Midnight – 1939

Don Ameche and Claudette Colbert in Paris

Poor people thrown into the world of the rich is a mainstay of screwball era comedies, and Midnight handles it funnily, gracefully and effectively. Claudette Colbert is a young and beautiful American in Europe trying to find a way to marry into a better income level, gets lucky with a payout from a rich mother wanting her to stay away from her infatuated son, and Colbert immediately takes the wad of cash to Monte Carlo and ... blows it all.

Now essentially penniless except for the shimmering expensive gown she's wearing, she ends up in the charitable graces of a Paris taxi cab driver (Don Ameche) who drives her around the dark streets as she looks for a job, payment from which she has promised the taxicab driver a rate double the meter.

Her emergency job search isn't working out and she bails on the taxi cab and starts walking in the rain with her last money used to buy a newspaper to put over her head. Through a series of bizarre happenstances she gets ensconced into a large evening party of the very wealthy, and while pretending to be one of them (her shiny dress is perfect camouflage) she hopes to settle into a soft chair and rest her weary feet while everyone is listening to a Chopin concert being performed for them by an exasperated pianist who is constantly being interrupted.

Instead, Colbert gets pulled into a smaller group of the wealthy who are bored with the music and want to play bridge elsewhere in the huge mansion. Colbert's bridge partner (Francis Lederer) starts making googly-eyes at her, something that frustrates fellow bridge-player Mary Astor (as Helene Flammarion) who has her eyes on Lederer, but John Barrymore (as Astor's husband Georges Flammarion) wants to encourage Lederer's staring because its pulling Lederer's attentions away from his wife.

Sensing Colbert's true financial state, Georges Flammarion secretly bankrolls a whole phony identity for Colbert as "Baroness Czerny," the title derived from the name of the taxi cab driver who was trying to rescue Colbert earlier.

Though Barrymore is acting the part of a faery Godfather, he has also cooked up a mission for Colbert: keep Lederer away from his wife. Meanwhile, Don Ameche (Tibor Czerny) is organizing all of the taxi cab drivers of Paris to search for the poor missing American girl who, as far as they know, is at the cold mercy of the Paris streets.

Midnight is a carefully paced and structured screwball comedy that, while it has many funny situations and characters, depends a lot on how Claudette Colbert can satirically twist the meaning of a phrase to mean something much more than the words contained in a sentence she is speaking, a talent the actress put to good use in earlier films of girls in jeopardy, like Capra's 1934 It Happened One Night.

Don Ameche as the boundlessly energetic taximan on a mission of mercy holds up the other half (well, more like 40%) of the film and is good at modulating into other characters as the script (by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Edwin Justus Mayer and Franz Schulz) ends up having him pretending to be a baron and then a lunatic in a French divorce court (with Monty Woolley as the presiding judge!)

Poor John Barrymore is on screen showing the signs of physical decay that would take his life a few years later, but he seems to effortlessly play out his mentoring role as a man determined to keep wife Mary Astor close by, even if it means puppeteering a crazy cover story that only gets crazier as it unfolds.

Midnight was released in March of 1939 and is the kind of film that easily fits into the category of both a classic screwball comedy but also a worthy title made in the greatest year of Hollywood production.

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Original Page February 18, 2025