For any true classic alcoholic movie lover, Nick Charles, as played by William Powell, embodies the dream of being able to drink heroically while always remaining competent, coherent, and witty. Sadly, few of us have managed it in real life: sooner or later the drinks catch up to us, and we're lucky if we can solve the mystery of where our pants are, or what we did last night, let alone a murder. Nick Charles' speech stays lucid, even if it slurs a bit around the edge; he solves murders while trading quips with his cool, understanding, no-nonsense wife Nora (Myrna Loy). Nora, who doesn't bat an eye when he pops open the bedroom bar in the wee hours of the night because he can't sleep; who merely raises a bemused eyebrow when he shoots out a window on Christmas morning; who, on finding out he's already had five martinis, orders five of her own. The chemistry of Powell and Loy / Nick and Nora was something strictly from the land of genius drunk Dashiell Hammett and a time when such things still existed, and such breezy chemistry did not come again until the 40s, bruised and chastened but wiser.
Of STAR OF MIDNIGHT, Classic Movie Ramblings' Dfordoom notes "The plot is fiendishly complicated, perhaps even too complicated, but these sorts of 30s mysteries rely mostly on style, witty dialogue and classy acting so it doesn’t do to get too stressed out about following every one of the countless plot twists." And I'm glad he notes that. Ramble on, brother! I used to use to go to sleep watching this film on a blurry VHS back in the 1990s, when my drinking was at its most Wagnerian. With its rambling, dull plot, the film knocked me out like a feather with a crowbar behind it. Only now, after 35 viewings, can I actually follow the machinations. As for rapport, I even prefer even the breezy B-movie bondng between Tom Conway and his various lady taxi drivers in the Falcon films (worth checking out!) to Powell's vain attempts to be scintillating with Rogers' clothes horse buzzkill.
As a point of conversation, however, STAR OF MIDNIGHT is an invaluable window into an alternate cinema universe where Nick and Nora had never met, and Nick had instead become a lawyer and hung out with Ginger Rogers, here looking gorgeous and stylish, yet hammered into the common post-code frilly mold of a suffocatingly nurturing, marriage-minded champion of moral sobriety. In fact her attitude and acting seem to bitchily satirize Powell's true cinelove, Myrna Loy, as the Ludivico technique's Chase Kahn points out: "(Rogers) mocks the gaudy glamor and comedic timing of Myrna Loy, even scrunching her face at a sly comment... When she finds out Powell's been shot (just grazed) she freaks out to the point where he snaps "hey, it's my wound!" (1) You can't imagine Nora ever being so overbearing, no matter how many humiliating situations and castration-symbolizing hats and hairdos she was forced into by the post-code Better Home and Gardens gestapo. In THE THIN MAN, when Nick was similarly shot (just grazed), Myrna Loy's response was touching --she was really scared for a moment, and her womanly concern was understandable. Rogers on the other hand plays up the fretting mama, wanting to give him a hot bath--a terrible idea for a flesh wound--and Powell is more or less forced to kick her out just to drink in peace. And when she does pour him a drink, she measures it out like an eye dropper. Is that supposed to be funny, you fu***ing c*nt?
Without Loy, STAR OF MIDNIGHT can only remind us of the lonely feeling of being stuck in a relationship with someone who desperately wants us for a life partner, and we have no better offers at the moment, no pressing engagements, and we're too drunk and/or lazy and/or weak-willed to resist them. This is certainly borne out in the late night presence of Vivien Oakland (left) as one of Powell's former lovers, who bursts in to get information, stays to flirt, and forces Powell to give the old 'what's done is done lets be friends' speech (later it turns out she's slept with half the suspects). This is subtle insight, as she clearly didn't win Powell for her beauty, sporting instead a Margaret Dumont-ish height and imperiousness (she was in a lot of Laurel and Hardy films, I hear, no doubt getting the pie in the face treatment for her troubles).
Poor William Powell. He seems adrift in this RKO alternate reality (he was loaned out by MGM basically in order for the rival studio to rip off an MGM product), as if he had no one to eat lunch with between takes and is afraid to ask where the phone is. The way Jean Paul Belmondo seemed alone and adrift in PIERROT LE FOU, knowing he could never compete with the camera for Anna Karina's affections, so too Powell seems alone and adrift in STAR. Ginger nags about his lack of interest in marriage, answering her own question in the incessant way she asks it and he's too sorrowful and bewildered to realize he needs to dump her to the curb with the quickness.
Meanwhile at least two people in the murder mystery are never even seen and a lot of the action takes place off camera. What we get instead of what we should aret those notorious post-code 'domesticities.' We come to know in great detail every domestic breakfast in Powell's chambers and where Rogers slept that night (in the butler's room). There's lot of virginal white bouquets, and if someone's going to get semi-naked and take a shower under a police grilling, it's going to have to be Powell and not Ginger. Powell's so pussywhipped the butler has to practically prod him into drinking with any kind of heroic gusto. STAR OF MIDNIGHT indeed! They all but have a 10 o'clock curfew.
The big eerie possibility might be though that this mismatched pair are truly in love, and that's why they put up with this draggy amount of magnetic repulsion and symbolic social castration they bring to the mix. Sometimes the only way your friends know you've finally found love is when you seem happy in a way you haven't before, and by contrast your old joviality and free-wheeling bachelorhood is suddenly remembered as forced and a little desperate, as if you had to keep the drinks and murder clues going full throttle lest your shaking hands, slurred speech and steady loss of coordination overtake you and force you to wake up where you left off --still hanging off that same old ledge, like the future VERTIGO's Jimmy Stewart, dreading the tediously life-affirming vortex that is marriage... to Midge.
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