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Screwball comedy doesn’t get any more effortlessly elegant and gleefully irreverent than this roulette wheel of romantic deception, gleaming with cunning wit and Continental élan. A couture-clad Claudette Colbert is divine as a penniless American showgirl who crashes Parisian high society by posing as a wealthy Hungarian baroness—but both a scheming nobleman (John Barrymore) and a smitten taxi driver (Don Ameche) are soon on to her game. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett’s sophisticated script—a typically subversive blend of fairy-tale escapism and caustic social observation—and the pitch-perfect direction of master craftsman Mitchell Leisen yield a topsy-turvy Cinderella story with a cynical bite.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
New audio commentary featuring author and film critic Michael Koresky
New program featuring audio excerpts of a 1969 interview with director Mitchell Leisen
Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of the film from 1940
Trailer
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: An essay by film critic David Cairns

New cover by Abigail Giuseppe

Leisen's first Criterion and we get a commentary track. I'll take it!

A great, elegant comedy, though some of the Brackett-Wilderisms leave it slightly below my favorite Leisens. If I remember correctly, it was one of the favorite films of our departed member David Hare.

I've enjoyed Michael Koresky in the past, I'm cautiously optimistic for his commentary.

Flixyfox will be happy! And so am I, this has been a long time coming. Shame there’s a lack of extras but I can’t say I expected much from Criterion. Just glad to have this in HD at last!

Perfect

Delighted this is announced and didn't linger in "Criterion has the rights" purgatory for however many years after the restoration (though it does smart a little that it's only a BD). One of my favorites, and one of my favorites to show people.

I know Koresky's a regular on the Channel featurettes—has he done a commentary before?

Yeah I have zero ideas for Criterion (or any label) extras for Leisen, other than, i dunno...maybe get something out of Mark Rappaport I guess? The only other Leisen expert I'm aware of is deceased.

Randall Maysin Again wrote: Fri Mar 14, 2025 5:44 pm Yeah I have zero ideas for Criterion (or any label) extras for Leisen, other than, i dunno...maybe get something out of Mark Rappaport I guess? The only other Leisen expert I'm aware of is deceased.

Indicator got Geoff Andrew, Rick Burin, and Adrian Martin to do extras for their release of Remember the Night so I imagine there’s at least 3 other people who could be considered experts.

Well, not to dump on those people, but surely in general the criterion for being an expert on a filmmaker shouldn't just be that you've recorded a commentary for one of their films....?

Except wait a minute, there's all sorts of Wilder and Sturges experts out there, what am I talking about

features on Claudette Colbert, Wilder, and Sturges would've all been cool. that said, I wonder if this will be the first Criterion/Indicator overlap on a classic Hollywood title? or did CC grab this for the UK too? I'd be curious what Indicator would include here

Red Screamer wrote: Fri Mar 14, 2025 4:05 pm A great, elegant comedy, though some of the Brackett-Wilderisms leave it slightly below my favorite Leisens. If I remember correctly, it was one of the favorite films of our departed member David Hare.

I wasn't aware David Hare had passed on. I had assumed as I stopped seeing his posts and see that he's long been gone from a certain invite only site he got me on. When did he pass away?

As for Midnight, it's one of the best comedies of the 30s. Leisen was the perfect director on this. I don't associated Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett scripts for subtlety, but Leisen makes their script into a far more elegant film than Wilder ever could've done. Between this and Hold Back the Dawn, it's clear that Leisen was ideal in dampening the more ostentatious elements of their writing style. Ernst Lubitsch was the other, but in that case, it's clear they're trying to write in the manner of a Lubitsch film.

I think he just left the forum, not this mortal coil

And how! All of his posts got wiped into oblivion (per his request). A shame.

My writeup from the Billy Wilder list project:

therewillbeblus wrote: Mon Apr 27, 2020 3:33 am This is a sweet take on deception, where a gold digger navigates her way into high society and fights love with a poor cabbie despite the magnetic pull of attraction. Somehow the writers succeed in their strategy to make us believe this act isn’t for superficial selfishness or ill-intention, but rather due to society’s messaging and hard-nosed conditioning from personal history. Again, painting the world as grey, Wilder and Brackett make us understand that marrying for money over love should withstand judgment until we hear out the reasons. Colbert has hers, and the film resists being too preachy with its smart humor, especially in classist jabs, even if at times it does spend a while expressing the ambiguity. I found this semi-didactic aspect more interesting than I did tiresome but it definitely chooses to walk the plank there, so mileage will vary. Personally I thought it was an excitable multicharacter farce with a beating heart that worked in its tonal balance.

Yes the deleting of Mr Hare’s often very insightful posts is so unfortunate as it means a lot of old film discussions don’t make sense when reading back today.

He is still active on FilmAlert where he comprehensively reviews the occasional Blu-ray.

David Hare on Midnight´s lack of film grain:
"if it wasn't actually de-grained at some level pre-mastering I suspect Criterion have gone into their now notorious filtering, a process which makes it "easier" to deliver a 2K encode without straining the grading process. They are now notorious for this."

Source: June 14 post:
https://filmalert101.blogspot.com/

Haven’t yet seen what Criterion did with Midnight but the encode filtering would surprise me as their authoring house definitely dialed back or even avoids it altogether at least for discs without huuge amounts of video content on them. I’ve noticed this the first time with their BD of Not a Pretty Picture which was released in 2024. With that title, their BDs started to look more filmic and detailed than before.

It’s possible that Universal did it themselves. Even when they turned around, in terms of their older DVD-era masters, 2010s Universal masters still had their own type of noise reduction/filter (granted not as aggressive as some of their older masters).

There's no way Criterion did this, and the notes (which i didn't post yet, so apologies) state Universal performed the restoration (from a nitrate composite fine-grain). I suspect that's why they didn't bother with a 4K.

Plus Thelonious Monk looks great, no issue with filtering there.

Universal hit their The Incredible Shrinking Man 4K restoration pretty hard with the DNR. Although in that case, due to the way it was made, I can see why they felt they had to do it, even though I think they shouldn't have.

The review is up on blu-ray.com, and it looks, hmm, interesting as plenty of caps look fine but then, some look plainly DNRed.

Some shots however look sourced from something else and have that typical kinda vertical grain-ish texture from several Universal masters of movies of that era.

David Hare:
"The 4K for Midnight is exquisite but the 2K master Universal provided them for the Blu only dies the death with low pass filtering."
See post 4:
https://www.hometheaterforum.com/commun ... ay.388050/