Mike (2:39)

Welcome back to another episode of 15 Minute Film Fanatics. A weird one this week. I once saw a movie and somehow I forgot to tell Dan about it. But I was absolutely wild about this movie and I just thought how interesting it was. And I thought about it from time to time. Dan, you saw it, I guess, a couple of weeks ago, just out of the blue, and you were trying to tell me how good it was. You were nominating it for the pod, and I said, I'd have already seen it. So what are we doing this week?

Dan (3:07)

History is made at night.

Mike (3:08)

History is made at night. 1937, Frank Borsage. I guess it's a me movie. So, Dan, you're going to go first. I want your overall impression. You get to get us kicked off. Go.

Dan (3:21)

If you think about somebody you love in your life, not your siblings or your parents, but, like, somebody who was once a stranger, like your spouse, and then who you now love, right there. There was a time when your feelings moved from not love to love. There had to be mathematically this time, right? And maybe, like you mark that, maybe a lot of people, we mark that moment. You and I are both married, right? You mark that moment by, like, testing its validity. You say to the other person, I love you, and you hope the other person does not say.

Mike (3:50)

That'S not what I meant.

Dan (3:51)

Yeah. Or that's nice. Or something like that. Right? So we hope the person says, I love you, too. And then. Okay, then you move forward, right? So by the time you vocalize it, by the time you say I love you, it's already happened. Like, it's already happened to you. And you have to vocalize it. Like, it's almost like you want the receipt from the other person. But you might not recall. Most of us don't recall the exact moment where you went from the state of not love to love. Maybe it was because emotions are very messy, right. You're kind of like, I don't know, like, I think I love her. Right. Song, I think I love you, but what am I so afraid of? We say things like, oh, I knew right away, or from that very moment. But it's hard to put a timestamp on it like you can in an email, right? So the charm of this movie, the great thing about history, is made at night is that you actually do get to watch it happen. You could see the timestamp, right? We watched Charles Boyer move from the state of not love to love with Gene Arthur. We see it happen when she says, oh, like, it's like filming it happen. It's like finding. This is like finding footage of Bigfoot. Like, find the actual. It's like the Zapruder film of falling in love where someone happens to be there with a camera and they capture the whole thing. What would it be like? What's fascinating about the movie is what would it be like to watch that happen, to watch that process happen before you, Right. As instantly as it seems. And when he says he falls in love with her, he knows it. He goes back and tells Cesare, that's. That. That's who I'm going to marry. Now, that's a movie thing. And we'll talk about movie things later on. And we, you know, a lot of us might know that right away, but he knows it. And he's right. I think it's fascinating that we have our. We have our anniversaries. We celebrate our anniversaries. We remember the dates on which we got engaged. Like, I happen to remember mine because it was my father's birthday, Right. But we don't go around saying. We say things like, oh, my anniversary is March 2nd, and my. We got engaged on, you know, on December 5th. And our love date is actually May 3rd. We don't say that. But this movie is like the love date. You turn it on and you watch people fall in love. And it's awesome.

Mike (5:51)

I think it works particularly well, far better than it does in any contemporary movie, because very few people know Gene Arthur or Charles Boyer. I think when they try to show you two stars falling in love, we've attempted to capture this before, but sometimes when we attempt to capture it, it's like George Clooney and, you know, all of his personal business and Catherine Zeta Jones and, you know, all her personal business. And the strength of their performance is judged on the similitude that they can create on screen to what that might be, to what that might look like or what that might feel like. But when it's Jean Arthur and Charles Boyer, you can extra suspend your disbelief and pretend that you're watching two people fall in love because they have. They have the anonymity of time going for them. And I don't think that the Hollywood press, even for the two of them, was sophisticated enough to air all their dirty laundry. They don't just play characters the way that George Clooney would play a character. They embody characters. I also think that there's something going on in the script because there's not an enormous amount of elapsed time in this movie. There's extremely compressed time.

Dan (7:12)

That's my whole second part. That's my whole moment about that.

Mike (7:14)

Yeah. And I just. I think it's one of the things that only film can do. This wouldn't make a great stage play, and it definitely. It might make an okay novel, but there's some. There's something about seeing it and hearing it and almost smelling Cesar's food that I think works a little bit better than it might on the page. There's different accents, there's. There's different charm. I mean, this is. Let's just say it this way. This is a weird movie.

Dan (7:39)

Oh.

Mike (7:39)

I mean, it's.

