Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Twelve Review: Midnight

Screwball comedies are a sketchy business, as far as I'm concerned. They're the direct precursor to our modern romantic comedies, and like romantic comedies, when they work, they work really well -- but when they don't work, they can be excruciating. The best screwball comedies, like the best romantic comedies, either take the tried-and-true scenarios of comic misunderstanding and turn them on their heads, or elevate them through superb writing, acting, and directing, so that the tropes of the genre seem fresh and charming rather than cliche. Bad screwball comedies, like bad romantic comedies, end up seeming like the same tired story rehashed over and over again, often with the same small group of actors: in the case of screwball comedies, that story is some variation on rich girl/boy + poor boy/girl = wackiness, with rapid-fire dialogue and a zany heiress thrown in to boot; in romantic comedies, it usually involves a driven career woman with no time for love and a outwardly douchey/inwardly awesome guy who teaches her how to loosen up. (Feeling sick yet?)

I didn't know what to expect going into Mitchell Leisen's 1939 screwball Midnight. On the one hand, Leisen was a director with a gift for comedy, and the cast, which includes Claudette Colbert, John Barrymore, and Mary Astor, is top-rate, full of "actorly" actors who play comedy as seamlessly as they do drama. On the other hand, the script is by Billy Wilder, who I sometimes find brilliant and sometimes...don't (see Irma La Douce), and the filming was notoriously rocky, with Colbert refusing to be shot from her right side (she thought her nose looked funny from that angle), Leisen trying to disguise the fact that Astor was seven months pregnant (which her character was not), and Barrymore so far down his slide into alcoholic oblivion that he had to read his lines off of cue cards. Throw in the fact that I found costar Don Ameche off-putting and smarmy in the revered comedy Heaven Can Wait (1943) and the odds definitely seemed stacked against Midnight's favor.

Fortunately, I didn't have any reason to be worried. Midnight is one of the best screwball comedies I've ever seen, if not the best. The story is familiar enough to be called typical of the genre, but it's also unique enough to stand on its own: After showgirl Eve Peabody (Colbert) arrives in Paris without a dime to her name, she quickly befriends the wealthy Georges Flammarion (Barrymore), who agrees to pay for all her expenses if she'll do her best to steal away his wife's not-so-secret boyfriend, Jacques Picot (Francis Lederer). Along the way, Eve meets cabby Tibor Czerny (Ameche), whose name she adopts as she drives a wedge between Jacques and Madame Flammarion (Astor), posing as Baroness Czerny, wife of a Hungarian diplomat. (The title "Midnight" refers to the story's similarities to Cinderella, and that at any moment, Eve's coach might turn back into a pumpkin.) From there, the screwball aspect really kicks in, especially after Tibor decides he's in love with Eve and travels to the Flammarions' estate to retrieve her.

As Eve, Colbert is better than I've ever seen her, and I was equally impressed with Ameche (no smarm in this role), Astor, and Barrymore, who may not have been able to remember his lines, but could still deliver them with flare. Another stand-out is the supporting actor Rex O'Malley, whose character Marcel has some of the best lines in the movie. Unlike a lot of my favorite screwball comedies, which I simply find entertaining, I actually found Midnight funny, especially the sequence in which Eve tries to convince her new rich friends that Tibor (now posing as her husband the Baron) is insane. I would recommend Midnight as a great starter film for people who are unfamiliar with screwball comedies, especially over a more famous example like Bringing Up Baby, which becomes increasingly shrill with every new twist of the plot.

Grade: A+