Mitchell Leisen’s film Midnight (1939) is a battle-of-the-sexes rom-com which features fun plot-twists and identity reversals, making it a staple of the screwball comedy genre. As one of the earliest subgenres of rom-com in Hollywood, this light-hearted and fast-paced storytelling uplifted moviegoers exiting the Great Depression at the turn of the 1930s. Here, Claudette Colbert plays Eve Peabody, an unemployed showgirl who is stranded on the streets of Paris with nothing to her name — no money, lost luggage, and alone. Doing what she deems best in this situation, Peabody takes up a new name and begins a charade as a Hungarian Baroness who goes by “Madame Czerny”.
Watching Peabody assimilate as one of the upper class — or bourgeois if you will — shows off Peabody’s spectacular wit that ultimately makes this risky stunt work. Profound class commentary would come to accompany the standard screwball comedy. Midnight captures this sentiment through the duality of Peabody’s identity as both a poor showgirl and a masquerading noble, highlighting her interactions with the upper class as superficial and distant. The title of the film also seems to indicate this by alluding to the ‘Cinderella’ trope; midnight marks the conclusion of bedazzling disguises, paving the way for a return to one’s true identity, and with that, their unfortunate circumstances. To keep it spoiler-free, Peabody and Cinderella are quite alike in this way, and it is this magical transformation which shapes the film’s ending.
All throughout the film, Colbert is simply enchanting on screen. She perfectly embodies the clever, flirtatious energy of Peabody who dazzles the unsuspecting men around her. In the first 15 minutes, Peabody seduces Tibor (Don Ameche), a taxi driver, into giving her a free taxi ride, a cigarette, dinner, and a place to sleep for the night. Peabody then takes a pass on the accommodation and slips out of sight after dinner.
The next 80 minutes move fast as we follow Peabody fall into the trap of making impulsive decisions with her newly fabricated noble identity. In between games of bridge, ballrooms dances, and limousine rides, Peabody seizes the hearts of both the soft-hearted Tibor and Jacques Picot (Francis Lederer), a suave, wealthy man. However, one falls in love with Eve Peabody and the other with the charming Baroness, Madame Czerny. Peabody grapples between her love for the taxi driver and a lucrative marriage proposal from Picot. In the midst of her own romantic entanglements, Peabody weaves through the mess of bourgeois society where she is pawned to end an affair and investigated for her false identity.
Like Peabody, fluid and malleable identities characterised the screwball comedy, with films like Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Some Like It Hot (1959) featuring cross-dressing, solidifying it as a recognisable convention of the genre. The screwball comedy created an important ripple effect in Hollywood for women and writers. Female characters occupied the roles of both the protagonist and hero, often calling the shots and deciding the fate of the male characters around them. This playful and silly genre also paved the way for some of Hollywood’s biggest screenwriters, such as Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett who wrote Midnight together before later hits such as Ball of Fire (1941), A Foreign Affair (1948), and most significantly, Sunset Boulevard (1950).
Midnight has been neatly catalogued as one of the classics to come out of Hollywood in the decade after the Great Depression, alongside Colbert’s earlier screwball, It Happened One Night (1934), the first film to ever win all five major Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It Happened One Night has often been credited for birthing the romantic comedy or ‘rom-com’. Now, rom-coms have brought us to the likes of Anyone But You (2023) which has been pitifully labelled as “reviving” the genre, despite the movie having more romantic drama off-screen than on-screen… But luckily, the cinemas are still alive as Midnight will be screening at the Ritz Cinema in May for the opening night of the 2024 Cinema Reborn festival. Grab a friend (or a lover) and go watch it!
Midnight (1939) is playing at the Cinema Reborn Festival which is screening restorations of classic films at the Ritz Randwick. Click here to access the 2024 program, running from May 1-7.
Student prices for tickets to the 2024 Cinema Reborn Festival have been set at $15.00.