Dan (7:40)

Because I thought it was going to be much more screwball than it is.

Mike (7:43)

And I was. It's. It comes off as though it's. It's one kind of movie. And then 10 minutes in, you know, you meet Paul and you're like, oh, it's a. It's a totally other kind of movie.

Dan (7:53)

Eight kinds of movies.

Mike (7:54)

And then you think it's going to be okay. And then it turns back into the other movie and it's. It's. The movie knows what it wants to be, but. But it has to do some weird things to do this extraordinary thing that's at the center of it, which is to compress time in such a way that you could believe that two people are falling in love, which is. It's in the screenplay, it's in the framing, it's in everything. But there's no genre for this film. It defies every expectation you could possibly have. But at the same time, I mean, you don't say this a lot. I think that this is a perfect movie.

Dan (8:29)

It is a perfect movie. It is perfect from beginning to end. It. It's. It. And this is like a silly exercise, but you might say, oh, what's the best movie? Or it's the 10 best at this. But if you want to see a perfect movie, like, you know what I thought of the other. I thought of when I watched this. We did our episode on Alien and we talked about how Alien is the perfect movie. Right? And there's a lot of great candidates for that category. But this is. I thought the same thing, Mike. It's so funny. I'm like, this is an absolute perfect movie. It's the same way that when Orson Welles was making Citizen Kane and he watched Stagecoach a million times to learn how to make a movie. Same thing.

Mike (9:00)

It's. It's almost. You almost mean it from an architectural or engineering perspective. It's. What could you remove that would make it work better. And there's not. There's nothing.

Dan (9:10)

There's nothing. And going good, going through it the first time is, of course, like you said, you know, you also have this thing where they actually do have real chemistry. So it's funny what you said about George Clooney and Catherine Zeta Jones. Or we think about, you know, when Julia Roberts burst on the scene with Richard Gere. Like, these two really do have chemistry. And a lot of times, we're told in movies today, they've got a lot of chemistry. Like. Like the junkets and the press surrounding the movie tell you that they have chemistry. And you're supposed to go, oh, yeah, sure they do. But the cool thing about this movie is you could show this to somebody. But we know Charles Boyer, and we've all seen Gaslight, but the idea is that you could watch this, and you actually do see it happen. Like, it's right there on the screen. And that's kind of funny what you said. Like, you can't do that in a novel and on a stage play, you'd be too far away. But you can actually sit in your living room and watch it. And you're like, wow, this actually works. Whatever that magic is, they're pulling it off.

Mike (10:03)

It's. It's just one of the moviest movies that I've. That I've ever seen. It's not an adaptation of some other text, to my knowledge. It's just something that they stumbled upon and they realized that they could build this contraption. It's an aesthetic contraption that. And they could catch love in it. And they did.

Dan (10:21)

I was gonna say this at the end, but since you brought it up, what's great about watching this is that the idea of dancing, of her dancing barefoot in a restaurant with Charles Boyer and her mink coat on, because she has her nightgown on, which is just an excuse for her to have the mink coat on, right? And having them open up the restaurant in the middle of the night so they can make all the food and she can make the salad and all those things. That whole idea is that people today, very jaded people, very young people, might watch that and go, oh, come on. And roll their eyes. Like, that's such. That. You know, that's such a thing from the quote unquote, the movies. But this is 1937. You're watching the invention of the movies, which is so cool. Now, you could say, oh, that's such a movie thing. We say it all the time on the pod we say it all the time. Well, that's such a movie thing because we've seen a million movies. But to watch the industry create this thing that we refer to as a fantasy world. When I was, I'm like, that is so cool.

Mike (11:18)

There are very few tropes in 1937.

Dan (11:25)

Welcome back. So in part two, we always talk about a key moment we found watching the film. Mike, what do you think?

Mike (11:31)

I say this on the podcast a lot, I think, but there are certain moments, there are certain great movies that will teach you how to write movies. And there is such a scene in this movie. There's a dozen such scenes. But if you really like, you want to write good scenes, this is how. This is when Paul takes her to the club and they're closing and Cesar is locking up and he says, ah, don't tell me you're closing. And Cesar says, we have closed. And so you have a character that wants something so deeply and so badly. And don't forget, we're in like an E. We're in one other way, weirder kind of movie. Like all you know so far is that the husband is evil. He's going to have the chauffeur burst in on her and he pretends don't.

Dan (12:13)

Know that Charles Boyer is a waiter there.

