Hollywood's Greatest Year 2

Some years back one of my favorite film critics Jonathan Rosenbaum published a book entitled Essential Cinema (there's a link to Rosenbaum's blog over on the left of this page if you want to check him out). Most of the book was comprised of essays on those films he considered the cornerstones of film culture, and the book ended with his list of the 1000 movies that he considered the most important to the history of the medium. In his introduction to the list, he acknowledged the subjective nature of his selections, especially noting a bias towards releases from the 1950s-- the decade when he grew up and when his own critical faculties began to mature. I suppose everyone has a similar generational bias, if only because of the nostalgic tinge that lingers over the material one first encounters when youthful enthusiasm is evolving into full-fledged intellectual appreciation. In fact, such an explanation is about the only thing that makes sense to me in elevating product from the 1950s over almost any period of film history, as most of Rosenbaum's favorites from that era leave me rather cold. But then, that wasn't my period to discover the joys of cinephilia.

Strictly speaking, that came for me in the mid to late 1970s, and much like Rosenbaum, I harbor a great deal of affection for the movies of that period (possibly beyond any realistic or objective qualitative judgment of their actual worth). But here's a weird sort of anomaly: I probably saw as many, maybe more, films produced in the 1930s and 1940s during my high school and college years (1973-81) than I did contemporary films of that era. There were two major reasons for this. First, after seeing Richard Schickel's PBS series The Men Who Made the Movies in 1973, I became fascinated by the history of movies (Turner Classics sometimes replays episodes of that series, each of which was devoted to a different director from the golden age of Hollywood), and made a point of looking for old movies whenever they might air on TV. The second factor was that the University of Buffalo, which I started hanging around by my senior year in high school, had a vibrant film society which programmed a wide range of semester long series-- bi-weekly double features that focused on film's past. Particular favorites included a full run of Buster Keaton's silent features, a couple film noir series, a Jean Renoir retrospective, and, maybe my favorite of all, a comprehensive survey of screwball comedies.

All of this is a rather long-winded introduction to one of my favorite movies from the golden year of 1939: Mitchell Leisen's Midnight, which I first saw sometime around 1978 as part of that screwball comedy series. It's a typical, for the genre, story of romance trumping class, which takes place in Paris as a down-on-her-luck American showgirl (Claudette Colbert) infiltrates the hoity-toity aristocracy (abetted by John Barrymore) before giving in to true love for a lowly cabdriver (Don Ameche). There's a lot of imposture driving the plot, and a sophistication about sex and marriage that in heavier hands than Leisen's might've played out as decadence instead of the farcical earthiness on display here. One could almost imagine this as a companion piece to another classic from '39, Renoir's The Rules of the Game which unfolds in a similar setting, a wealthy family's country estate in rural France. Renoir, not surprisingly, had a more advanced sense of class and its implications than the American Leisen did. The latter's perspective was much more tied to the notions of opportunity and mobility, so much so that the Colbert and Ameche characters almost effortlessly pull off their infiltration of the world of aristocracy and privilege. Unrealistic, for sure, but Leisen maintains such a narrative pace that there's little time to consider how silly the premise is, and one is swept along by the performances and clever machinations of the plot. It's pure escapism, and somewhat timeless as a reflection of a certain persistent American characteristic of striving that was as relevant in 1979 as 1939-- though possibly a bit more open to question by 2009. Even so, it's still a delightful entertainment, and highly recommended if you've never seen it.