Midnight. Mitchell Leisen. 1939.
Claudette Colbert! I like her.
This movie gets off to a really great start: Everything is explained in a couple of sentences and then we’re off. Colbert is a lot of fun to watch, too.
I’m all in.
This movie is a lot of fun. It’s got a great set-up: A grifterish, but still somehow sympathetic woman (just by being Claudette Colbert), trying to make her way through Paris. It could seem like a nightmarish situation, but the Don Ameche character works like a safety net — surely he’s a benign character? So it’s lessening the tension, making things more fun.
This is delicious! The plot is so contrived; I love it.
Oh! Billy Wilder is a co-writer on this! That explains the high concept, high fun thing going on here.
But I mean… this has got John Barrymore and Mary Astor and Hedda Hopper…
I don’t understand why I haven’t seen this before. It’s fabulous!
Oh, Barrymore died a couple years later.
OK, the movie gets a bit bogged down in the plot in the last third — it has to go through all the bits you think it has to go through for it to resolve into the ending you know it going to happen — but every scene is plenty amusing.
It could have had a bit more zing in the pacing.
Monty Woolley!
This blog post is part of the 1939
series.