This Is the Night

"This Is The Night" is noteworthy primarily because it marks Cary Grant's feature debut, but can stand on its own as a prime example of Pre-Code comedy. Some of the subject matter and situations must have been regarded as naughty for its time, but as with many of Hollywood's Pre-code movies it is pretty tame by today's standards.

It is quite funny, but you have to give it a chance to warm up, as it takes a few minutes to get underway. The humor is very subtle and probably wouldn't go over well with modern audiences (see Adam Sandler). It comes with some unique quirks, like Cary Grant delivering a few lines in song, but once into the picture some old pros take over. Roland Young and Charles Ruggles, two veterans of the stage, have some of the best exchanges of situational dialogue and are aided by Thelma Todd, a comedienne who had a bright future but who was murdered around the time of the film's release. Her murder was never solved. Cary Grant plays it straight and Lili Damita is everyone's love interest but is the weakest member of the cast. It is very much like a filmed play, with just a few indoor sets, and there are only six cast members. The blue-tinted nighttime scenes were a nice, unexpected touch.

In short, it is well worth your time but give it a chance to get past the slow beginning. It is actually a quick 80 minutes.

Frank Tuttle was a highly competent house director for many years, working for Sam Goldwyn, Paramount and so forth, turning out well-made movies in which the style served the story. In our day of auteur worship and the insistence that, if a critic can't tell who directed a film without looking at the credits, it is not a good film, craftsmen like Tuttle are considered hacks. I disagree. You may disagree with me. We'll leave that unsettled for the moment and thumb wrestle over it later.

This movie has all the earmarks of a Lubitsch picture: the European settings (Paris, Hollywood, which Lubitsch said he much preferred to Paris France; Venice, where he had set the opening of TROUBLE IN PARADISE two years earlier) and is the sort of racy European comedy that Paramount specialized in until the Production Code killed them dead later that year. The setups are all Lubitsch: the recitative number "Madame Has Lost Her Dress" that opens the movie; The sexual imagery of Cary Grant carrying around a bagful of javelins and reducing Roland Young and Charlie Ruggles to blithering idiocy; Thelma Todd in her underwear; and into this mess lands Lily Damita, an honest girl reduced to sleeping on movie sets: trouble in Paris, Hollywood.

Although Tuttle lacks the ability to direct actors in the small, exquisite details that Lubitsch did, he had a fine hand at framing and storyline. The movie is near perfect, except for the miscasting of Roland Young as the love interest..... but perhaps that is the point of the matter: we do not always fall in love with Maurice Chevalier.

This is a partial musical when musicals were anathema at the box office from 1930 until the Busby Berkeley musicals brought the genre back in 1933, although none of the billed characters actually sing. Two strip Technicolor existed at the time, but the film is black and white unless it is night and the characters are outside and then the film is tinted deep blue.

So all of this experimental art design is the backdrop for a pretty typical precode farce. Bachelor Gerald Gray (Roland Young) is having an affair with married Claire Matthewson (Thelma Todd). They plan to take a trip to Venice together because Claire's husband (Cary Grant as Stephen Mathewson) is at the summer Olympics throwing the javelin. But he returns unexpectedly, just in time to see the two train tickets that his wife had ordered. A poorly constructed alibi is devised - Claire was planning to take the trip alone. The two tickets were mistakenly left there for neighbor Gerald and his wife. Stephen suspects what is going on and insists that he and Claire take that trip and that Gerald and his wife come along on the journey with them, not believing that there actually IS a wife. So Gerald hires a starving actress (Lili Damita as Germaine ) to play the part of his wife. But even this is a switcheroo as the actual actress hired for the job (Claire Dodd) doesn't want it and gives it to Germaine. Complications ensue.

If Cary Grant had been just a couple of years further along in his film career, doubtless he would have had the part of the carousing bachelor and Roland Young would have been the cuckolded but suspicious husband and the film would probably have been better for it. But Grant is humorous carting around those javelins as phallic symbols. Irving Bacon was an odd choice for Roland Young's butler in a continental setting since he really seems like he would be better suited working in Mr. Drucker's store in Hooterville.

I'd recommend it for the weirdness of it all and to see Cary Grant in his first film role.

Lili Damita sleeps, stretched across a luxurious bed…until a man wakes her up and tells her to move and we discover that she's a struggling actress sneaking some sleep on a quiet movie set. –Appearances are frequently misleading in this witty and ultimately charming comedy of manners, deceit and romance.

A great cast of more or less sympathetic characters surrounds the lovely Damita:

Roland Young and Charlie Ruggles are fine as a pair of wealthy gentlemen of Paris. Young is about to embark on a clandestine Venetian trip with girlfriend Thelma Todd—when her husband, Olympic javelin-thrower Cary Grant, unexpectedly returns home. One lie leads to another, and soon Young has hired an actress—Damita, eager to accept any job—to pose as his wife, and the whole gang boards a train for Venice.

Thelma Todd is excellent as the deceiving wife jealous of her lover's new partner; we don't get to see Todd angry in many of her movies, but smoke positively comes out of her ears here. Cary Grant—very youthful and athletic, bag of javelins slung over his shoulder—has a minor role but is awfully fun to watch (in his first picture).

Roland Young is outstanding as the would-be cosmopolitan lover who can't quite control either Damita or Todd; his face and mannerisms express varying degrees of discomfort, frustration and worry as he struggles to keep multiple relationships from caving in on him.

A hilarious running gag involves chauffeur Irving Bacon repeatedly catching Thelma's dress—in a car door, for example—and accidentally pulling it off.

Overall, it's very funny, with a plot that is tough to predict…and somewhat surprisingly, it gradually turns into a very sweet picture, at that. Very enjoyable, especially for fans of these great character actors—and well worth watching just to see Roland Young and the great Thelma Todd together.

A slight-but-enjoyable romantic farce, THIS IS THE NIGHT is an entertaining little film that should earn a place in cinematic history simply because it contains the feature film debut of Cary Grant, who soon become arguably the most famous movie star of all time. Although he is regulated to playing a largely secondary character, Grant's incomparable screen presence makes him a standout from the very start. Playing an Olympic athlete, Grant makes his entrance into the world of cinema with a light step and a sharp wit - singing about apartment keys, no less! It's a memorable debut, and there are numerous other moments throughout the picture in which Grant demonstrates much of the early promise that would soon flower into full-throttle, megawatt star power in just a few short years.

As for the rest of the film, it is a reasonably solid comedy of adulterous affairs, with some surprisingly risqué elements that were permitted in the days before the Production Code was heavily enforced due to pressure from the National Legion of Decency in l933. The film begins delightfully as a light comedic ballet, with director Frank Turtle providing some truly madcap slapstick and even recitative singing that sets the viewer up for a knockabout farce. Unfortunately, this progressively free-wheeling atmosphere is largely abandoned in the film's last half, which plays out in a more or less predictable manner. The film still holds up perfectly well, however, until the too-conservative ending, which is a big disappointment after over 70 minutes of uninhibited fun.

On the plus side, the film is very well cast, and the actors manage to keep the picture engaging even after the initial momentum of the exhilarating first-half is long gone. Although she makes somewhat of an delayed entrance, Lili Damita brings both pluck and intelligence to the female lead, Roland Young makes the transformation of his somewhat unsympathetic character highly believable, and both Grant and Charles Ruggles offer top-notch support. The lovely Thelma Todd also makes the most of a rather bland role, and her talent for making a relatively thankless character seem genuinely inspired serves as a bittersweet reminder of yet another comedic great that was taken from us way too soon. In the end, THIS IS THE NIGHT is far too inconsistent to ever be considered a great movie, but it sure is a lot of fun!