Midnight Madness (1928) A Silent Film Review

When a diamond miner falls in love with his broker’s secretary, she rejects him but then realizes that he is her chance to escape a life of poverty. When he discovers that she didn’t marry him for love, he sets course for revenge.

Home Media Availability: Stream courtesy of the NFPF.

Lion Eyes

Lion films were an outright craze prior to the First World War. In the era of shorts, producers could easily make a movie that was at least 50% lion with no narrative excuses required. With the rise of longer motion pictures, the proportion of lion to story was reduced drastically and the amount of juggling required for the big cats to show up increased.

Cecil B. DeMille was no stranger to the shoehorning of lions (see Male and Female) and Midnight Madness (originally called The Lion Trap) was right up his alley as a program picture for his struggling independent studio, a venture resulting from a disagreement with the brass at Paramount. I quite enjoy DeMille’s programmers as he let his trash flag fly for many of them, producing some of the most memorably bonkers mainstream fare of the later silent era.

The picture was originally conceived as a vehicle for Jetta Goudal, whose outré histrionics were much better suited to costume pictures rather than this sweaty and lurid tale of love, lust and lions. Instead, Jacqueline Logan was given the lead role as Norma, daughter of a drunken shooting gallery owner and secretary to a diamond broker. Norma was born on the wrong side of the tracks and knows how to take care of herself and she has decided that the best way to move up in life is to marry her boss.

Arthur Childers (Walter McGrail) enjoys romancing his pretty secretary but his real desire is to know the location of a fabulous South African diamond mine discovered by Richard Bream (Clive Brook). Bream has a hopeless crush on Norma but she has her eyes on the prize of Childers. Childers has a hopeless crush on Bream’s diamond mine but Bream says he doesn’t need a partner. What’s a sleazy diamond broker to do?

Childers tells Norma to romance Bream and get that mine location out of him. Marry her? Oh, please. Childers has his fun but he isn’t the marrying kind. Norma quits in a huff but returning home to the shooting gallery (a patron is subtly hitting lion-shaped targets, forget Chekhov’s Gun, this movie is Chekhov’s Armory) drives home how miserable she is, so she calls Childers to accept his offer.

Bream is overjoyed to have Norma’s attention at last and proposes on the spot, intending to take his new bride back to Africa with him. Norma does a little double-crossing of her own: she isn’t going to get that mine location for Childers. She’s going to enjoy being the wealthy bride of a wealthy man and let him shower her with his money. She’s gone second-class her entire life and now she’s going first-class.

The problem is that she tells Childers this and Bream overhears and is understandably upset. Does he call off the wedding? No, silly, that would be a normal reaction. Instead, he decides that he will teach Norma a lesson. He sends back all the gifts he planned to give her and books second-class tickets on a steamer for Capetown.

If he is angry that she married him for his money, well, the pot has met the kettle. Did he really think that a young woman he barely knows who is fifteen years his junior was marrying him for love? By the same token, could he really claim to truly love an attractive young lady he met a few times at the office? If she married him for money, he married her for beauty, a fair exchange that has existed for centuries.

But, well, this is Hollywood and not only does Bream go through with his plan, he physically restrains Norma in their cabin so she can’t jump ship before they sail from New York. He tells her that he is flat broke and rather than taking her to his tony townhouse, he drives her out to the shack near his mine. Norma takes the first opportunity to wire Childers for help, telling him where to find her.

(Her telegram is fun period slang to decode. Sherman said war was hell and Harry Lauder was a Scottish singer/comedian who sang hits like Always Take Care of Your Pennies.)

Once at the shack, the surviving attendant (Oscar Smith) tells Bream that the mine foreman and the rest of the staff were killed by lions. Smith’s role is small and stereotyped but the “what the heck?” expressions he gives as Bream and Norma carry on absolutely convey what the audience was probably thinking as they watched his picture.

Does Bream take any action to make the shack more secure against lion attack? Don’t be silly! He continues his mind games with Norma, mocking her and preventing her escape by removing the spark plug from the only car. (Norma also knows her way around a car engine. She’s a serial heroine trapped in a romantic melodrama, poor thing.)

Bream decides he has punished Norma enough and he wants to take her to live in luxury because she surely loves him now. Why he thinks this, I have no idea. Bream has obviously been watching too many movies. Norma isn’t too impressed with his declarations of love either and is even less impressed when he starts to paw her… but then the cavalry arrives. Well, not cavalry but Childers and his goon of a mining foreman (Frank Hagney).

Childers has registered a claim next to Bream’s and he has what he wants. Since Bream doesn’t want Norma to leave, Childers is ready to leave her there. Norma turns her attention to the foreman, who is more than ready to take her up on her offer and knocks Bream out cold, tying him to a chair and leaving him as lion kibble. (You didn’t forget about the lions, did you?)

Will Norma let her husband become the world’s largest cat toy? Will Childers get away with everything? See Midnight Madness to find out!

Midnight Madness is a study in déjà vu. I had never seen it before but I felt like I had because it has bits and pieces of other, and often better, silent movies. The city woman suddenly married to a country man was done in The Purchase Price and its remake, The Canadian, at DeMille’s old Paramount digs. The employee setting her cap at her employer was a flapper film staple, seen famously in IT. The gold digger double cross was used in That Certain Thing. A drop of this, a dab of that…

However, some things had changed in the movies. (Spoiler) The treatment of lions, for example, had improved a bit from the early silent days. The 1911 Selig picture Back to the Primitive had also featured romance with Africa as the backdrop and frequent lion attacks. In that film, a lioness was shot down onscreen (I went frame by frame, there was no splice) and the picture was lauded for its realism and excitement.

