Tonight’s Saturday Night Cinema classic is the screen adaption of Paddy Chayevsky’s successful stageplay, with powerful performances by the luminescent Kim Novak (what a piece of cake she is) and one of Hollywood’s most celebrated, talented stars, Frederic March. Middle of the Night is the story of a May/December romance. It’s a sweet story of two people finding each other at just the right time, even if it doesn’t seem that way to others.
I have great affection for this film because my father, a workaholic and self-made man who came from nothing, made his success in the garment district, and that is the backdrop of the film (although my father’s personality was more Mitchum than March). The scenes of pattern-making and laying textiles on long tables warm the cockles of my heart. The scenes in the Garment District, the workers pushing rolling racks of clothing on the street, the long tables — all of it brings memories flooding back for me. Here is where I saw my father spends his days and a good many of his nights as a clothing manufacturer. He did it all — he would draw the designs and the jacquards, cut the patterns, fix the enormous knitting machines and the sewing machines, and even sew, if he had to get a sample to a show. The movie is worth the watch just for the snapshot of that now-dead slice of great Americana.
It’s almost a documentary of the garment business back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s — until, that is, the unions completely gutted that industry, like they do in any business they get a chokehold on. In those days, a woman who got laid off in the garment industry simply walked into another factory and got a new job that same afternoon. There were a sea of jobs in what had been the largest single employer in New York City.
Thanks to ILGWU, that is long dead, in the left’s long war on America. Today, there are no jobs. But that for another post — enjoy the film :)
Reuben Geller, R.I.P.
“Middle of the Night” (1959) begins with a camera shot out the back of a moving truck in New York City traffic. It is early morning. The soft strains of a single oboe lend a contemplative touch. We float through the traffic and the pedestrians (actual New Yorkers going to work and unaware they are being filmed from the back of a truck).
What interests me most about the writer’s and director’s treatment of this story is how much importance they place on the workplace. We know that Fredric March is a well-off factory owner, but are not asked to accept this on faith with a shot of him at a desk mumbling into a Dictaphone. He is a hands-on manufacturer and his work is his life. He is sort of the opposite of the smarmy corporate shark he played in “Executive Suite”, which we examined Labor Day last year. Fredric March is riveting, commanding every scene.
When we arrive at the factory, it is as if we are taken out of the back of the truck by the delivery driver, and brought up to the dark, narrow hall where Kim Novak types and shuffles manifests and bills of lading behind her receptionist’s window.
Just beyond the office is the factory floor, where men are cutting out clothing patterns on long tables, and Fredric March takes a moment to have a coffee in a paper cup with some of his salesmen, who tell tales of the road.
Middle of the Night (1959)
Lonely People; Middle of Night’ Is at Two Theatres, By Bosley Crowther, June 18, 1959
PADDY CHAYEFSKY’S skill at probing average people who are lonely, insecure and who spend much time fumbling and groping for the comfort of sheer companionship is brought to the screen again most fitly in the picture version of “Middle of the Night.” This film from Mr. Chayefsky’s Broadway stage play opened yesterday at the Forum (formerly the Odeon) and the Trans-Lux Fifty-second Street.
This time, the lonely-hearts expert, whose best job of matchmaking to date was that of pairing off Marty, the fat Bronx butcher, with a school-teaching old maid, is playing successful shatchen to a middle-aged manufacturer from New York’s garment district and a 24-year-old divorcée. While the romantic aura of the union is brighter than its prospects of success, the obvious assumption of the author is that it’s going to turn out okay.
We wouldn’t want to bet money on it—not as much money, anyway, as we’d have bet on the future of the union that was finally resolved on the stage. In the first place, the garment manufacturer that a hard-working Fredric March plays looks a little too old and doddering to be taking a 24-year-old bride. And the young lady, played by Kim Novak, seems too much of a badly mixed-up kid to be settling down quietly with a grandpa on West End Avenue.
That’s by the by, however. The film is not concerned with the success of the marriage that is pending, but only with the courtship of the pair. And that is made thoroughly tempestuous and harrowing in this intimate screen view. By the time the playwright gets through poking them, the participants would seem too tired to care.
In this respect, the picture has more to offer than did the play. The characters are more intense and driven by their lonely and neurotic moods. They fumble and paw at each other in a more avid and frenzied way, and their squabbles and indecisions are more violent and sweaty with pain. Mr. Chayefsky and Delbert Mann, the director, have worked for the taut, dramatic thing. They haven’t wasted much time on humor. This is loneliness, boy, and it is grim.
But something that was quite attractive on the stage is not in the film. That is the humor and the temperament of a particular ethnic group. Mr. March is an excellent actor when it comes to showing joy and distress but he isn’t successful at pretending to be a Jewish papa and business man. He goes with the flavor of his family, which is very colloquially played by Edith Meiser, Joan Copeland and Martin Balsam, about as poorly as spoon-bread goes with lox. And when he takes his girl to the Catskills for a resort-hotel New Year’s Eve, he stands out from the well-defined environment as sharply as if he were wearing a burnoose.
His isn’t the garment manufacturer that Edward G. Robinson played.
As for Miss Novak’s secretary and unsettled divorcée she is plainly designed to be erratic, frightened and immature, so that Miss Novak’s fluttery performance is inevitably in the shifty mood. It is as hard to discover precisely what she is aiming to be as it is to discover what Glenda Farrell, as her mother, is trying to convey. Obviously both these characters are lacking self-discipline.
That’s why we wouldn’t bet much money on the happy union Mr. Chayefsky has strenuously arranged. But we must say it is vigorous, tense and touching while the arrangements are being made.
The Cast
MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, screen play by Paddy Chayefsky; based on his play; directed by Delbert Mann; produced by George Justin; a Sudan Production; presented by Columbia Pictures. At the Forum. Broadway and Forty-seventh Street, and the Trans-Lux, Fifty-second Street at Lexington Avenue. Running time; 118 minutes.
Jerry Kingsley . . . . . Fredric March
Betty . . . . . Kim Novak
Her Mother . . . . . Glenda Farrell
Her Sister . . . . . Jan Norris
Marilyn . . . . . Lee Grant
Neighbor . . . . . Effie Afton
George . . . . . Lee Phillips
Evelyn . . . . . Edith Meiser
Lillian . . . . . Joan Copeland
Jack . . . . . Martin Balsam
Paul . . . . . David Ford
Elizabeth . . . . . Audrey Peters
Widow . . . . . Betty Walker
Lockman . . . . . Albert Dekker
Gould . . . . . Rudy Bond
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