight. Without clips, however, it’s hard to show how all the elements — acting, pacing, wit, camera, music, mise en scène — work together. I can give some hints, however, about how the film creates fairy-tale irony visually.