In Midnight Madness, a lioness is killed at the climax but the death is offscreen and no big cat was actually harmed. The American Animal Defense League, among others, had been raising awareness of injury and death inflicted on animal performers with Paramount hits like The Covered Wagon and DeMille’s own The Ten Commandments singled out. Midnight Madness was meant as a low budget programmer and couldn’t afford to be the target of a boycott over animal mistreatment.

A 1923 letter from a concerned reader to Picture Play magazine expresses sentiments that I am sure most of us today can agree with: “There is something so unsportsmanlike in dragging animals before the camera and  there goading or frightening them into antics supposed to be either terrifying or amusing, that one wonders what the producer’s idea of the audience is. We aren’t such cads as some of them seem to think us… a friend who used to be an admirer of Richard Dix says she will never go to see him again because he played in “To the Last Man,” [note: another Paramount release] where horses were used with unnecessary cruelty.”

How things had changed since the pre-WWI lion picture heyday when animal deaths were an advertising point of pride. Obviously “not killing living creatures when making your movie” is an incredibly low bar and major reform was still years away but forward movement is appreciated.

Reviews of Midnight Madness, as well as feedback from movie theaters, were generally pretty positive. Nobody claimed that it was a masterpiece but it was praised as an entertaining program picture with a somewhat weak story, which I cannot argue with. The Film Spectator had a teenage critic as a gimmick and he stated that the film’s low number of closeups made it “surprisingly easy to watch.” A bit of an odd take and I wonder if the young fellow was fed up with German pictures generally and Karl Freund particularly.

Jacqueline Logan carries on a bit in the more emotional scenes but is generally very good as the ambitious, social climbing Norma. In a talkie, the film could have used code-switching to show Norman shifting between working class New Yorker and the more refined New England accent Hollywood liked to hear in women of quality. Since this is a silent, Logan pulls off the change with body language and Norma’s graceful movements dissolve into frenzied gestures as she loses her temper and her mask slips.

Walter McGrail, though, really walks away with the movie as the amoral Childers. He grins and swaggers around and generally seems to be having the time of his life. It helps that his character is the only one who behaves in a recognizably human way after Norma decides to get all sappy about Bream.

And now, we must address the elephant in the room: Clive Brook. Brook generally has the reputation of being stiff as a board and, at times, unlikeable in his roles. This is a fair enough assessment in many cases (and, in fact, an outright advantage in the comedy of manners On Approval) but he was capable of engaging in a proper, likable romance.

The first silent film I saw him in was Barbed Wire, he was excellent there and gave a sensitive and believable performance as the romantic lead. Unfortunately, it seems that whatever magic was in the air during the production of that picture is not to be found in Midnight Madness.

Obviously, the plot is a problem as well. In his early forties at the time of production, Brook is just too old to play a character with such a ridiculous motivation. A younger actor might have pulled it off as a puppyish impulse but off the top of my head, I can’t think of a DeMille leading man who could have done it. Rod La Rocque was beautiful but no actor. William Boyd was too nice to be sinister. Joseph Schildkraut could do sinister but couldn’t slum in trash roles without looking embarrassed. They needed a Valentino and not even Valentino could do Valentino if the screenplay wasn’t good.

The direction of the film is a bit weak. F. Harmon Weight was no Cecil B. DeMille and some of the sequences are just too staid for the over-the-top storyline. However, I am always a sucker for the off-frame gunshot and the ambiguous closeup so that we don’t know who or what was shot for a few seconds and Weight pulls that off nicely. So, I give the direction a B-.

The most frustrating thing about Midnight Madness is that there are the bones of a pretty good, claustrophobic suspense film trapped inside the romantic melodrama. The Woman Everyone Underestimated is a cinematic staple that never grows old. Sweaty hot weather proto-noir was very much a thing at the time. See Desert Nights, a similarly diamond-studded suspense picture.

(In fact, if you wanted to, you could interpret the ending as much darker than it appears on the surface: Norma’s decision to rescue her husband comes after Childers confirms that Bream is, in fact, not a bum but the owner of a rich diamond mine and after the death of the man who had agreed to take her away. Golddiggers one, rich fools zero, I think.)

We have dwelt on the many, many flaws of the picture but when it comes down to brass tacks… it’s entertaining as hell. I think the flaws probably make it even more diverting, in fact. Your mileage is going to vary wildly and very much depend on how much you enjoy cinematic trash. Me, I am a bit of a trash panda with no taste at all, so my lizard brain enjoyed this a lot more than I should probably admit for absolutely no good reason.

So, now we come to the verdict. Is Midnight Madness a good movie? No. Is it tasteful? No. Is it suitable for audiences without a bevy of content warnings? Absolutely not. Is it entertaining as absolute trash? Yes. I wasn’t bored for one moment while watching it, so I guess mission accomplished. It’s no sleaze fest on par with West of Zanzibar but nobody is going to accuse it of being in good taste.

I believe I have given anyone reading enough information to judge for themselves whether or not Midnight Madness is for them. If “absolute trash” is an invitation rather than a pan, then you are in for a good time. If this review has been off-putting, then you would probably be better off watching just about any of the other films I have referenced in this review.

Where can I see it?

Stream for free courtesy of the National Film Preservation Foundation.

☙❦❧

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