Movie Note: Midnight
It’s a beautiful face. The moustache, snaking from nostril to lip, looks more like makeup than something a grown man would wear, and it completes Don Ameche’s American boyishness — so vital in a movie about decadent Europeans on the eve of World War II.
Tibor Czerny — that’s Ameche’s name in this movie — has just learned that the girl he didn’t know he was crazy about until just this minute (Claudette Colbert’s Eve Peabody) is traveling around Paris using his name — prefacing it with “Baroness.” As an eighth cousin of the real Baron Czerny of Budapest, this taxidriver that Ameche’s pretending to be is “more a baron than you are a baroness,” as he will tell Eve when he tries to rain on her parade at the [John Barrymores’] weekend place at Versailles — his very next scene.
And, hey: what a smile!
Crocodiles on the Nile are green!