Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Midnight
1939 · Mitchell Leisen · Midnight on Sightlines
Rain streaks a train window, and a woman steps down onto a Paris platform in an evening gown. That is all Eve Peabody has: the dress, a stranded showgirl's nerve, and not one franc. Mitchell Leisen's Midnight starts here, with a costume and no one to wear it for. The rest of the film shows what a costume can do once somebody believes in it.
Keep that gown in mind, because the whole film is a bet on it. Eve doesn't get into Parisian society by luck or by love. She talks her way in. Through a run of improvisations she becomes the “Baroness Czerny.” Notice that the name belongs to Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche), the Hungarian cabdriver who has fallen for her and is searching the city to find her. Then the wealthy Georges Flammarion (John Barrymore) hires her, title and all, to lure a gigolo away from his wife. Now the lie has an employer.
Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on how films think, has a useful name for Eve: the forger. He meant a character who doesn't uncover the truth but makes it up, and whose identity shifts to fit each new situation. The forger is the hero of what he called the powers of the false, a kind of cinema where you can no longer tell truth from lie, and where that uncertainty becomes a creative force. Eve looks like a perfect example. She invents a title and a manner, and at one point a sick child, and every invention works.
This is where the lens earns its keep, because Midnight is not a film where the false wins its freedom. It is a 1939 Paramount comedy made under the Production Code, and it is built to keep the lie going without letting it break the world. Adultery, kept women and a sham marriage all get smuggled past the censors through speed and wit, and each impropriety is defused before it can go off. So Deleuze lets us ask a sharp question: what does a classical Hollywood film do with a forger? It gives her a stage.
Watch how Leisen builds that stage. Hans Dreier's art department supplies salons, hotel suites and a country château, all of them deep-perspective rooms full of doors. Deleuze describes the film frame as a closed set, a system of information in which everything inside counts. These rooms work exactly that way: every doorway is a possible entrance for someone who knows who Eve really is. Charles Lang lights them evenly and brightly, so every surface gleams and every gown catches the light. That polish isn't neutral. It is the standard Eve has to meet. The richer the room, the wider the gap between who she is and who she's playing.
This is still what Deleuze calls the action-image, the cinema in which characters read a situation and act on it. In its usual form, a situation is laid out and a character acts to change it. Midnight uses the reverse, which he calls the small form: a gesture or an act reveals a situation we can only partly see. Deleuze found the master of this form in the comedy of manners, especially Ernst Lubitsch. Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932) is the clearest ancestor here, with its con artists who charm by impersonating rank and its risqué meanings left to objects and closed doors. Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder had written Bluebeard's Eighth Wife directly under Lubitsch the year before. Midnight is where the students show what they learned.
The sharpest tool of the small form is what Deleuze calls the index of equivocity: one act that could belong to two different situations, so that its meaning flickers. That describes Eve's every move in society. A pause before an answer might be aristocratic boredom. It might be a chorus girl hunting for her next line. Claudette Colbert plays both at once. Her poise is solid enough to fool the room, and she lets us see the calculation underneath it. Two situations, one face. The editing is built around it, cutting to reactions just as a lie is tested and holding two-shots through the verbal duels so we can watch the bluff survive.
That brings in a third concept, the relation-image: meaning that comes from relations the viewer keeps in mind. We are the knowing third party. We know the baroness is Eve Peabody of no fixed address, and the salon doesn't. Every line becomes double-coded. The suspense never comes from physical danger. It comes from the constant threat of exposure, and the plot runs on the rule that each fix to a problem creates a new one.
The film also takes a position in a long argument about realism. André Bazin, the critic most associated with it, prized cinema that respected the ambiguity of the real world. Midnight's Paris is the opposite: a city built entirely indoors, with back-projected streets behind the taxi, that never pretends to be the real place. That isn't a flaw. A film about impersonation, set in a city that is itself a studio forgery, has its own kind of honesty. The society Eve deceives is putting on a show too. Flammarion's wife is straying, a gigolo is circling, and the rich are performing their rank as hard as she is. Eve isn't corrupting a genuine world. She is joining a fake one, and her timing is better than theirs.
Leisen cast the film from that lineage. Colbert brings the persona fixed in It Happened One Night (1934), where a mismatched couple invent fake names to travel together. My Man Godfrey (1936) had already set out the Depression-era plot of an outsider passed off among the rich. Leisen's own Hands Across the Table (1935) taught him to balance mercenary scheming against sympathy, which is the tonal tightrope this whole film walks. Then there is Barrymore, carrying over the grand, self-amused ham of Twentieth Century (1934). By 1939 his career was in visible decline, and accounts from the period describe him relying on cue cards. Here he plays a man who pays someone else to perform a fiction for him, and he plays it wittily, as if he enjoys the joke.
What Midnight did to film was push the small form about as far as it could go. The lie stops being a complication and becomes the engine: the plot is generated by the work of keeping a fiction alive. The film reaches the edge of the powers of the false and holds there, playful and contained, while the Code keeps the classical world in place. Later films would let the forger walk free. Midnight shows how close a studio comedy could get first.
So when you watch it, look at Colbert in the half-second after someone asks her a question she can't answer. That small hesitation, with the false self deciding what to say next, is where the whole film lives.
Concepts in play
- index of equivocity — Eve's every gesture in society reads two ways at once, as a baroness's poise or a chorus girl's improvisation; Colbert shows the calculation behind the façade, and the editing cuts to reactions just as a lie is tested
- action-image, small form — Set pieces staged like one-act plays (the taxi courtship, the society party, the sick-child ruse) in which acts and gestures reveal a partly hidden situation; the form inherited from Lubitsch via Trouble in Paradise and Bluebeard's Eighth Wife
- the forger — A penniless showgirl improvises the 'Baroness Czerny' and keeps the false identity going through a chain of fresh inventions, including the sick-child ruse
- powers of the false (approached and contained) — The sustained lie is the plot's engine, but the Production Code and the romantic-comedy structure defuse every impropriety and keep the false inside a stable world
- relation-image — The audience knows the baroness is Eve Peabody while the salon doesn't; suspense comes from the threat of exposure, not from physical danger
- the frame as closed set — Dreier's deep-perspective salons, suites and château, lit evenly and brightly by Charles Lang, work as information-dense systems in which every door could expose the imposter