Midnight

1950 romantic comedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Eve Peabody's a hardluck nightclub singer who travels to Paris without a dime. Taxi driver Tibor helps her out for the night and falls in love. She runs off while Tibor pays for gas and sneaks her way into a ritzy party where she pretends to be a baroness. Just as things are ready to fall apart, a soon-to-be-jilted husband comes to her aid and offers her a job--seduce his wife's boyfriend to teach her a lesson. Things are going well with the plan until Tibor manages to find her. His presence could ruin everything! Oh, snap!

This Wilder/Brackett-penned comedy threatens to become completely unhinged a few times, but things ultimately hold together and finish up like anybody would expect it to. The crisp, witty banter is often more clever than uproarious, but there are some genuinely funny moments, my favorite involving a telegram from a daughter with measles and a subsequent phone call. There's also great comic timing and good rapport between the actors. I like the leads (Claudette Colbert and Don Ameche), and I really like John Barrymore as the husband. It's a lot of fun watching the twists and turns as the characters try to one-up each other. Sophisticated and gay screwballery that should probably be more widely known. Interesting note: the studio apparently liked an initial draft of Midnight's script but wanted revisions. They hired Wilder and Brackett to handle those revisions, apparently unaware that they had written it in the first place. The writers, of course, just typed it up again and sent it back.

Another Cory recommendation.

I found the camera which means you get to see this: