La belle nuit

Well this is a weird one. It's a Pre-Code sex comedy with very odd casting. Thelma Todd is cheating on her husband, Olympic javelin thrower Cary Grant. Wait until you see who she's cheating with -- Roland fricking Young! That's right, the mousy mumbly guy from Topper. On what planet, I ask you...on what planet!?! Anyway, to cover for their affair, Young hires Lili Damita to pose as his wife. Gradually he and Damita fall for each other.

Notable for being the feature film debut of screen legend Cary Grant, who makes quite an impression in his first scene. Cary's great in his minor role. Young is fine but I never liked his character enough to get invested in the story. Same with Todd. Damita is sexy but I couldn't understand half of what she said with her thick French accent. Charlie Ruggles does his usual shtick. If you're familiar with him, you'll realize he's very much an acquired taste. He's tolerable here though. Frank Tuttle's direction is nice. I think the blue-tinted night scenes are a good touch. Love the opening few minutes. It's an amusing movie at first but grows less so as each minute passes. It helps that the mood stays light. Didn't find much of it believable and, like I said, I didn't like the main characters much. Swapping Young and Grant's roles might have improved the overall picture. Although then we'd have the absurd image of Young as an Olympic athlete. But that's no more ridiculous than him being able to take any woman from Cary Grant. It's not a bad film and there's certainly enough of interest to entertain most classic film fans. Definitely one Cary Grant fans will want to see at least once.

Although This Is The Night which is the feature film debut of Cary Grant is an enjoyable enough bedroom farce it probably has more significance as the possible inspiration of one of Paramount's best feature films of the Thirties, Love Me Tonight. This film directed by one of Paramount's more competent contract directors Frank Tuttle plays a whole lot like Rouben Mamoulian's classic. Possibly if Tuttle had better material to work with, this film would be better known.

This Is The Night has Cary Grant as a French Olympic athlete whose sport is the javelin. But apparently he's not spearing Thelma Todd enough and she's casting a roving eye. The eye of Roland Young meets her's and the two plan a holiday in Venice.

To which Mr. Grant arrives and rudely interrupts. Thinking fast on his feet as American Express agent Charlie Ruggles arrives with tickets at Todd's apartment, Young says that he'll be traveling with his wife and once outside frantically looks for a wife. He finds Lily Damita and hires her for a railroad holiday from Paris to Venice. Ruggles goes along as a fifth wheel on this carriage, presumably to catch whoever comes flying off the rebound. As he's soused most of the time, I can't see what appeal he would have. Of course I can't see what appeal he would have sober.

Cary Grant was billed fifth in this film, but in 1932 he gradually went up the billing ladder and by the time of She Done Him Wrong, he's co-starring with Mae West. His debonair charm could barely be concealed in a role which required him to be a bit of a fathead.

Ralph Rainger and Sam Coslow wrote a couple of forgettable songs and it's in the musical numbers that this film bares the closest resemblance to Love Me Tonight. Note the Italian gondolier in the Venice scenes. He gets no billing in the film, but it is Donald Novis one of the most popular singers of the day on radio. In three years he would move to Broadway and play the romantic lead in Rodgers&Hart's Jumbo where he would introduce The Most Beautiful Girl In The World and My Romance. Novis had a wonderful tenor voice as you'll agree if you see this film.

Speaking of Rodgers&Hart maybe if they wrote a score as good as the one they did for Love Me Tonight, This Is The Night would be more remembered than as footnote as Cary Grant's feature film debut.

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.

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!