With a script by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, Midnight is a screwball masterpiece, full of callous observations of the rich at play and delightful romantic charades. Claudette Colbert lands penniless in Paris where she hitches her star to John Barrymore, a charming middle-aged rogue, and his philandering wife Mary Astor. James Harvey writes in Romantic Comedy: "Claudette Colbert...always levels with us. It isn't that she isn't magical, but rather that she always shows us what she has up her sleeve-and she's still dazzling...She is the most amoral of all the great screwball heroines. It's a function of her clarity: devastating to the matters-of-the-human-heart style, and very hard, too, on the people who talk about peace of mind or who disapprove of getting something for nothing...Colbert does for golddigging what Lombard does for craziness: she makes it seem like something liberating...(In Midnight) she is a party crasher, first by accident, then by design. It's not only her central action in the movie; it's her nature. To be classy without ever quite believing in it...like her line when she first enters the movie: 'Well, so this, as they say, is Paris, huh?' She's come for the enchantment...but on her own terms...The Colbert heroine may dream of and pursue the world of wealth and luxury-but...she is outside that world, happily and irredeemably. The fun of the party is crashing it-not belonging at it."