Midnight Lace (Ross Hunter Productions, Arwin, Universal-International, 1960)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, November 24) I watched an intriguing film on Turner Classic Movies: Midnight Lace, a 1960 crime thriller starring Doris Day as a put-upon woman who’s the victim of a plot to drive her to commit suicide and Rex Harrison as her husband. The film was set in Britain and was based on a 1955 play called Matilda Shouted Fire by British playwright Janet Green, though at the time producer Ross Hunter bought it for Universal-International as a Doris Day vehicle it had only played the British provinces and hadn’t yet opened in London. The film was also shot in Britain by director David Miller (Green’s play was adapted for film by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts), which meant they had access to the marvelous pool of British actors, including Hermione Baddeley (who does a great turn as a bar owner), Roddy McDowall, Herbert Marshall (as a board member of Preston Oil, the company of which Harrison is the CEO), John Williams (repeating his role as a Scotland Yard super-cop from Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial “M” for Murder) and Richard Ney (the actor who played Greer Garson’s son in Mrs. Miniver and subsequently married her). Midnight Lace – the title comes from a sheer black lace negligée Kit Preston (Doris Day) buys early in the film in hopes of impressing her husband Anthony (Rex Harrison) – is a Gaslight-style melodrama (in fact TCM showed it right after the 1944 Gaslight, directed by George Cukor and starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer and Joseph Cotten) that begins in a London fog. Kit tries walking home across Trafalgar Square in a fog so thick visibility is almost zero, and as she’s making her way across towards her home she hears a weird voice coming from different directions but all belonging to the same person, a man who tells her point-blank and matter-of-factly he’s going to kill her. Later she starts getting threatening phone calls from the same individual.

She turns for help to her husband, to her aunt – an American woman named Bea Vorman, played by the great Myrna Loy, whom Ross Hunter persuaded to come out of retirement for the role – and to Brian Younger (John Gavin), a young American contractor who’s supervising a building site on the same block where the Prestons live. It’s established that Kit Preston is a well-to-do American heiress, and when she reports the psychological assaults she’s receiving both to Inspector Byrnes of Scotland Yard (John Williams) and her doctor, Garver (Hayden Rorke), they both urge her to see a psychiatrist. The film rambles for almost two hours’ worth of running time as Kit becomes more and more discombobulated, including one scene in which Kit gets her friend Peggy Thompson (Natasha Perry) to lie for her and say she, too, heard the mystery phone voice – only Anthony catches them out on the lie by revealing that their phone had actually been out of order for the last half-hour. Midnight Lace builds to a surprise ending (sort of) in which [spoiler alert!] Kit’s seemingly devoted and supportive husband turns out to be the principal villain. Anthony Preston never actually loved Kit; he just married her for her money. He’d been embezzling from his company, his accountant Daniel Graham (Richard Ney) had noticed the shortage in the books but had not yet traced it to him, and in order to cover his losses he’d married Kit with the intent of knocking her off by driving her crazy and ultimately getting her to commit suicide so he could grab her fortune. Peggy was his accomplice and his lover, and the rat-faced man we’d seen in several sequences and assumed was Kit’s tormentor was actually Peggy’s sailor husband, Roy Ash (Anthony Dawson), who’d deduced that she was having an extra-relational affair by the sheer number of letters she was writing him and gifts she was sending him while he was away at sea.

The voice that tormented Kit both in the fog in the opening scene and on the phone was Anthony’s own, voice-filtered and doctored and played back on a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder at a time when pocket-sized recording devices were a novelty. At one point Kit had asked Anthony to call the police for her, giving her the confidence that they were on their way and would rescue her, but he just pretended to make the call; he really just called the phone number that gave you the correct time (something I remember from my childhood!), though Inspector Byrnes had wiretapped the Prestons’ phone anyway in a search for Kit’s mystery tormentor and he’d heard the whole thing. Ultimately Kit ends up literally fleeing for her life across the framework of the uncompleted building Brian Younger’s (ya remember Brian Younger?) work crew is building next door, and while Kit predictably ignores Brian’s warnings not to look down, in the end he rescues her while Byrnes and his fellow bobbies arrest Anthony and Peggy. Midnight Lace is a good film but also a frustrating one; given that at least two of the cast members had worked for Alfred Hitchcock (Day in the second The Man Who Knew Too Much and Williams in Dial “M” for Murder), and the story is very “Hitchcockian,” one can’t help but wish that Hitchcock himself had been around to direct it. There’s even a scene in which Kit Preston returns home to find a man standing outside her building reading a newspaper – and one gets the impression that if Hitchcock had directed Midnight Lace, that would have been Hitchcock himself making one of his trademark cameos.

What’s most convincing about Midnight Lace is Doris Day’s performance; she starts out as her usual perky, lovable self but as the film progresses and the events of the plot start attacking her sanity, she gradually loses her sang-froid on-screen and becomes both physically and psychologically disheveled. Apparently in this film, as in her earlier thriller Julie – also about an innocent young woman who gradually realizes that her husband is a psycho determined to do her in – Day did the Method thing and drew on her own personal experiences to create her character. In Day’s case the personal experience she drew on was a wretched first marriage to a man named Albert Paul Jorden, who was both physically and psychologically abusive – so much so that their child, a son named Terry, used his stepfather’s last name and called himself Terry Melcher. After Julie Doris Day said she would never make another thriller because the strain of reliving her relationship with Jorden for the role had given her what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder, and though Ross Hunter talked her into doing Midnight Lace the same thing happened to her psychologically and she never again made a film that wasn’t a comedy and/or a musical. It was a pity because, like Lucille Ball, Doris Day was a far rangier and more sensitive actress than she allowed herself to be and had a lot more potential than was tapped by the sprightly comedies for which she’s best known.