"MIDNIGHT."

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 14, 17 July 1939, Page 4

"MIDNIGHT."

Cinderella Up To Date

"Midnight," which has Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche, Francis Lederer, and John Barrymore at the head of its cast, opens on Thursday at the Regent Theatre. This modern Cinderella story about a girl who is taken out of the rain by.a taximan and pitchforked into the midst of wealthy! society in the effort to escape him, who finds herself engaged on a strange task of creating a triangle to order, has the authentic note of comedy which was present in such films as "The Milky Way" and "She Met Him in Paris," and it turns unexpected corners and reveals new angles at every development. Once again the film is played out before a Parisian background, with a Hungarian baron, real and imaginary, a champagne millionaire, a pawn ticket from Monte Carlo, an American chorus, and th' whole rait of the taxi-drivers oi Paris as important items in the plot. The weather helps, too, for it was the weather which drove Eve Peabody, alone and baggageless in Paris after a Monte Carlo disaster, to make a deal with taxi-driver Czcrny to take her around the night clubs in the effort to get a job, and it was the weather (plentiful rain) which '- allowed her to gate-crash a party when |Czerny threatened to complicate her life too greatly. There are any number of good scenes: the moment at the party when Eve thinks she has been discovered, the moment when the fairy coach, ordered by fairy-god-father John Barrymoi'o, brings her a wardrobe, the time when the Parisian taxi-drivers force the hotel to reveal her address, the time when Baron Czerny saves the "Baroness" from embarrassment, the telephone conversation with the imaginary child with the measles, the court trial for divorce with its unexpected ending. "Every Cinderella has her midnight," says Eve when things begin to go too well for her and when she sees ready that "tub of butter" which, as a poor workinggirl, she has always wanted and of which she has always been cheated by "some snub-nosed kid in the orchestra playing the trap-drum." And it is when Cinderella's midnight approaches that the film reaches its funniest. The movie shows Claudette Colbert in hexbest vein, it brings Don Ameche one of his likeable parts, though perhaps not very reminiscent of the Hungarian, Francis Lederer an opportunity to play the part of a young man about town to whom life is one romance after another, John Barrymore, that quizzical, desensitised role he knows so well. And the supporting roles are ably filled by such people as Mary Astor and the Elaine Barrie who became Mrs. Barrymore. It is a film which moves fast and has dialogue written neatly and fluently, and it lacks nothing in the way of expensiveness in background and dressing. Altogether "Midnight" is one ot those movies which make one glad to have left home to sec them, even in July.