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Midnight (Paramount). For the past year and a half, Paramount has been struggling with all the $120,000,000 resources at its command to produce another comedy as good as True Confession. Midnight does it. The story—about a chorus girl who lands in Paris on a rainy night with no assets but a low-cut evening dress —is not as fresh as a mountain daisy. But with Claudette Colbert as the chorus girl, Don Ameche as the taxi-driver who meets her at the station, Francis Lederer as the gigolo who falls in love with her and John Barrymore as the millionaire who finances her, it looks as bright and fetching as an artful nosegay. Good sequence: Barrymore and Colbert eyeing each other at a musicale which she has crashed by palming off a pawn ticket as a card of admission.
Dodge City (Warner Bros.). This picture had last week the most expensive cinema première on record. To the little Kansas town whose history it purports to record, Warners transported trainloads of notables. One contingent of 175 stars, pressagents and columnists was brought from Hollywood. Another of 14 newspapermen was imported from Manhattan. Dodge City store fronts were dressed up for the event in old Western style. Its somewhat sheepish residents, at the request of Warner Bros.' publicity staff, grew beards, carried hoss-pistols, danced in the streets for 60,000 visitors.
Dodge City's première was the most notable thing about it. The picture itself is a good, noisy Technicolor, flag-waving Western, enlivened by Ann Sheridan, Olivia de Havilland, Errol Flynn and a knock-down drag-out saloon fight. So continual is the random gunfire that cinemaddicts might guess that the place took its name from the necessary behavior of the inhabitants.