| Cole Seidl |
Midnight plays in stunning 4K at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, July 17th, through Sunday, July 19th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
The 10th annual Nitrate Picture Show in Rochester, New York didn’t announce a single film of its program before the festival began on June 4th. They didn’t need to—tickets had sold out within a week of going on sale in January. People, it seems, didn’t care what the program was, but were simply excited for the opportunity to see nitrate film projected on the big screen with a passionate and insightful audience. Imagine my surprise when they announced one of the screenings would be Mitchell Leisen’s 1939 Midnight, the very week I had intended to re-watch it before writing this piece. The film was projected from an original release print that had been donated by Paramount to the UCLA film and Television Archive in 1971.
One of the joys of the Nitrate Picture Show is their commitment to screening excellent prints of films that could otherwise be seen as “unprojectable” because of their shrinkage. They have projected film prints with up to 1.55% shrinkage (previously a number deemed by many archives to be too far shrunken for any public projection). The print of Midnight we watched was up to 1.2% shrinkage—high enough to make this screening a quite rare pleasure.
Moreover, a shockingly large number of folks in the audience had never seen the film before. In some ways this makes sense, the film is often cited as one of the greatest ignored screwball comedies among cinephiles. Though it’s also shocking when you consider the amount of (still recognizable) talent involved in the film: Claudette Colbert and John Barrymore in front of the camera, performing a script co-written by Billy Wilder (in the film that purportedly convinced him to move into directing), and perhaps most of all, the voice of Shadow from Homeward Bound (Don Ameche as the leading man, in a role that could have been incredibly bland had it gone to a more obvious actor like Joel McCrea. But Ameche is truly standout here playing against Colbert at her absolute best). The ability to rediscover the film with a large audience who are in the process of discovering it for the first time proved a true delight. At one moment the entire audience burst out into applause at a gag I had originally read as relatively minor.
The film starts much slower than some more overtly madcap fare like His Girl Friday or Trouble in Paradise. However, it quietly builds a complicated web of relationships, alliances, secret desires, and personal resentments that release like a pressure cooker in the final third of the film to realize one of the most satisfying farces of the era. The production of the film was famously tumultuous, with Barrymore’s drinking rendering him difficult to manage, and Wilder’s disdain for Leisen’s direction leading to frequent tense moments. Leisen’s directing is first-class here despite Wilder’s critiques, which are possibly rooted primarily in homophobia. Leisen was queer and Wilder couldn’t help but reference this when leveling criticism, saying “Leisen was too goddamn fey. I don’t knock fairies, let him be a fairy. Leisen’s problem is that he was a stupid fairy.” Whatever interpersonal tensions existed during the production of the movie, it seems to have only benefitted a film that mines all its comedy and dramatic stakes from a myriad of interpersonal tensions.
Despite all the dazzle of an original Nitrate Release print beautifully projecting a long underappreciated masterpiece from Hollywood’s Golden Age before a wildly receptive audience, I found myself still fixating upon one specific detail of the film: the game of Bridge.
Now, I am an exceedingly mediocre Bridge player (or a bad player, depending upon your familiarity with the game) and I cannot resist films in which the characters play the game for which mastery is so elusive. Engaging with the manner in which Bridge is represented on screen serves almost as an analogue for shifting cultural mores throughout the twentieth century. Bridge, in the 1940s, was one of the most popular games in America, though now it is technically a sport. In 1941, 44% of American households regularly played Bridge. There was a baseline of familiarity, and it even shared similarities with spectator sports. Bridge games were broadcast on radio, and later television. People were expected to have a basic familiarity with the rules of Bridge, even if they weren’t regular players. This led to films like Midnight weaving the game into their stories, sometimes dishing out key details of the plot or important psychological information through the play of the cards.
This can get tricky for a modern audience. Bridge makes its appearance early on in Midnight when Rex O’Malley invites Claudette Colbert to join their game simply because, as he says, “you look like you won’t trump your partner’s ace.” Fair enough. The average audience member can understand from context that he thinks she’ll play without making rookie mistakes. And of course, it’s true. Colbert’s character does play Bridge, even though she was pulled into the game at random. This is not a strange plotting error, like a character suddenly revealing they know how to pick a lock or hotwire a car. Of course she knows how to play, she’s a reasonably sophisticated modern woman. In 1939, just before the height of Bridge, her ability to play the game puts her in a minority, but a significant one which also displays her notable cultural cache. Perhaps the equivalent today to a character casually being capable of driving a manual transmission vehicle. So far, so good. Probably, this is how most modern audiences take the scene even without any real concept of Bridge as a game, or its history. Then we get to the cardplay and things go haywire.
