History Is Made at Night (Frank Borzage, 1937)

Leo Carrillo, Charles Boyer, and Jean Arthur in History Is Made at Night

Cast: Charles Boyer, Jean Arthur, Leo Carrillo, Colin Clive, Ivan Lebedeff, George Meeker, Lucien Prival, George Davis. Screenplay: Gene Towne, C. Graham Baker, Vincent Lawrence, David Hertz. Cinematography: David Abel. Art direction: Alexander Toluboff. Film editing: Margaret Clancey. Music: Alfred Newman.

It starts as a domestic drama about a failing marriage, then becomes a suspense thriller, then a romance, then a rom-com with screwball touches, and winds up as a disaster movie. Objectively viewed, History Is Made at Night is a mess. But somehow it holds together, partly because of the chemistry of its leads, Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur, as well as some good comic acting by Leo Carrillo and the creepiness of Colin Clive, outdoing even his Dr. Frankenstein. And most of all, I think, by the direction of Frank Borzage, an under-recognized helmsman who seems willing to take anything the screenwriters and producer Walter Wanger throw at him. I've always been a fan of Arthur, and I think she's at her best here. She's not the sort of leading lady that makes you think men readily fall deeply in love with her, but here her character, Irene Vail, causes both the sinister steamship magnate Bruce Vail (Clive) and the suave Parisian headwaiter Paul Dumond (Boyer) to become obsessed with her, to the point that Dumond pursues her from France to America and Vail is willing not only to murder his chauffeur but even to sink an ocean liner with 3,000 passengers for her sake. Somehow, Arthur imbues the character with a quirky charm that makes all this credible. No, it's not a great movie by anyone's standards, but as a sample of Hollywood hokum it's at least great fun.  

Une Parisienne (Michel Boisrond, 1957)

Brigitte Bardot and Henri Vidal in Une Parisienne

Brigitte Laurier: Brigitte Bardot
Michel Legrand: Henri Vidal
President Alcide Laurier: André Luguier
Prince Charles: Charles Boyer
Monique Wilson: Madeleine Lebeau
Caroline Herblay: Claire Maurier
M. d'Herblay: Noël Roquevert
Queen Greta: Nadia Gray

Director: Michel Boisrond
Screenplay: Annette Wademant, Jean Aurel, Jacques Emmanuel, Michel Boisrond
Cinematography: Marcel Grignon
Production design: Jean André
Film editing: Claudine Bouché

Michel Boisrond's Une Parisienne is also known as La Parisienne. I don't know why the indefinite article used for the original release in France was later changed to a definite article, but I wonder if the thinking was something like that of the French censors when they made Jean-Luc Godard change the title of his 1964 film from La Femme Mariée (The Married Woman) to Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman): They insisted that the definite article implied a kind of case study, that the adulterous wife of Godard's film became typical of all married women; changing the definite article to an indefinite one turned the film into the story of one and only one married woman. So maybe taking the reverse route, changing "a Parisian woman" into "the Parisian woman," was the producers' way of suggesting that all Parisian women were like Brigitte Bardot, then at her perky peak as an international sex symbol. Whatever the reason for the title change, Boisrond's film is a fairly banal sex farce, and the only reason to watch it is Bardot -- no one was ever more skilled at exploiting her own charms -- and some nice comic support from Henri Vidal and Charles Boyer, who gives himself over to this nonsense with his usual charm and professionalism.

Cluny Brown (Ernst Lubitsch, 1946)

Charles Boyer, Jennifer Jones, and Richard Haydn in Cluny Brown

Adam Belinski: Charles Boyer
Cluny Brown: Jennifer Jones
Andrew Carmel: Peter Lawford
Betty Cream: Helen Walker
Hilary Ames: Reginald Gardiner
Sir Henry Carmel: Reginald Owen
Col. Charles Duff Graham: C. Aubrey Smith
Jonathan Wilson: Richard Haydn
Lady Alice Carmel: Margaret Bannerman
Mrs. Maile: Sara Allgood
Syrette: Ernest Cossart
Mrs. Wilson: Una O'Connor
Dowager at Ames's Party: Florence Bates
Uncle Arn: Billy Bevan

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Samuel Hoffenstein, Elizabeth Reinhardt
Based on a novel by Margery Sharp
Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle
Art direction: J. Russell Spencer, Lyle R. Wheeler
Film editing: Dorothy Spencer
Music: Cyril J. Mockridge

Ernst Lubitsch's celebrated "touch" was mostly a good-humored, occasionally naughty irony and a flair for pulling off sly sight gags such as the one that ends Cluny Brown: Cluny and Belinski are viewing his book in a shop window when she's suddenly taken faint, followed by a cut to the shop widow in which a sequel to Belinski's book is now displayed. The gag works only if you've caught the set-up, a joke I needn't spoil, but it's a reminder that Lubitsch, like so many of the great directors of the '30s and '40s, learned his trade in silent films. Which makes it all the more amazing that he was so deft with dialogue. Cluny Brown is also a great showcase for its stars, Charles Boyer and Jennifer Jones, who were never quite so charming in any of their other films. Especially Jones, who was manipulated by David O. Selznick into so many roles that she had no business playing, such as the supposedly sultry but really campy part of Pearl Chavez in Duel in the Sun, a film that appeared the same year as Cluny Brown, but seems to be taking place in another galaxy. That Jones could move from Pearl to Cluny with such grace suggests that she was a finer actress than Selznick ever let her be. Cluny also showcases some wonderful character actors, especially the always welcome Richard Haydn as Cluny's unsuitably prissy would-be fiancé and Una O'Connor as his mother, whose "dialogue" consists of clearing her throat. But mostly the Lubitsch finesse is what saves Cluny Brown from turning into the twee horror it might have been with its gallery of talkative eccentrics and off-beat situations. Instead, it's a refreshingly delicate comedy shadowed only by the fact that it was to be its director's last completed film, a reminder of the exchange that took place at Lubitsch's funeral when Billy Wilder sighed, "No more Lubitsch," and William Wyler replied, "Worst than that. No more Lubitsch pictures."

Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944)

Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight

Paula Alquist: Ingrid Bergman
Gregory Anton: Charles Boyer
Brian Cameron: Joseph Cotten
Miss Thwaites: May Whitty
Nancy: Angela Lansbury
Elizabeth: Barbara Everest

Director: George Cukor
Screenplay: John Van Druten, Walter Reisch, John L Balderston
Based on a play by Patrick Hamilton
Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg
Art direction: William Ferrari, Cedric Gibbons

There is a tendency among critic-historians to prefer the 1940 Thorold Dickinson film of Gaslight to the slicker and more opulent 1944 version directed by George Cukor, partly because MGM attempted to suppress the earlier film -- an absurd and vicious effort that evidently failed. But although I myself went along with that attitude in my entry on the Dickinson version, I have to admit that rewatching Cukor's film has brought me around, partly because Cukor is a director I have more and more come to appreciate for his warm professionalism. He loves actors and showcasing them, which he does to great effect in the 1944 film, winning an Oscar for Ingrid Bergman -- largely, I think, for her wonderful scene in which Paula turns the tables on Anton -- as well as bringing out Charles Boyer's great gift for attractive menace. And perhaps best of all, giving the teenage Angela Lansbury an opportunity to shine -- and to earn the first of her sadly unrewarded Oscar nominations. Lansbury's Nancy is a saucy baggage, and she steals the show from the stars by wielding her sharp little chin like a knife, making Paula's fear of Nancy entirely credible while flirting boldly with Anton. May Whitty as the nosy Miss Thwaites, with her delight in the macabre, provides a needed bit of comic relief, too. Her curtain line, "Well!", when she comes upon Paula with Brian Cameron after Anton's arrest, provides a satisfactory ending, partly because it's delivered in a different tone -- this time one of delight -- than her earlier scandalized "Well!" when she saw Paula and Anton kissing. This is high Hollywood filmmaking at its most satisfying.

Madame de... (Max Ophuls, 1953)

The word "tone" is much bandied about by critics, myself included. We speak of a film as being "inconsistent in tone" or its "melancholy,  despairing tone" or its "shifts in tone." But ask us -- or, anyway, me -- what we mean by the term, and you may get a lot of stammering and hesitation. Even my old copy of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics falls back on calling it "an intangible quality ... like a mood in a human being." So when I say that Madame de... is a masterwork in its manipulation of tone, you have to take that observation as a kind of awestruck, slightly inarticulate response to a film that begins in farce and ends in tragedy. The American title of the film was The Earrings of Madame de..., but to my mind that puts the emphasis on what is, in effect, merely a MacGuffin. The earrings were given to Countess Louise de... (Danielle Darrieux) by her husband, General André de... (Charles Boyer), on their wedding day. (Their full surname is coyly hidden throughout the film: A sound blots out the latter part of the name when it is spoken, and it is hidden by a flower when it appears on a place card at a banquet. The effect is rather like a newspaper gossip column trying to avoid a libel suit when reporting a scandal among the aristocracy.) The scandal is set in motion when Louise, a flirtatious woman with many admirers, decides to sell the earrings to pay off the debts she wants to hide from André. Their marriage has obviously come to a pause: Though they remain affectionate with each other, they have separate bedrooms and at night they talk to each other through doors that open on a connecting room. Louise takes the earrings to the jeweler (Jean Debucourt) from whom André originally purchased them. But when she tries to persuade André that she lost them at the opera and the "theft" is reported in the newspapers, the jeweler tries to sell them back to the general. To put an end to the business, André pays for them, then presents them to his mistress, Lola (Lia Di Leo), as a parting gift: Their affair over, she is leaving for Constantinople. There, Lola gambles them away, but they are bought by an Italian diplomat, Baron Donati (Vittorio De Sica), who is on his way to a posting in Paris. And of course Donati meets Louise, they fall in love, and he presents the earrings to her as a gift. Recognizing them, she has no recourse but to hide them, but they will resurface with fatal results. How Max Ophuls gradually shades this plot from a situation suited to a Feydeau farce into a poignant conclusion is a part of the film's magic. It depends to a great extent on the superb performances of Darrieux, Boyer, and De Sica, but also on Ophuls's typically restless camera, handled -- as in Ophuls's La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952), and Lola Montès (1955) -- by cinematographer Christian Matras, as it explores Jean d'Eaubonne's elegant fin de siècle sets. Much depends, too, on the film editor, Borys Lewin, who helps Ophuls accomplish one of the movies' great tours de force, following Louise and Donati as they dance what appears to be an extended waltz but gradually shows itself to be several waltzes taking place over the period of time in which they fall in love. It's a cinematic showpiece, but it's fully integrated into what has to be one of the great movies.