Vigil in the Night (1940)

Film: Vigil in the Night (1940)

Stars: Carole Lombard, Brian Aherne, Anne Shirley, Julian Mitchell, Robert Coote, Ethel Griffies

Director: George Stevens

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Carole Lombard-click here to learn more about Ms. Lombard (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

The years after Nothing Sacred, which we profiled last week, were busy ones for Carole Lombard.  She was a big enough star in 1938 that she did something relatively rare for actors of that era-she left Paramount, but didn't sign with another studio; this was unusual, and only a couple of major players of this era didn't have studio contracts & were still able to be major successes (the most notable being Barbara Stanwyck).  In her personal life, she was romancing actor Clark Gable, and in 1939, following Gable's divorce from Maria Langham, she married him.  Lombard at this point, according to her biographers, was desperate to win an Academy Award to match her husband's, but there was a problem with that-the public wanted Lombard in comedies, and while Gable had won his Oscar for a comedic performance, by-and-large comedies even in the 1930's simply didn't win Oscars.  So Lombard began to make a string of dramas, most of which flopped or were met with break-even success.  The best known of these, and the one that Lombard thought would win her an Oscar, was Vigil in the Night.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a nurse named Anne Lee (Lombard), who at the beginning of the film takes the blame for her sister Lucy (Shirley), whose negligence as a nurse causes the death of a young boy; Anne has her certification while Lucy doesn't, and so she knows she can find work somewhere else.  She does go to a city where she gets a job in a much rougher environment, one that has a near constant string of patients (and is severely underfunded), and there she falls in love with a doctor, Robert Prescott (Aherne), but both of their work comes first (more so for Anne than Robert).  As the film continues, Anne becomes more emboldened to fight the smallpox epidemic, a fight that comes to a head when the hospital's stingy funder, who has spent most of the film fruitlessly hitting on Anne, needs the success of the hospital when his own son gets the disease.

This is not where the film ends, but Vigil in the Night is an unusual film for Classic Hollywood because it was distributed with two endings.  This isn't a case where there's a director's cut that was released/found later, but it was that based on the geographic location the film was released in, it got a different ending than other areas.  In the United States, the film gets a romantic ending, one where Robert & Anne end up together.  In the United Kingdom, though, considering when this was released, it ends with (the real) Neville Chamberlain's voice talking about how the country is now at war with Germany, making it a much more somber affair, as the staff understands their fight is just beginning now.  TCM aired both endings when I saw this film, and I will admit the UK ending is better if you have to pick which one to watch.

That being said, Vigil in the Night is a bit of a slog.  The film is too melodramatic, and the script is too repetitive-Anne has to have the same fights over-and-over, to the point where you kind of wonder if the characters aren't a bit too consistent.  Oftentimes with this style of melodrama, part of the problem is that it's taking itself too seriously, particularly if it's leading toward a happy ending...the movie feels too light on occasion, and to my chagrin, a bunch of that falls on Lombard.  We've established over the past few weeks that Lombard was a terrific actress, someone capable of greatness with comedy, but she plays Anne as too light, and while she's good in parts (the standing-up-to-the-man scenes are classic Lombard), overall this is the least successful of her performances, and with no one else bringing much energy to the movie, it falters.  I get why an actress would read a part like this & think they'd win an Oscar for it, but it's not just about the role-you need to find a part that would fit (this feels much more attuned to a Bette Davis-style actress than Lombard).  Of course, Carole Lombard would never win an Academy Award, and we'll talk about the tragic reason as to why next week as we conclude this month devoted to the star (and yes, we'll finally get to the one picture she made with our director this season, Alfred Hitchcock).