The Midnight Lady (1932) User Reviews

Good little melodrama

[dbborroughs · 6/10 · 22 December 2009]

This is a complicated soap opera about a girl from a rich family who is running with an artist, the young man (not the artist) who loves her and the older woman in the night club that befriends them. When a murder occurs and it looks like the young girl might have done it the older woman covers up for her for reasons that the girl never suspects.

Good melodrama that is similar to several other films but which manages to carve its own path thanks to the films structure which puts characters over plot and made me completely forget that a murder occurs in the second half.

Definitely worth a look.

Who Would Have Thought - Sarah Padden as a Night Club Hostess!!!

[kidboots · 7/10 · 1 January 2015]

Sarah Padden, usually right at home with cooks, widows and schoolteachers, is given a chance to strut her stuff as Nita St. George, a Texas Guinan type hostess who can tell dodgy liquor from the smell of the bottle. And the novelty is good for a few minutes but it is all down to Lina Basquette as a wronged woman to give the film a much needed kick. The only problem is she is only in the film for 10 minutes at the most. Always a big problem is when the main character, in this case Claudia Dell, is totally unsympathetic. It wasn't her fault, her Jean is flighty, almost the last of the flappers and with the depression in full swing you couldn't really laugh at her little indiscretions - like you could with Clara Bow a few years earlier.

She is stringing along Byron Crosby (Theodore von Eltz), an artist with a wandering eye for the ladies - but one of his loves, exotic and fiery Mona (Basquette) has had as much as she can take. Meanwhile Jean's patient, long suffering boyfriend Bert (John Darrow) gets involved in a scuffle at Nita's night club. She urges Bert to bring Jean along one night and from photos adorning her dressing table, it is not hard to see why Nita wants to get to know her better. Jean is having her own problems at home - she is like a square peg in a round hole as she constantly butts heads with her always carping grandmother and stern father (Montagu Love). The phase "you're just like your mother" is used so many times - Jean wishes she knew her mother!!

One night Byron is entertaining Jean when he is called out of the room, Jean investigates, sees he has been killed and flees the scene but not before she notices Nita in the lobby. The fact that the trial is over and Nita is serving a term for manslaughter before Jean confesses that she knows for sure that Nita is not the killer doesn't exactly warm the viewer to her either. To give Jean her due it is her visits to Nita in prison that give her a newer, more wholesome outlook on life - she even makes Nita candy!! She also goes to Mona's to have it out with her and from then on (about 8 minutes) Basquette is centre stage for the dramatics!!

Poor Claudia Dell had the looks and personality to go a long way in movies but even though in 1930 she was lovely in "Sweet Kitty Bellairs", people were staying away from musicals in droves and by 1931 she was a fixture on poverty row. John Darrow never really made the grade and Donald Keith who played Jean's sympathetic brother had started out in films playing Clara Bow's love struck boyfriend in "The Plastic Age"(1925).

Sort of like a cheapo version of "Madame X"

[planktonrules · 5/10 · 30 January 2021]

"The Midnight Lady" is a cheap reworked version of "Madame X" made by itty-bitty Chesterfield Pictures. And, for a movie by this poverty row studio, it's pretty good....even though it's not exactly original. On the other hand, there are better all-suffering mother films...not just "Madam X" but "So Big" and many other films of the classic era....films in which mothers give everything to protect their children who don't even know they exist.

The story begins with a troubled household. Although the family has money, there isn't a lot of love there and it's strongly impacted by the angry and prudish grandmother....who spends much of her energy controlling or trying to control everyone. As for the grown children, they are clearly rebelling against it. As a result, you really cannot like either extreme....the self-destructive rich kids nor their father and grandmother who are prudish and loveless.

What no one realizes is that the speakeasy that the kids frequent is run by their biological mother! Nita is loved by the kids, though she never divulges to them that she is their mother and she apparently left when they were tiny children. Late in the film, someone is murdered and Nita thinks her daughter did it...and so she takes the rap. Is this the end of the story? Nope.

The film is okay....mediocre in practically every way. But it is oddly entertaining and worth seeing if you love weepy self-sacrificing mommy films.