Wednesday, March 26 @ 7:30 PM / NEIU — The Auditorium at NEIU — 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
Tickets: $10 at the door
HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT
Directed by Frank Borzage • 1937
“I know the best champagne in Paris.” “Tonight I don’t care if it’s the worst.” Have a Titanic-sized (and shaped) hole in your heart? Fill it with History Is Made at Night, Frank Borzage’s dizzyingly romantic, fizzy, and frenetically assembled melodrama, an enduringly pleasurable film that feels like several in one. Borzage initially agreed to direct History on the strength of its beautiful title, but with four weeks left until the film began shooting, as he later recalled, the script only had two pages; it arguably went on to have more than two genres. The film is shot like a film noir, and sometimes feels like one. As a romance it’s beguiling, as a disaster film it’s enthralling, and as a character study it’s deeply moving. Despite the near-shipwreck of circumstances it depicts, the film is strongly fixated on the power and endurance of romantic love against all odds (tonal shifts be damned), an idea forever close to Borzage’s heart. The film stars a heartbreaking (yet still spirited) Jean Arthur as socialite Irene Vail, an American in Paris on the cusp of divorcing her abusive ex, an obsessive ship magnate who names his giant liner the Princess Irene. She meets a tall, dark stranger (Charles Boyer, never more alluring or affectionate) and bottles begin to pop. Arthur and Boyer, two of the great romantic foils, make a great dance duo and even better lovers, with a practically cosmic meet-cute like no other. History is made; it just happens to be the transformative love shared by two ordinary people from different worlds (or continents). Class differences, sociopathic tycoons, and icebergs are no match for these two. Why would they be, in Frank Borzage’s universe? (RIN)
97 min • Walter Wanger Productions • 35mm from UCLA Film & Television Archive, permission AGFA
Preceded by: The Three Stooges in “Playing the Ponies” (Charles Lamont, 1937) – 15 min – 35mm
NEXT UP: SPRING NIGHT, SUMMER NIGHT on Wednesday, April 9 at NEIU