Midnight Lace (1960)

User Rating:

6.8/10   

Director:

David Miller

Writers:

Janet Green (play)
Ivan Goff (screenplay) ...

Release Date:

23 December 1960 (West Germany)

Genre:

Thriller | Mystery

Plot:

Kit and Anthony Preston never had a real honeymoon, and the midnight lace pajamas are for when they can finally get out of London...

Plot Keywords:

Fog | Telephone | Elevator | Woman In Jeopardy | Police Detective

Awards:

Nominated for Oscar. Another 3 nominations

Cast

Doris Day	...	Kit Preston
Rex Harrison	...	Anthony 'Tony' Preston
John Gavin	...	Brian Younger
Myrna Loy	...	Beatrice ('Aunt Bea') Corman
Roddy McDowall	...	Malcolm
Herbert Marshall	...	Charles Manning
Natasha Parry	...	Peggy Thompson
Hermione Baddeley	...	Dora Hammer
John Williams	...	Insp. Byrnes
Richard Ney	...	Daniel Graham
Anthony Dawson	...	Roy Ash
Rhys Williams	...	Victor Elliot
Richard Lupino	...	Simon Foster
Hayden Rorke	...	Dr. Garver
Doris Lloyd	...	Nora, The Housekeeper

Runtime:

110 min | 108 min (TCM print)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Westrex Recording System)

Certification:

UK:A (original rating) | UK:PG (re-rating) (2000) | Australia:PG | Finland:K-16 | Spain:18 | Sweden:15 | West Germany:16

Filming Locations:

London, England, UK

Company:

Arwin Productions

Trivia:

The white gown that Doris Day wears is the same dress she wore to the Oscar ceremony for her nomination in Pillow Talk (1959)

Goofs:

Continuity: When Brian Younger is walking by Kit Preston's building, he hears the door to the construction site squeaking loudly as it opens and shuts. A second later he goes through it, and the door makes no sound at all.

Quotes:

Aunt Bea: Ah, the jungle of finance. Men must work, and women must weep!

Movie Connections:

References Vertigo (1958)

Soundtrack:

What Does a Woman Do?

Kinda Likable.

SPOILERS.

There's nothing spectacularly original about this glossy Hitchcockian thriller but it's likable in its own commercial way. The theme is absolutely routine. Someone repeatedly calls Doris Day in a spooky voice and threatens to kill her. She spends the entire movie trying to get someone to believe her -- her husband, her friend Peggy, her bubbly Aunt Bea, the police -- and fails. That's it. That's the plot. Except for the last few minutes when things get a little twisted. A lot of people evidently saw the explanation coming but I didn't.

Oh, of course, the story has to be liberally sprinkled with suspicious men who might, for one reason or another, have a screw loose in their heads and a motive in their minds. John Gavin seems helpful and handsome enough (he smokes a pipe and works in his shirt sleeves, usually good signs) but he has one scene in which he reminisces about a horrifying experience he had during the war, trapped in a burning tank, and his character stares distractedly, ominously, into space. Roddy MacDowell is a weaselly guy who tries to pry money out of Day. Anthony Dawson mopes around in the shadows and we don't know who he is or what he wants. His face is scarred and he looks more openly menacing than he did in "Dial M For Murder." John Williams basically repeats his detective role from the same film. Sometimes when I have trouble falling asleep, I try to force my mind to run through all the times Williams has played a lawyer, a detective, or an investigator of some kind, in an attempt to compare the subtle differences in the performances, but I can never find any. By the time I'm entering Stage Two sleep I've run out of detectives and the final fading image is of Williams hawking "the classical collection" of LPs in a TV commercial -- "Ahh, it's a marvelous collection." Where was I?

Oh, yes. Williams has seen all this happen before. The husband a busy executive, the wife at home bored. Perhaps sexually neglected. Then a few complaints about naughty phone calls and the husband begins to pay attention. Aunt Bea believes Doris, at least until she too is sucked into the sneaky caller's web. Now, you must understand, Rex Harrison as husband Tony WANTS to help her. Really, he breathes sympathy. But there is simply no evidence that these threats are coming from anyplace except Day's imagination. The creepy voice that first calls out to her from the fog in a deserted park (good scene). The person who pushed her in front of the bus. A shadow passing her bedroom window up on the third floor -- or second floor, in London.

Come to think of it there's a small hole in the plot somewhere along in here. Harrison and his girl friend, helpful neighbor Peggy, have contrived the entire plot. The creepy phone voice comes from a tape recorder that either Harrison or Peggy play over the phone when they make the filthy calls. The calls then are pre-recorded, right? So how is it possible for this scene to take place? Day, Aunt Bea, and Rex are in the flat when the phone rings. Day begs Aunt Bea to answer the phone and take the call, just to prove that they're real. Bea answers the phone and claims to be Day but the caller simply asks, "Why haven't you called me, Mrs. Preston?" Before she breaks down, Day cries that the caller realized it wasn't she who answered the phone. Okay. But since Rex is present in the scene, it means the tape was being played by Peggy, with whom he is in cahoots. How could such a deceptive tape have been prerecorded? No one knew until the last second that Aunt Bea would answer instead of Day. Well, not worth going on about. I may have missed something.

The movie is kind of fun. If I don't look forward to watching it, I nevertheless enjoy it when I happen to catch it. The score is worth mentioning too. Nice scene in the pub when Gavin is having his supper and watching Dawson. There's a tinkling piano, pub-style, in the background and slowly a more ambitious and menacing low counterpoint swells up on the sound track, rather neatly done.