The scene, while still entertaining enough within the context of the film, leans into some heavier cardplay that is almost guaranteed to be read as gibberish to most modern audiences. Every game of Bridge begins with an auction. This is the key to the game. Colbert opens the auction with a bid of “2 Spades”. When it comes to her partner, Francis Lederer, and his turn to bid, all he can do is muster up a weak “Pass.” This is important. This is where the cardplay indicates to the audience a key detail. Lederer’s bid can only mean two things (in terms of character psychology, not in terms of card play): Either he doesn’t know how to play Bridge (an option that has already been negated earlier in the dialogue suggesting he’s the best player of the group) or he’s so completely smitten with Colbert that he can’t even focus on the game at hand.
An audience in 1939, by and large, would have caught this instantly. An audience in 2026 likely will not, even if they happen to play Bridge. This is because the bidding conventions changed after World War II. In 1939, a “2 Spade” bid indicated an incredibly strong hand (the modern equivalent would be opening with “2 Clubs”). In 2026, a 2 Spade opening bid often indicates something called a “Weak 2”, and Lederer’s “Pass” would be a reasonable response, thus lacking the dramatic irony that the entire scene hinges upon.
This scene fascinates me because it is a specific mode of representing an incredibly complex card game that didn’t last too long. It expects greater familiarity than some other notable representations of Bridge on film. For example, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) has a significant Bridge sequence. However, Danny Kaye’s character, Walter Mitty, isn’t familiar with the game (putting him in distinct contrast with Colbert’s sophisticated modern woman, he’s a bumpkin who cannot follow the speed play) and thus the game is represented as incomprehensible. The audience, identifying with Kaye’s character, doesn’t need to understand what’s happening with the cards. In fact, the scene is funnier if you have no concept of what is being played, or why.
The cinematic midpoint between Midnight’s expectation of sophisticated familiarity with the game and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’s rendering Bridge knowledge obsolete would be the very fun sequence from the Marx Brothers film Animal Crackers. The chaos that Harpo and Chico bring to the game renders the real rules irrelevant. Their obvious cheating (bringing in extra aces from other decks of cards, looking at each other’s hands, etc.) is a mode of humor that can be applied to almost any card game. However, the knowledge of the basic rules and conventions are a key to some of the provocations to (and shocked responses from) Margaret Dumont. It also provides an extra bit of fourth-wall breaking humor as Dumont, a Bridge player, almost breaks into laughter at multiple moments of the conventions being flouted.
Bridge has a storied history in film, particularly in Hollywood. Buster Keaton dedicated much of his later years to Bridge. He met his third (and last) wife, Eleanor Norris, playing Bridge in the San Fernando valley and their partnership (in Bridge and in life) proved incredibly fruitful. Norris helped revitalize interest in Keaton’s early silent films, and together they frequently bested other partnerships playing Bridge in Hollywood throughout the 40s and 50s. Keaton’s Bridge playing was immortalized in another Billy Wilder film, Sunset Boulevard, where he makes the most of his single, repeated, line of dialogue, an echo of Francis Lederer’s line from Midnight, when he utters “pass.” The mournful expression in his eyes suggests, however, that he’s fully aware of the cards on the table and the weight of his awareness is heavy on his heart.
Omar Sharif is perhaps the Hollywood figure most associated with the game of Bridge. He regularly published a Bridge column which was syndicated in dozens of newspapers, wrote several books on Bridge, and even had a popular computer game called Omar Sharif on Bridge designed to teach players how to play and improve their skills. He represented Egypt at the 1968 World Bridge Olympiad, and famously (at least in the Bridge community) stated that he was profoundly unhappy during the shooting of Lawrence of Arabia because he was required to spend 18-months in the desert unable to seriously commit to his Bridge playing.
The game’s ubiquitousness offscreen throughout the Golden Age of Hollywood, has led to various representations of the game onscreen, and those representations continue to this day, though the implications of the images are very different. The single most distinctive representation of Bridge in recent years appeared in the third season of the TV Series Fargo. The joke here is less about the play of the game, but rather how far behind the times the community in Minnesota is. They treat a Bridge tournament the way Robert DeNiro’s character treats the gaming floor in Casino. Contract Bridge, this relic of a bygone time is still seen as vital, full of tension and dramatic potential. Well, I am from Minnesota. And when confronted with a beautiful Nitrate print of Midnight, I held my breath throughout the Bridge game onscreen. So perhaps there’s a shred of truth to that joke.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon