MIDNIGHT

One of the funniest and most criminally underappreciated comedies of Hollywood's golden age, MIDNIGHT is a marvelously sophisticated farce about a woman who discovers that the easiest way into Parisian high society is to lie about who she is. Claudette Colbert is a penniless American showgirl who arrives in Paris with nothing but an evening gown and promptly talks her way into a fashionable party by impersonating a Hungarian baroness. John Barrymore, in gloriously disreputable form, recruits her to help put an end to his wife's affair, while Don Ameche plays the lovestruck taxi driver determined to drag her back down to earth.

Directed by Mitchell Leisen from a brilliantly constructed screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, MIDNIGHT turns the increasingly desperate business of maintaining a false identity into an exquisite comedy of manners, where everyone is so busy pursuing their own interests that nobody can afford to ask too many questions. Colbert has rarely been more delightful, and Barrymore is a marvel of aristocratic mischief, presiding over a scheme that grows increasingly impossible to control. If you've somehow missed MIDNIGHT, you're in for one of the happiest discoveries classic Hollywood has to offer.