Despite her pivotal role in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much and starring
in the underrated Julie, Doris Day
isn’t commonly thought of as an actress who appeared in thrillers. Especially
not during her seven year reign as queen of the rom-coms. But it was smack dab
in the middle of her frolics with Rock Hudson and her tiffs with James Garner
that Day starred in a Gaslight-style
thriller called Midnight Lace.
She plays an American heiress named Kit Preston, recently
married to financier Tony and living in a wealthy and glamorous London
neighbourhood. Tony is a middle-aged Rex Harrison, in a role that harkens back
to his early British films like Blithe
Spirit. Both of them do a fine job, even with their notable lack of
chemical reaction.
Part of the trouble, I think, is at this point, Day was
primarily a sex comedienne and Harrison had been spending a good deal of his
time on the Broadway stage. His distant theatricality and her newly acquired
habit of playing bedroom moments for laughs kicks the “sizzling newlyweds”
angle right in the stomach.
On a particularly foggy evening, Kit is on her way home when
an unseen voice calls to her by name. It’s a bizarre, disguised voice that
sounds like it belongs to a marionette. And this creepy marionette says it
wants to kill her.
She rushes home in terror to find Tony waiting for her, and
he quickly soothes her and suggests that it was just some prankster taking advantage
of the fog. This manages to comfort her, and all seems well.
Until the puppet-voiced weirdo starts phoning her.
Scotland Yard insist that this is a simple case of a lonely
housewife imagining sinister goings-on while she flirts with a nervous
breakdown. No need for police involvement, just take her to a good head
shrinker, guv.
Trying to ignore the constant harassment from the evil
version of Topo Gigio, Kit manages to plan a much-anticipated honeymoon with
Tony. She even buys an elegant negligee in a style called “midnight lace”
giving us our title. (The film was adapted from a play called Matilda Shouted Fire, so a title change
was well in order.) But Tony is terribly busy with work, and the honeymoon
keeps being delayed while Kit wonders if she’s going slowly insane.
An early red-herring culprit is presented to us by way of
Roddy McDowell, being his usual dependable self in a role that could’ve used
some expansion. It isn’t much of a spoiler to announce his innocence, since
anybody who’s seen even a handful of these types of stories will be able to
guess the ending from go.
An ally arrives in the form of Kit’s Aunt Bea, played by
Myrna Loy. (Chairs spin as all of my readers now run to find copies of this
because Myrna Loy is in it.) Aunt Bea is a fabulous character with a fabulous
life full of jet-setting to obscure places, collecting strange curios, and
being delightfully open-minded about the possibility of telephone stalkers. So,
a little different from the Aunt Bea of Mayberry.
Aunt Bea is a soothing presence. She believes Kit actually is
getting upsetting calls, but thinks it’s more of a harmless weirdo than a
homicidal one. Slowly, Tony manages to turn Bea to his view of things, and has
her convinced that all of this might just be in Kit’s head.
The whole thing culminates in a gripping breakdown sequence
that really took it out of Doris Day. In her autobiography, she wrote in order
to prepare she recalled a specific moment from her marriage to Al Jordan. While
she was pregnant and on bedrest, Jordan burst into the room, pulled her up from
bed and threw her against the wall. This bit of method acting resulted in the
best scene of the film, but also caused Doris Day to collapse in emotional
exhaustion after filming it was complete. Production was shut down for two
days, and the experience was so unpleasant she decided to never do another
drama. It was comedies from then on out.
One of the best reasons to check out Midnight Lace is the wardrobe designed by Irene.
The former head of the costume department at MGM, Irene also
designed the incredible costumes for 1944’s Meet
Me in St. Louis. She had been operating her own fashion house, when her
friend Doris Day asked her to design her looks for Midnight Lace. The outfits were so elegant and well-made that Harry
Winston jewellery was rented for Day to wear, because the usual costume jewels
looked extremely fake against the couture fabrics.
One dress in particular, a white evening gown, blew the star
away. She was so enamoured with it, she asked if she could borrow it for the
Academy Awards ceremony. Kind of fun for a normal red-carpet appearance, but
this was the year she was nominated for Pillow
Talk, so that dress was in all
the magazines.
In contrast to the hyper-real regal wardrobe, the London of Midnight Lace looks about as convincing
as a ride at Disneyland. Which is to say, it’s charming but clearly fake.
Budgetary constraints forced the production, originally
slated to film on location in England, to shoot on the Universal fake-London
soundstages. It’s a shame, because two years later, director David Miller
showed how well he could do when given real landscapes to work with. He helmed
one of my all-time faves, Lonely Are the
Brave.
Midnight Lace isn’t
as good as Julie, or any Hitchcock
film, and it’s a little paint-by-numbers in terms of the plot, but it’s got its
selling points. The creepy puppet voice is creepy, the clothes are magnificent,
and Myrna Loy is in it. It’s worth a watch if you come across it on your
travels, particularly if you’re a Doris Day completionist.
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