Midnight Mary (1933)

Film: Midnight Mary (1933)

Stars: Loretta Young, Ricardo Cortez, Franchot Tone, Andy Devine, Una Merkel

Director: William A. Wellman

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Loretta Young: click here to learn more about Ms. Young (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Loretta Young's career is unusual in that the earliest parts of it seem effortless.  She was a child actress after her family moved from Utah to Hollywood, and while she wasn't as successful as her sister Gretchen, she quickly got into movies, and even as a teenager was a WAMPAS Baby Star and acting opposite Lon Chaney (then one of the biggest stars in silent pictures) in the late 1920's.  Young's career, as we'll track, is sometimes hard to define because other than her two Oscar-nominated roles and The Bishop's Wife, which all happened over two decades into her career and in rapid succession, she was a consistent headliner but never someone who made a particularly strong mark on Hollywood.  So as we piece together her career, we're going to focus on five films that happened during key moments in Hollywood, and talk about how Young adapted to a town that was still reeling from the advent of talking pictures, and starting next week, the Hays Code. This week, though, we have Young in one of her more salacious roles, a Pre-Code drama called Midnight Mary.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is told in flashback, as Mary Martin (Young) we see in the opening scenes is being tried for murder, and we understand through flashback what led to this moment.  Mary, from a young age, was given the fuzzy end of the lollipop, accused of crimes she didn't commit & growing up in poverty.  This put her into the company of a criminal crowd, as this was the easiest way to make money (though, to the film's credit, it gives Mary enough utility to make the choice to go into crime rather than just forcing her into it).  She chances upon a wealthy lawyer named Tom Mannering (Tone) who gives her a chance at a better life, but at this point the cards are dealt.  When Mary is finally found by the police for her life of crime, she makes it look to Tom like she'd conned him for his money, rather than admit she fell in love with him but can't bear to inflict on him the shame of being in love with a criminal.  Later in the film, when she kills her abusive boyfriend Leo (Cortez) as he's going to go for Tom & kill him out of jealousy, rather than admit what happened, she is willing to go to the chair to save Tom's dignity...but Tom storms in at the last second and sacrifices his honor to save the woman he loved, and they live happily ever after.

The movie sounds schmaltzy, but it doesn't read that way except for the last ten minutes.  The film's Pre-Code looseness helps a lot, making Mary's criminal cronies feel very real while also genuinely scary.  There's a scene where Leo is beating Mary senselessly in the next room, and his associates, celebrating one of them becoming a father, instead of stopping Leo turn up the music with knowing glances to each other, understanding that "Mary deserved it" even as they're celebrating another woman in their lives making them so happy.  It's a nasty bit of informed toxic masculinity, which runs rampant through the film, and is a good testament to why we need more female writers in every era of Hollywood (this was written by Anita Loos & Kathryn Scola).

The other reason the film doesn't read as schmaltzy, and I can't believe I'm saying this, is Loretta Young.  Young is not my favorite actress, as I said when I introduced this month, and one of the reasons I picked her was because I didn't like the idea of such a celebrated screen star having nothing for me to point to as "that's the role you should start with."  Now I have that.  Young plays this role differently than someone like Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Crawford might have, actresses known for playing tough-as-nails figures who can make it in a man's world largely by emulating the behavior of men.  The best parts of Mary's story, though, are that she can't make it in a man's world-that she needs to rely upon her femininity to get by, and sometimes she falls.  It makes the film more realistic, and Young's performance feel so true to a woman who knows she'll never get better than this, so she might as well make do.  A very strong piece-of-work right out the gate, making me excited we might find more hidden gems this month.