Mike (12:15)

Like you don't know that.

Dan (12:16)

You know. You don't know.

Mike (12:17)

You don't know anything. And it's like how this movie gets defrosted in a way, because it's just a weird, stiff kind of thing so far, but it, but it works. And Charles Boyer tells Cesar that this lady, this American lady, has come all the way from America because even in America she's heard of the great Cesar. And so you just have. You have a character that wants something, another character that says no, and you go through a slow transition of getting that character of getting them to yes, and opening up the whole cafe scene, which in itself, as we've already gone through, it's almost like its own sort of weird dream sequence or the invention of a trope. It's like Hollywood's dream of how the movie should be. And then other movies re dream it after 1937. But everything about that scene is absolutely perfect. From the way that the band goes back in to the way that it's. The way that it's framed, the way that it's staged. Everything is perfect. You could watch that scene a thousand times. And I guarantee you, if you've ever tried to write a scene that the next time you try, after you watch it a Thousand times. You will write a better scene.

Dan (13:27)

It's funny you say that because you reminded me of David Mamet's thing where he's always saying, like, every single scene in every single movie or play should be, what does the character want? Can the character get it, yes or no? And then what happens?

Mike (13:37)

And in Mamet Land, you might think that he's talking about something terse, like you could imagine. Like a cop wants something somebody doesn't want to tell him. Cop has to convince them. But it's. It's the same. It's the same elements adapted to who. To whoever's idiom that it happens to be in the time. But. But in this idiom, the same elements work absolutely perfectly, and it turns this movie into a comedy. Cesar is seduced and I, the viewer, am seduced and Gene Arthur is seduced and everybody seduced.

Dan (14:06)

Because you want that restaurant to be opened. You don't even know who Charles Boy is, but you want that restaurant open.

Mike (14:12)

We already trust him. We don't know, like. Like you said, we don't know his identity. We don't know what he's up to there. There's not dramatic irony in the sense that we don't know what he's up to. We only know that he wants to get her something to eat or sit down with her because he can't take her back to the hotel. And unlike movie today, he can't take her back to his place. And so the movie is struggling to come up with a third location. And this is the invention of the third location.

Dan (14:39)

The invention of the third location. That's exactly what it is.

Mike (14:42)

All right, so what's your moment?

Dan (14:44)

So my moment is. I want to ask you a question. Are you familiar with. This is going to sound totally far out there for our listeners, but I'm telling you, hang in with me. Hang in with me. Are you familiar with the. Now, you've read Othello. You've read Othello many times as a great student of literature, right? Shakespeare's Othello. Are you familiar with the complaint that people make about time in Othello? Have you ever heard this?

Mike (15:04)

It moves way too fast. That he goes from just being in love with her and believing her to believing that she cheated on him in 0.2 seconds and killing her, right?

Dan (15:12)

So it's supposed to be like a day and a half, right? So that's a big thing, like fast time in Othello. So A.C. bradley, the great writer, who I know you also like as much as I do, he has a great thing about fast time and slow time in Othello, and he actually takes up that challenge, and he says there's actually two timelines at work. If you want to, you can go back with a calendar and kind of do the math, like, how long does it take them to get to Cyprus and things like that. And, like, longer time goes by, like on the actual empirical calendar. But what happens is, he says the play works because of the fast time. And the idea is that the emotional intensity and the intensity of the language makes you feel like time is going much faster, and it gets you caught up, like, in a rush of events. And that's kind of what Shakespeare was going for. It's not supposed to be, you know, Hamlet, which takes place over months, and his anti disposition and how long is this going to go on for? And Lear with the raising of the armies. Like, Othello is supposed to be somebody who's caught up, like, in a tornado, and he can't get out of it. And a tornado has to move quickly, right? Iago doesn't work on him slowly over. Like Charles Boyer in Gaslight. Ha ha. He doesn't work that way, like, slowly over the course of years. It happens really fast. And so that's what I thought watching this. And the line that made me think about that is when they're dancing in the restaurant and Charles Boyer says, I want to say something to you, but a man can't say it to a woman unless he's known her for a year. And he doesn't. And she won't say it right. Now, of course, what he wants to say is I love you. I love you. Right? He wants to say it. He's known her for 20 minutes. They got into the restaurant, and he already wants to say I love you. Now, you go out to someone on your first date, right? And after 20 minutes, you tell her, I love you. That date's not going to go well. Right. You're going to go back on that app pretty soon. But in the movie, when he says that, you believe him, because the movie is engineered to get you caught up with that tornado. And that's what I kept thinking of, is that the intensity of their emotions accelerates time. So the movie seems like a big rush of events all the way until we're practically on the Titanic at the end, which I'm sure we'll talk about later. Right? Is that.

