After Midnight

.... people met during muggings. I guess New York has always been like this save for a decade or so in the 1990s. But I digress.

Mary is a waitress in a restaurant so she gets off work quite late. One night she is confronted by homeless Joe Miller, who holds her up with a piece of lead pipe. He then gives her the pipe and turns his back on her and she hits him with it and gets her money back. So we can see why Joe is homeless and unemployed in the roaring 20s as he can't even manage to get armed robbery right. Strangely enough, she also takes him to her apartment to tend his wounds rather than call the police. Somehow, knowing her motivates Joe to look for a job. He gets a job at a filling station and plans to save for a taxi. This strange relationship blossoms into romance and the pair decide to marry after Joe can save up enough to buy a cab and Mary has saved one thousand dollars.

But some misunderstandings mess up this relationship. Mary's sister Maizie decides to buy an expensive evening gown instead of pay the rent, she goes out to a company function, and receives one thousand dollars in her company's stock. In the meantime Mary goes looking for Joe and sees him in a bar with a couple of girls and thinks he has gone back to his old life. So Mary decides to try the party girl life too since it took her years to save one thousand dollars and Maizie got the equivalent in just one night of partying. Complications ensue, although none of them are that interesting or unexpected.

Lawrence Gray did do some silent work before he became a film song bird for a couple of years after the talkies came in while musicals were still popular, but he usually played the clean cut type or a playboy, not a poor homeless guy turning to crime like he is here. If the print had been better this would have been a good showcase for Norma Shearer's silent era talents, but it is better than nothing. The current print is 55 minutes, so I'm not sure if any footage was lost.

Norma Shearer is a cigarette girl at a night club, fending off the customers and saving her money. She's walking home in the wee hours when Lawrence Gray steps out of the shadows and offers to sell her the lead pipe he's clenching for $10. She scrambles in her purse and hands him the money. He gives her the pipe and starts to walk away. She conks him on the head and then takes him home to nurse. When he wakes, he's in love and soon enough so is she. But when she caches him with old associates, she concludes he's fallen back into old ways, takes the money she's saved and goes out to have a wicked time. In truth, he was buying a taxicab, part of their plan.

It's good meet cute opening, with two people at te end of their tether. In many ways it reminds me of King Vidor's THE CROWD, but that was a serious drama and this is a romantic comedy that purports to be tough but has a heart of mush. Miss Shearer's sister is flapper Gwen Lee, to whom money flows for no clear reason, and she's pretty good until she has a change of heart.

I have to admit Miss Shearer looks great in the shiny, spangly outfits she wears at the club, but this one depends strictly on her star power, and she isn't given much to do.

If you've ever seen the movie poster for After Midnight, you look at it and think, 'WOW! What a great film this must be!' - Unfortunately it's not. It's a somewhat mediocre melodrama, typical of MGM in the 20's. Norma Shearer looks glamorous and lovely as always and carries the picture, but she was capable of much more.

The print that I viewed is missing it's original title cards and is of very contrasty quality. Hopefully TCM has a better print in their vaults. While a lot of stars like Lon Chaney and Greta Garbo get a lot of time and effort put into restoring their silent films, some of the less exotic stars like Norma Shearer get lost in the shuffle. It would be nice to see TCM do a retrospective on Norma, who was, for a very long time, the "First Lady" of MGM. Several of her silent era films still exist along with the wonderful early talkies that she made in the 1930's.

After Midnight does not give a clear picture of Shearer's talent, so I would not advise this film for someone new to her or to silent films, however it is worth seeing, even if it is nothing exceptional.