Midnight

…romantic-comedy gems as Mitchell Leisen’s Midnight (1939), Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), and Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire (1941). Arguably Wilder’s most personal work during this period was Leisen’s Hold Back the Dawn (1941), a compelling drama about a suave European refugee (played by Charles Boyer) stranded in Mexico who uses his…

Midnight (1939) was in an entirely different class; an accomplished, complicated, witty screwball comedy (scripted by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder), it presented Claudette Colbert as a showgirl in Paris who is hired by a millionaire (John Barrymore) to impersonate a Hungarian countess as part…

…Fred MacMurray and Ray Milland), Midnight (1939; with Don Ameche and John Barrymore), and The Palm Beach Story (1942; with Joel McCrea). She also had notable dramatic roles in such films as Private Worlds (1935; with Charles Boyer and McCrea), for which she was nominated for the best actress