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Dan (18:13)

Before I said the movie is, you're watching people fall in love. And I thought to myself, yeah, because when you fall in love, the intensity of your emotions makes up for lost time. So you know people for 20 years, really close, but you know your spouse for six years, but you know your spouse better because of the. Does that make sense?

Mike (18:35)

It's very special relativity.

Dan (18:37)

Yeah, right. It's like, exactly it. It's like emotional relativity. And so I think the whole movie works like in fast time. And that's what's so cool about it. And he says like, well, that, well, that first half of the evening, that's like our half of a year. And he tries to like justify it on a calendar, but that's what it's like to fall in love. So welcome back. In Part three, we always talk about the title of the ending. I guess we could start with the title. Now, I happen to know from doing a little bit of reading about this, is that it's one of those movies like Jaws, where people didn't know what to call it, which makes sense when you watch the movie. And that Walter Wagner, the great producer, he's the one that came up with the title History is Made at Night. I think that's a great title. I'm not sure what it does for the movie or how it encapsulates the movie. I'm actually at a loss for it. But what do you got?

Mike (19:26)

Well, so first I was thinking of fast time or very special relativity, emotional intensity, which is. It's not just like us BSing each other on the podcast, right. It's in the screenplay where he says, okay, a night is a year. And so that's, that's the hint for, you know, for people like us. And we're listening to the dialogue. But I think History is made at night is a way of showing, like, we're almost on the Titanic at the end.

Dan (19:53)

We're on some and we're almost done. We almost get on the Hindenburg and.

Mike (19:56)

We almost get on the Hindenburg. And I think that part of the point here is that if you looked up the history of the world or you thought deeply about the history of the world, you would try to understand it as a history of events. Because the personal history of the world is hidden in the hearts of people. But the actual history of humanity, of being fruitful and multiplying is stuck. It's like an. It's. It's in two person bubbles of how people come together. And what the movie is going to do is elucidate one such relationship as a metaphor for all such relationships. Like the real history of the world is made at night when people fall in love with one another, right?

Dan (20:41)

As if people say history is made in the back rooms and not on the floor.

Mike (20:44)

History is made on the. History is made on the newspaper. History is made on the battlefield. History is made at night. History is made over a case of champagne is, I think, is the movie's premise.

Dan (20:53)

And we've talked about that a lot on here, about how like when people talk about society with a capital S, like, well, really society is. It's two people and then, and then it goes from there.

Mike (21:02)

And you could, well, you could imagine the charge, though. I mean, it's 19. It's 1937. Somebody says, why are you making this silly French comedy? Make a movie about something real. Didn't you know John Ford, you know, went to go with the Marines or something like that. Like, go make a real movie. And you could imagine the screenwriter saying, I am making a real movie. Like, imagine we win and society is preserved. What is society for? Society is for tangoing barefoot in the middle of a restaurant with champagne on the table. That's what it's for.

Dan (21:32)

It's for falling in love. That's what it's about. So let's talk about the ending, which is great when they get on the, you know, when they get on the quote unquote Titanic there. What I love about this movie is, like I said before, I expected it to be very screwball. I expected it like to be kind of like a Cary Grant. And it's not like that at all. Not to its demerit, but it's just not that. But it goes from, you know, you have the jealous husband, which is hilarious. Like, I love jealous husbands in movies who think that, like, now she'll come.

Mike (21:59)

Home, very scary, jealous husband. I mean, he's the kind of scary husband that could like reach out and just strangle her at any time.

Dan (22:04)

He's the kind of scary husband that could create a monster out of other body parts, as he does later in Frankenstein. Anyway, so we get that business and we think we know what's going on there. She's going to escape, she's going to fall someone else. Then we get Mitras Boye. But then of course, the. He kills the chauffeur and you're like, wait a minute, this movie got dark. Like not even a haha dark, it just got strange. And that goes on. And then you get the whole Titanic thing. And this movie keeps jumping from genre to genre. That's not a complaint. I think it's the strength of the movie and what makes it so interesting. But what struck me is if this movie is about what it's like to be in love with somebody, I thought to myself, damn, you know what it's like to be in love with somebody over a long period of time. It's like your genre shifting because some days you're in a romantic comedy, some days you're in a disaster movie, some days you're in a quick dialogue. It's. Everything's going happening really fast. Some days are a lot more expressionistic. And I'm like, your life is a collection of genres and things from genres. And that's kind of funny in a funny way. What this movie does in an hour.

