12:01
Midnight (1939)
directed by Mitchell Leisen
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Robert Osborne should know better than to dare his audience to spot the scenes where John Barrymore reads from cue cards. By insisting it's never obvious, Osborne only means that Barrymore's drunken shorthand is most obvious in an early dialogue with Claudette Colbert, in which the lion of the frazzled mane comes off like an eleventh-hour fill-in on Saturday Night Live. Not that Barrymore doesn't steal the best scene in the movie right out from under his able co-stars, but he does it with his eyes on a higher horizon.
In the old days a movie star could drive a cab, belong to a cab driver's union, and be proud of the heart on his sleeve. It isn't that heroes today don't mingle with the proletariat, but the camaraderie between Don Ameche and his co-workers in Midnight is so closely knit as to unabashedly be love. It's as carefree as the "bromance" is defensive. Maybe the cabbies are more like a team than friends, but the seriousness they accord love makes love a more necessary sentiment, somehow - one to be artfully re-arranged, perhaps, by wiser, hurting hearts, but mature enough to make us all adults. It's the opposite of nostalgia for your teenage years, and it means the best is yet to come.
directed by Mitchell Leisen
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Robert Osborne should know better than to dare his audience to spot the scenes where John Barrymore reads from cue cards. By insisting it's never obvious, Osborne only means that Barrymore's drunken shorthand is most obvious in an early dialogue with Claudette Colbert, in which the lion of the frazzled mane comes off like an eleventh-hour fill-in on Saturday Night Live. Not that Barrymore doesn't steal the best scene in the movie right out from under his able co-stars, but he does it with his eyes on a higher horizon.
In the old days a movie star could drive a cab, belong to a cab driver's union, and be proud of the heart on his sleeve. It isn't that heroes today don't mingle with the proletariat, but the camaraderie between Don Ameche and his co-workers in Midnight is so closely knit as to unabashedly be love. It's as carefree as the "bromance" is defensive. Maybe the cabbies are more like a team than friends, but the seriousness they accord love makes love a more necessary sentiment, somehow - one to be artfully re-arranged, perhaps, by wiser, hurting hearts, but mature enough to make us all adults. It's the opposite of nostalgia for your teenage years, and it means the best is yet to come.
posted by NPK at 3:43 PM
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