Midnight Mary

Midnight Mary 1933 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (74 minutes) directed by William A. Wellman; story by Anita Loos, screenplay by Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola; cinematographer, James Van Trees; editor, William S. Gray.

This beautifully cut and polished William Wellman gem is a romance set in the late dusk of the pre-censorship, pre-noir era and wrapped in a courtroom drama.

The protagonist Mary Martin (Loretta Young) shared a chronic problem with a lot of the American film audience in 1933—not to mention 2012: she was young, single, out of work and could not find a job.

Mary tells her life story in flashbacks, reminiscing in a clerk’s office adjacent to the courtroom where she awaits a jury verdict in her ‘sensational’ murder trial. Her eye first catches the year she was born—1910—on the back of a volume of court proceedings on a shelf in the clerk’s office; she moves apace through the key events.

She is a ‘good gal’ at heart, though she has a knack for turning up in the wrong place at the wrong time. It did not take her long to fall in with the wrong crowd, even the wrong Mr. Darcy—Leo Darcy (Ricardo Cortez), a dapper thug, and his gang—not exactly Jane Austen’s paragon Fitzwilliam Darcy.

On the other hand, Mary gets great mileage out of being a strikingly beautiful wrongster, especially after she turns the head of Thomas Mannering Jr., Esq. (Franchot Tone), son of a judge and scion of a wealthy family with a Park Avenue address.

Ricardo Cortez, Loretta Young and Franchot Tone in Midnight Mary

The writing is crisp and sharp. The studio lighting, editing and montage are reason enough to see this gem. An early sequence follows Mary wearing holes in her shoes and runs in her stockings as she pounds pavement looking for work. At the end of the day, advertising signs in lights speak to her disheartenment in a manner similar to details in Bruce McCall’s covers for The New Yorker magazine:

A sign advertising ‘Coco Facial Soup’ becomes ‘No Jobs To-Day’; a sign for ‘Tires: More Miles’ becomes a rotating ‘No Help Wanted’; the sign for the Riverside Drive subway station reads ‘No Jobs; No Help Wanted’; and the ‘Capitol’ and ‘Joan Crawford’ of a picture palace marquee flash ‘No Jobs’ and ‘No Jobs To-Day.’ The superimposition of this collection of images in a single frame crowns her disappointment and frustration.

Cortez was an Austrian expatriate who changed his name and modeled his look on the classic Latin lover popular in films of that time. He played the first film Sam Spade in Warner Brothers’ 1931 Dangerous Female, a well done but not well known adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s pulp detective novel The Maltese Falcon, directed by Roy Del Ruth. (John Huston made his classic version with Humphrey Bogart for Warner Brothers in 1941.)

Incidentally, the great character actress and comic Una Merkel, who plays Mary’s lifelong friend Bunny in Midnight Mary, was Sam Spade’s secretary Effie Perine in Del Ruth’s Dangerous Female.

Several references in this movie to William Randolph Hearst publications movie relate to recondite details of newspaper history. When we first see Mary at the defendant’s table in court during her murder trial, her eyes appear above a copy of Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan magazine she is reading as the District Attorney (Frank Conroy) gives his closing argument.

At the end of the movie, a series of New York Journal headlines and subheads brings the story arc to a clean, three-point landing. The New York Journal was the newspaper Hearst brought out in 1896 to take on Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World by emulating and amplifying Pulitzer’s ‘yellow journalism.’

Midnight Mary is among the early Hollywood talkies released before the industry began to enforce its self-imposed ‘Production Code’—censorship guidelines on sexual and moral content—in 1934, and continued to do so for nearly three decades.

Turner Classic Movies reissued this movie among several sets of so-called ‘pre-code’ films on DVD as its ‘Forbidden Hollywood Collection.’ Despite the ‘blue movie’ cover art, the moral, social, and in some instances political subject matter make for the raciest parts.