Why characters behave a certain way and what the film’s moral asks of both the characters and the audience– and whether you agree or not. How tension is constructed and maintained. No, Midnight nowadays seems very carefully composed for people who like to look at the way films are built. If you don’t know what either of those two movies I just mentioned are, get thee out of here and get to work on your Bogart movies, young one.Įthel Saxton, not having the best of days. I don’t mean this as a slight, but if you saw Bogart’s face up top and think this’ll be anything like The Petrified Forest or even Black Legion, you’re in for a severe disappointment. Midnight is kind of a weird one– it’s for people who like to think during movies. I don’t say this as a snob, but as a matter of truth– you don’t like every genre, every director, or every style equally, do you? If so, congratulations, you’re probably very boring at cocktail parties. Whatever may happen in any particular case, justice is done.” “It often happens the law is better served by applying the spirit rather than the letter. Stella ( Fox) is so desperate to hold onto boyfriend Gar ( Bogart), she offers to do anything for him, with or without being married. One of my favorite quotes about the Production Code comes from Wikipedia (I know, I know, I also develop treatises on moral philosophies from IMDB comments) when it summarizes an opinion piece from Nation: “if crime were never presented in a sympathetic light, then, taken literally, ‘law’ and ‘justice’ would become the same.” This movie is in open defiance of that, questioning how justice really functions when personal interest is involved, something that definitely could not be explored just a few short months after this film’s release.Released by Universal | Directed By Chester Erskine
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