MIDNIGHT : [8/10] : US 1939 : Mitchell LEISEN : 94m
seen on video in Rome, Italy: 22nd November 2007 (with thanks to Jay Weissberg and Frank Dabell)
   Midnight is rather a "perfect storm" of sophisticated romantic-comedy: the coming-together of a director with a rare flair for the genre, two star writers (Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder) near the top of their game, and an ensemble cast who prove expert in maximising the comic potential of every line. The story is, like most of the best farces, wispy nonsense - a confection of mistaken and assumed identities that skips merrily across social divides. When American showgirl Eve Peabody (Colbert) arrives penniless in Paris, she must rely on her wits in order to get by. After befriending chirpy Hungarian taxi-driver Paul (Don Ameche), the hunger-driven Eve breezily cons her way into a fancy dinner by posing as an exotic aristocrat - which leads to her inadvertently becoming entangled in the marital problems of an ageing roue (John Barrymore) and his less-than-faithful wife (Mary Astor)...
   Further deceptions and complications rapidly accumulate - indeed, Midnight isn't so much screwball as snowball, picking up pace and absurdity throughout while nimbly avoiding both incomprehensibility and (excessive) implausibility. A very high laugh-quotient is maintained throughout - easily enough, in fact, to keep us from dwelling on the potential incongruity (even, one could argue, the tastelessness) of such giddily daft goings-on transpiring in 1939 Paris, not to mention the minor issue of the characters' accents and language (invariably American-inflected English, whatever their theoretical nationality.) Simultaneously down-to-earth practical and sparklingly glamorous, Colbert proves herself a great sport and a superlative comedienne as the indefatigable Eve - though even she proves powerless to prevent supporting-player Rex O'Malley from stealing scene after hilarious scene as a particularly waspish denizen of the Parisian demi-monde.. 7.12.07

THE SHADOW LINE : [5/10] : Smuga cienia : Pol/UK 1976 : Andrzej WAJDA : 100m
seen at National Film Theatre, London : 29th November 2007 : public show (complimentary ticket - with thanks to Kieron Corless)
   "Torpid" is a handy little word much-beloved of film-critics who want a fancy way to say "slow" - but The Shadow Line is that rare movie to be actually about torpidity itself. It's based on a 1917 novella by (Polish/Ukrainian-born) Joseph Conrad - billed under his birth-name of Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowki in the picture's opening credits -  the cover of whose first edition posed the not-so-tantalising question 'Why did the captain and the silent crew of the ship in this story of the far east have such great and mysterious difficulty in passing latitude 8"20'?
   Perhaps the book provides an answer - but the film itself most certainly does not. Indeed, this adaptation by director Wajda and Boleslaw Sulik goes out of its way to avoid any kind of definitive explanation. Is it simply a matter of the lack of wind in the Gulf of Siam - described by one old sea-salt as "a funny bit o'water"? Is it a result of the inexperience of the ship's youthful captain - nameless in the book, here referred to as 'Joseph Conrad' (Marek Kondrat) - whose first command this is? Or could there be more supernatural forces at work? As 'Conrad' is reminded by his members of his crew, 8"20' is the exact point where the ship's previous captain died, and the more superstitious among them believe that his spirit is somehow interfering with their attempts at progress.
   Because while most of those on (and below) deck are indeed as "silent" as the book's cover describes - their wordlessness largely a result of the energy-sapping fever - two prove rather more voluble. There's the enigmatic cook, Ransome - a fresh-faced, lugubrious Tom Wilkinson, making his screen debut at the age of 27 - who proves conspicuously resistant to the distemper ailing his colleagues. Less fortunate is Burns (Graham Lines), the wild-eyed, wild-haired First Mate who spends most of the film in the malady's grip and much given to semi-deranged verbiage. In the middle of all this is the cockily impetuous young 'Conrad' - determined, despite hailing from from Poland (at that time a land-locked state), to prove himself a master of the sea - who discovers that the captain's role is as much a matter of interaction with tricky underlings as it is an engagement with the practicalities of rope and sail.
   Most of the script's 'dialogue' is, in fact, monologue: 'Conrad' narrates his experiences from some future point of hindsight, as when he ponders that adulthood involves "facing up" to "bad luck, mistakes, conscience, that kind of thing." Indeed, the enforced inactivity on board ship drives him to pick up pen and paper, apparently for the first time, and thus make his first steps (in English) on the road to becoming a Famous Writer. This is one of the numerous 'shadow-lines' which the character crosses from raw youth to experienced maturity and, in the context of Conrad's own career, perhaps the most illuminating.
   But Wajda and Sulik are essentially stuck with a narrative which is almost entirely about things not happening: there's a 35-minute mid-section dominated by grinding stasis, and there isn't really enough going on in terms of inter-character development or individual psychology to properly sustain our interest. It doesn't help that, Burns and Ransome apart, the crew-members remain undifferentiated peons, or that Wajda tends to falls into a cycle of repetition in terms of the visuals and the soundtrack, the latter in the form of echoing/ghostly/tinkly piano.
   When the ship is in motion, however, the camera soars and picturesque montage becomes the mode, all to the accompaniment of a soaring orchestral lushness - a combination which will remind older viewers of a certain, very popular British TV series from the same decade: not so much Shadow Line as Onedin Line, in fact. These first and third 'acts' of the film have a dated, stodgy, airlessly-conventional feel - although every penny of the budget was clearly well-spent, with great attention paid to specifics of period architecture, costume and design. Unfortunately the evocation of a bygone era also extends to the film's tempo: "all we can do is drift," as someone remarks during yet another period of enforced, becalmed inertia. 9.12.07