In the decadent French chateau of a frisky aristocrat and his wandering wife, a showgirl pretending to be a baroness and the cab driver she fell for are arguing about the practicality of a marriage surviving on 40 francs a day. “I know we’re right for each other,” he coos. “I know it deep down in my bones.” Ah, but what about what happened to her parents, she counters. Without the comfort of money, their wedded bliss turned into constant fights. “They just gave up. They didn’t even hate each other,” she says sadly. Can’t he see that she is just trying to save them both from heartache?
For Midnight‘s Eve Peabody (Claudette Colbert) and Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche), love came easily enough. Arriving in Paris one rainy evening with only one centime to her name, she convinced the reluctant cabbie to drive her around as she scoured nightclubs and cafés for a job. After many auditions, a cheap dinner, and some cozy dancing, he offered her his bed for the night and a shirt to sleep in while he finished his shift, an act so intimate that it made Eve realize just how deep their bond had already become. Frightened, she dashed away once Tibor’s back was turned, causing him to search for her while she stumbled into high society.
Falling head over heels after just one night happens often in classic Hollywood and is indicative of the era’s economical storytelling, but there is also a certain romance to it that isn’t bound by logic or realism. To look into someone’s eyes and be immediately swept into the heady euphoria of love is the kind of witchcraft Hollywood’s Golden Age excelled at weaving. It’s an old-fashioned, clichéd notion, yet it feels radical in comparison to the current film landscape, where it seems like earnestness and leaps of faith are fading, their magic no longer valued by a system dominated by mind-numbing homogeny. It’s easy to laugh at the idea of love at first sight, but a film like Midnight demonstrates the intoxication, and the inconvenience, of it with a sophistication and sincerity that few have mustered since its 1939 release.
Thanks to the Great Depression, countless romantic-comedy plots of the ’30s involved the tension between love and money as couples struggled to decide if matrimony could exist without full bank accounts, a conflict that defines Eve and Tibor throughout Midnight. When Tibor finally finds her again, Eve admits she ran because she knew he would’ve wound up proposing to her and she would’ve accepted. Terrified that they would one day wake up and find their penniless marriage suffocating them, Eve would rather pursue a man who can offer her a lavish, secure life, even if love doesn’t factor into it. For Tibor, though, love is security. As he says at the end of the film, “With you around, I’ll make as much as we want! Anything is possible!” Chateaus and jewels are nice, sure, but do they quicken your pulse or make your nerves tingle? Do they inspire, console, or encourage you in the way that a partner can?
What Eve also doesn’t consider is that the rich don’t have happy marriages any more than the poor do. Her charade as a baroness is a direct result of this as she is hired by Georges Flammarion (John Barrymore) to lure away his wife’s lover, Jacques (Francis Lederer). The Flammarions may be reconciled by film’s end, but who is to say that Jacques was the first or the last of Madame’s flings?
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In the world of screwball, it isn’t a soulmate you’re looking for, it’s a playmate. Tibor may feel exasperated by Eve’s make-believe, but he doesn’t shy away from telling his own tall tales or acting foolishly, as he so brilliantly does in the film’s climax to win Eve’s hand once and for all. His power to imagine and invent rivals her own, and their relationship is all the stronger for it.
The irresistibility of Tibor and Eve’s romance lies not only in their shenanigans and their words, penned so charmingly by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, but also in the expressivity of Don Ameche and Claudette Colbert. From the very beginning, the way they gaze at one another, whether through sly glances or dreamy-eyed joy, communicates that they’re a match. Ameche and Colbert both have faces with a capital F with her apple-cheeked freshness and his dimpled mischievousness beautifully conveying sarcasm, wit, heartbreak, and goofiness, sometimes all in the same moment.
There’s a fizziness to their interactions, but a vital softness too, as exemplified in the scene where Tibor has arrived at the Flammarions’ estate and tries to bring Eve back to Paris. As he moves closer toward her, their argument comes to a standstill once he wraps her in his arms. Their voices are almost hushed, and we can see Eve’s resolve crumbling as they melt into each other, her face buried in his chest. She attempts to stay strong, though, and when Tibor pulls her into a kiss, Colbert illustrates Eve’s inner struggle as her hand begins to caress Ameche’s hair before she stops herself in frustration and again reiterates that she must continue with her and Georges’s scheme.
In screwball comedy, love is destabilizing. It knocks you sideways and makes you realize the life you planned, the ideas you thought, and the safety you craved are traps. Being practical is a trap. Spontaneity, unconventionality, adventure — that’s the good stuff. As much as she will always cherish her Cinderella moment, Eve knows that at the end of the day, Tibor is the only thing she truly wants and the two are able to walk arm-in-arm towards the future, implausibly, impractically, and irrevocably in love.
Midnight will be screened at IU Cinema on October 29, concluding this semester’s Saturday Matinee Classics series.
Michaela Owens is thrilled to be the editor of Establishing Shot, in addition to being IU Cinema’s Communications and Outreach Media Specialist. An IU graduate with a BA in Communication and Culture and an MA in Cinema and Media Studies, she never stops thinking about classic Hollywood, thanks to her mother’s introduction to it, and she likes to believe she is an expert on Katharine Hepburn and Esther Williams.