Stephen Roberts | Star of Midnight / 1935

without a clue

by Douglas Messerli

 

Howard J. Green and Edward Kaufman (screenplay, based on the book by Arthur Somers Roche), Stephen Roberts (director) Star of Midnight / 1935

 

Hot on the trail of MGM’s successful comedy-mystery of 1934, RKO Pictures released a kind of follow up, this again starring William Powell, this time playing Clay “Dal” Dalzell, but with Ginger Rogers replacing his Nora Charles partner, Myrna Loy. Although the transformation is not entirely successful, Rogers as Donna Mantin certainly gives it a good try, working rather nicely when trading wit and clever comebacks with Clay. In this film, she is not yet his wife but has every intention of marrying him.

     Indeed, throughout most of the film, Clay spends much of his time eluding the grips of Ms. Mantin, who keeps popping up in his posh art deco apartment at hours of day and night and often when least expected out of doors, a place which it is hard to imagine that she has been.

     As the future Mrs. Dalzell, Mantin takes care of Clay the moment his real caretaker, his constantly worried butler Horace Swayne (Gene Lockhart)—who just a couple of years earlier might have had a few more effeminate characteristics and fussed over his “master” even a bit more attentively—bows out of sight. With the pansies banned, however, Swayne is bemused and at times even makes nice with and joins in the machinations of Mantin.

     What the two, Mantin and Clay, have in common other than a strong appetite for all sorts of alcoholic beverages I haven’t a clue; at one point, Mantin intimates that she is very wealthy, although Clay, employed as a lawyer doesn’t exactly appear to be in financial trouble.

      If nothing else, she’s certainly determined, having already planted her marriage plans in the major newspaper through gossip columnist Tommy Tennant (Russell Hopton), a story Clay immediately squelches. But that doesn’t stop her from involving Clay in another of her plots, asking that he find a way to get back letters she’s written to a local mobster, Jim Kinland (Paul Kelly). Quite inexplicably Clay just happens to have a copy of a cancelled check signed by Kinland which suggests that the gang leader has not properly been paying his income tax, so he’s able to retrieve the letters, which she later admits, belong not her but a close friend. 

      Meanwhile, all of Clay’s friends are under the mistaken impression, much as with Nick Charles, that he is really a detective since in the past he has solved some interesting police cases. Accordingly, an old friend of his shows up from Chicago, Tim Winthrop (Leslie Fenton) seeking help in tracking down his ex-girlfriend, Alice, who has disappeared. Refusing to become involved, Clay invites Winthrop along for a midnight showing of a now popular musical performance starring Mary Smith, a singer/dancer who wears a mask while performing, who has become the hottest ticket in town, the “star of midnight.”

       It is during the performance when Clay gets word of Kinland’s readiness to meet, and so he leaves the show midway, while in his absence perhaps the most important event of the film takes place without us getting even witness it, since Robert’s camera has trotted along with Clay to see Kinland.

      Evidently, in mid-performance Tim recognizes Mary Smith, despite her mask, as being Alice and screams out her name. Terrified by the recognition, Mary finishes her number and abandons the stage never to be seen again, the musical forced to close down and her fans leaving the theater in wonderment.

     Tim, startled by the turn of events, returns to Clay’s apartment, but when the columnist Tommy Tennant shows up at his door, Clay hides Tim in his bedroom. After some introductory chit-chat, Tennant suddenly begins to explain that he knows the “truth” about Mary Smith. At that very moment, however, Clay’s bedroom door is opened from wherein a gun shoots Tennant dead and grazes Clay in the hip, the gun tossed back into the living room, where Clay reaches for it, manages to stand, and checks out his bedroom, finding his friend Tim missing with his window wide open.

     If I already seem to be running out breath and verbs in describing the plot, I have to report that what I’ve expressed so far is simply the surface of such a labyrinthine plot that at several moments in the movie even Clay gives up his search for answers between drinks. I won’t even bother to attempt to describe the entire story, at least at this point. Let’s just say, before you can blink Mantin has returned and the police are called in to investigate Tennant’s murder, for which Clay himself is now a suspect.

       Luckily the writers have kept in enough encounters between Mantin and Clay to hold our attention for a while, but alas even the most attentive of whodunit addicts couldn’t have come up with a solution as convoluted as that created by the usually brilliant writer Howard J. Green and his associate Edward Kaufman.

       Let’s just say, that in the midst of our confusion, Clay, much as Nick does in The Thin Man, invites everyone for a get-together, although this time with a hitch. He tells all his suspects that he’s found Mary Smith in a Washington Square Apartment, but asks them to meet him back at his own apartment to where he is immediately taking her. His presumption is, for some reason, that all the innocents will rush to his apartment, while the guilty party will hurry off to the other address to kill them him and Mary off before they can reveal the truth.

     That truth involves yet another woman with whom Clay once had an affair, Jerry Classon (Vivien Oakland), who since their long-ago liaison has had dozens of boyfriends and handful of husbands, the current one of whom is Robert Classon (Ralph Morgan). Among her ex-boyfriends, it turns out, is a murdered man and another man under arrest for his murder, whose lawyer just happens to be Jerry’s current husband Robert. The missing Mary, formerly Alice, we discover blames her father’s downfall on one of them and has been manhandled by the other, going incognito for no other reason that she doesn’t want to have to testify in court with regard to either of these monsters.

     Meanwhile, back at the house where Clay hasn’t really found Mary, but plays a record of her singing from another room, his friend Tim shows up, desperate to find his Alice. A strange woman also appears, gun in hand and ready to shoot both Clay and Ms. Mantin dead if they don’t immediately reveal Mary’s whereabouts. Fortunately, Police Inspector Doremus has also decided to attend the wrong address, saving Clay’s life by shooting the strange female intruder dead.

     And who is this strange woman? Why, of course, Robert Classon, dressed totally in drag and wearing a complete latex head piece—just like the one Robin Williams wore years later in Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)—to match his other female apparel. He is, so the logic goes, out to kill both of his current wife’s former lovers for reasons for which I haven’t a clue. Why he dresses as a woman I have no clue. And why, near the very end of the film, when poor Tim is about to leave empty-handed, Clay tells him that he has found Mary/Alice who is waiting for him at the police station, I haven’t a clue, particularly given Clay’s explanation of how he found her address apparently through her bank accounts—since earlier in the story, the theater director makes a point of telling us that she demanded to paid only in cash. In fact, there so many open holes in this movie of which I haven’t a clue that I might be tempted to start up the process to solve the mystery all over again.

      Why do we never see Mary? Might she have actually been Robert Classon? Might Clay be lying to his best friend, having never tracked down his Alice, our mysterious Mary. Did Alice, in fact, ever exist? These are all absurd questions obviously. The film has declared that the mystery has been solved without resolving the clues.

     Moreover, by film’s end, we discover that without our even knowing it Clay and Donna Mantin have finally married, she calling her father to tell him she’s staying overnight in Clay’s bed. So despite the sudden appearance of a seemingly LGBTQ scene, a drag queen dragged into the story for no reason than the writers thought it might be fun, Star of Midnight proves itself to be a solid heterosexual story after all. The LGBTQ figure, Classon momentarily at least appearing as a transsexual man, has justifiably been done away with. And Breen has won another battle in his war against queers. 

 

Los Angeles, April 13, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).