Mike (23:07)

And a half, Love goes through periods. But those periods also have interludes. I mean, when they're on the Titanic and it looks like the movie's gonna fall apart. There's that part where Cesar, who's also on the ship, is telling the ship's chef that he is Cesar, remember? And he puts the hat on and he. And he pulls up the bottle of the dressing so he can recognize him. I mean, that doesn't belong in that scene. It seems like it doesn't belong in that scene, but boy does it. And I think, like, to. To kind of tie a bow on fast time. What's happening is if you can imagine how fast time is moving, like if a day, if an hour is a day or a day is a year or an evening is a year, when you really love somebody over a long period of time, there's almost more embedded time in that relationship than there is in the entire history of the world.

Dan (24:02)

Your relationship is X years. The history of the world is a lot longer. But it feels, it feels like it's embedded in there.

Mike (24:08)

Well, to put a bow on embedded time, if you take this movie seriously and you understand that the formula is like an hour could be an evening and an evening could be a year, then after you've known somebody that long and love them so intensely, there might be more embedded time in that one single relationship, that one single unit, than there are years in the history of the world. And I think that that's why it's like love is the only real reality. And so this is, if you will, it's a romantic comedy in a way, but it's also a dramedy in a way. And it's also a soap opera in a way. But it's also. It's the real history of the world.

Dan (24:50)

And to go back to what we said in Part one, if you had to pick your, you know, your love date as opposed to your engagement date or your wedding date, that'd be kind of funny. Like, oh, how long you've been married? Well, we've been married for 12 years, but actually, in terms of embedded time, we've been married for 272 years.

Mike (25:05)

Right, but isn't that what Paul says to her when. When he thinks that they're going to die? Right. It doesn't matter, she says.

Dan (25:11)

Everything is not important.

Mike (25:12)

What he means is the last couple of days is more than my entire life. Let's imagine he's 35 or something, right? That's how much embedded time is in just the few moments that he's. That he's known her. And so, again, I don't think that this is some extrapolation or critical conversation about the movie. This is really the center of the movie and what it's about.

Dan (25:32)

And that's what a lot of writers like. We both love Vladimir Nabokov. One of his whole big projects, as they say, as a writer, was to capture, he says, the texture of time. Like, what's it like to experience time as a human being? And it's not just the ticking of a clock. That's. That's. That's not it at all. It's like different things that happen to you affect how you understand time.

Mike (25:52)

And I don't think that these things are subjective either, although they're relative. Right. It's. There's an object, there's an objective measure of time. And you can. You can show the rules in a way that most human beings that are somewhat emotionally engaged can understand them, because time, an hour with somebody that you care about is not an hour with somebody that you don't care about. And, and that's, that's the same movement of the clock, but that's not the same amount of time.

Dan (26:22)

Right. Because the hour with somebody you don't care about is. It feels like 10 hours. And the hour with somebody you do care about is over in a second.

Mike (26:29)

But the meaning of those times, I think there's a chiasmic structure where, like, if you're with somebody that you love for an hour, it could feel like five minutes, but you might as well have been with them for five years.

Dan (26:38)

Which is why if a producer sat down with Shakespeare and said, hey, Billy, we had a little cut. We got some feedback about Othello. It seems here that the audiences think that it's going too fast. You know, it's not plausible that he could, you know, fall in love and then murder her at the end. He would just roll his eyes. And rightly so.

Mike (26:53)

Yeah. The lovely part is that when you write that well, you don't have to listen to the Groundlings.

Dan (26:57)

Thanks for listening, everybody. We hope you enjoyed our conversation about History is made at night. Mike, this was a great unsent pic. You sent this pic through the ether and I'm glad you did. So you can follow us on X@1.5min film. You can follow us. Where else?

Mike (27:12)

Mike letterboxd.

Dan (27:13)

And if you're on substack, which we urge you to do, you can follow me on pages and frames and you can follow Mike where?

Mike (27:19)

The Grumbler's Almanac.

Dan (27:20)

Hopefully you'll like them. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast. We'll see you next time.

Mike (27:24)

Thanks for listening.

Dan (27:29)

Sam.