Review: Frank Borzage’s History Is Made at Night on Criterion Blu-ray

Frank Borzage’s History Is Made at Night is a post-screwball melodrama that turns a jaundiced eye toward the institution of marriage espoused by the popular comedies of the early 1930s, even as it fiercely and passionately affirms the power of romantic love. Meticulously crafted as if to give the impression that even the filmmakers don’t know where it’s going, the story begins with the crumbling of a relationship, as Irene Vail (Jean Arthur) announces her intentions to divorce her ship-magnate husband, Bruce (Colin Clive), who, in turn, resolves to thwart her efforts at emancipation by having his chauffer, Michael (Ivan Lebedeff), pretend to be her lover and catch her in a compromising position. But when the driver attempts to act out this plan in Irene’s Parisian hotel room, he inadvertently attracts the attention of one Paul Dumond (Charles Boyer), who saves her from this assault and whisks her away from her abusive husband.

After this harrowing opening, History Is Made at Night blossoms into a whimsical romantic comedy as Paul and Irene have a dance-filled night on the town that ends with the mutual feeling that they’ve found the love of their life. Eventually, though, Bruce re-ensnares his wife, separating the two would-be lovers before they can cement their relationship. Despite Paul and Irene having only just met, the barrier erected between them wreaks emotional havoc on their lives, and it reverberates through the remainder of Borzage’s film.

One of Borzage’s greatest strengths was his slippery yet controlled approach to structure, to the point that his films’ plots and even emotional wavelengths are difficult to predict. History Is Made at Night spends much of its time oscillating between proto-noir and sparkling comedy, a tonal variation that has echoes in David Abel’s cinematography. Scenes involving Bruce are cloaked in shadow and defined by suffocating compositions that emphasize his controlling persona, while those involving Paul and Irene are brightly, almost ostentatiously lit, capturing the effusiveness with which the they fall head over heels for each other.

Later, History Is Made at Night even lurches into the terrain of a fog-blanketed maritime thriller, with the more uptempo editing and heightened sense of dramatic urgency wholly at odds with the melancholy that defines the film’s middle section. These tonal clashes suggest expressionistic projections of the protagonists’ feelings, juggling despair and wild joy in an impossible harmony that approximates the pains and pleasures of love. Borzage specialized in this kind of contradictory brute-force elegance, reworking the poetic realism of the ’30s around the structure of Hollywood melodrama to allow emotional logic to guide his narratives.

This focus on the complexity and irrepressibility of the characters’ feelings allowed Borzage’s actors to express themselves in remarkably unrestrained ways. On their first night together, Paul decides to play a joke on Irene by saying that he lives with a woman, but he cannot get to the punchline quickly enough to stop her from taking the statement at face value and visibly sagging with regret as she quietly says, “Pretend I didn’t ask that.” Later, when the two are reunited in the presence of Bruce and after she had been led to believe that Paul had been arrested, she’s so ecstatic that a giggle of childlike joy escapes her. Nothing compares, though, to the desperation that Boyer and Arthur bring to their performances when Paul and Irene find themselves on a sinking ship, their completely unguarded, raw devotion to one another feeling decades ahead of its time, pointing straight toward the way that James Cameron would mine similarly naked romance in the face of doom in his more blockbuster-sized Titanic.

Image/Sound

Sourced from a 4K scan of a nitrate negative, the image transfer on this Criterion disc looks superb, ably juggling the wild variations in lighting and contrast that define the film. The transfer boasts rich black levels in the darkest of chiaroscuro scenes and really shows off the shimmering gossamer textures of the more swooning passages. Grain distribution is uneven at certain points, and specks and debris are intermittently noticeable, but this is an otherwise exemplary presentation of one of the most beautiful Hollywood films of the 1930s. And notwithstanding the to-be-expected tinniness of the PCM mono track, the audio presentation is sturdy. The dialogue and music are cleanly and clearly rendered, and the track never gives way to distortion during the film’s boisterous pivot to disaster-movie terrain in the last act.

Extras

In a new conversation between author Hervé Dumont and film scholar Peter Cowie, the focus is heavily on the film’s somewhat hectic assembly, from the many rewrites of the script to the subsequent reshoots. Their breakdown offers a critical insight into why the twist-laden film often feels so hard to pin down as it shifts between different genre modes. And in an interview from 2019, critic Farran Smith Nehme discusses Borzage’s obsession with romantic love and untrammeled emotions and how it informed the look and feel of his work. Audio of a 1958 interview with Borzage covers his life from his childhood to his early work in theater and his turn to cinema, while the 1940 radio adaptation of History Is Made at Night (also starring Charles Boyer) is also included. Rounding out Criterion’s package is a brief restoration demonstration and a booklet essay by critic Dan Callahan that, in addition to covering the film’s peculiar plot and style, is richly attuned to the pleasures of the lead performances.

Overall

Frank Borzage’s urgent paean to love conquering all is one of the strangest, greatest films of the 1930s, and Criterion’s beautiful transfer attests to its undiluted aesthetic pull.