Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

2freensel I saw this movie before reading any reviews, and I thought it was very funny. I was very surprised to see the overwhelmingly negative reviews this film received from critics.

DipitySkillful an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

Sienna-Rose Mclaughlin The movie really just wants to entertain people.

marilynhenry This is one of my all-time favorite films, partly because it stars Jean Arthur, one of my all- time favorite actresses, has Boyer's charm, and is beautifully directed and produced. An artistic achievement of its day. Poor Jean Arthur, trying to get loose from a really ruthless, jealous soon-to-be ex, is set up in her Paris hotel room by husband who has hired a gigolo to sneak in. Boyer, on the balcony, gets wind of it and spoils it and steals her away. They wind up at his place of work, a elegant Paris restaurant, and they dance, dine, laugh, and begin to fall in love. But when she returns to the hotel, it seems the hired gigolo is dead, and her husband coerces her back, threatening scandal, making her give up the divorce final. Broken-hearted, Boyer and his chef friend go to America to try to find the lady, but cannot, so decide to go to work at an upscale café where Boyer hopes she may patronize. She does and they reunite and the cruel almost-ex-husband, who is a very wealthy shipower and builder, fixes it so Boyer is about to get arrested for the Paris murder. Jean and Boyer try to return to Paris on board a new ship of her husband's and he orders the captain to go full speed into a dense fog...and, well, it is suspenseful and frightening and wonderful. It plays up the speed competitions of the great Ocean Liners, the luxuries and yet dangers of this mode of travel. I learned all I know of Ocean Liners of the time thru movies like this, Love Affair, and Now Voyager, etc, because I would never have the opportunity to sail on one myself. Movies were always a great source of learning to me! But this film is especially entertaining, even though Jean Arthur is playing a straight romantic drama this time. Boyer never disappoints. I count this as another of the late 1930's golden crop of finest all-time films...

bkoganbing Colin Clive is one obsessed man. Insanely jealous of wife Jean Arthur's imaginary lovers, he still won't let her go in divorce. Before Arthur's got a real one in head waiter Charles Boyer.History Is Made At Night is another one of Frank Borzage's romantic films with tender lovers and lots of soft focus cinematography. A common thread that seems to run in Borzage's films is forces that threaten to keep intended folks apart. This is true in Three Comrades and The Mortal Storm where it is the political situation in Germany of the twenties and thirties respectively. In History Is Made At Night, what keeps them apart is Boyer's conscience.Colin Clive as the husband is a multimillion dollar owner of transoceanic ship line who sets a trap trying to catch Arthur in a compromising position. When total stranger Boyer walks in and breaks up the trap and hits Clive's chauffeur a few times, Clive being the obsessed fellow he is, kills the chauffeur and says a burglar did it.Of course Boyer thinks he did it and when he finds out the Paris police are looking for him, he and Arthur go back to Paris from New York where they have run away to. They have the bad luck to be on one of Clive's ships where from a distance he controls the fate of all.Boyer and Arthur make a beautiful couple in love. However a biography of Jean Arthur assures us there was nothing to anything about that. This was also Colin Clive's farewell film. Sadly he died a few months after this film was out. Known primarily for being Baron Frankenstein, creator of the undead, he was so much more than that as this film aptly demonstrates.We also can't forget Leo Carrillo who plays chef Caesar who aids and abets Boyer and Arthur's romance. Carrillo was a guy who always added something to any film he was in.If tender romance and ship board excitement are your thing than History Is Made At Night is your film indeed.

hildacrane This mixture of suspense, comedy, and romance might seem unlikely to work, but it does, due to director Borzage's vision of a love that magically transcends even the most dire of obstacles. This movie is in love with love and the improbable, and in some ways is a Cinderella story almost in reverse (including the removal of a lady's slippers on two occasions). Arthur and Boyer are lovely together. Some of their scenes, luminously lit and heightened by Alfred Newman's lyrical score, are heartbreaking: their beautiful voices are almost like cellos. (Newman wrote a number of such tender and yearning scores in the thirties, including those for "Stella Dallas" and "These Three.") There's also an interesting paralleling of the love/passion that Arthur's husband has for her and that Boyer's friend has for him, although one is destructive and the other nurturing. Years ago there was a local radio station in San Francisco that played short clips from films and invited listeners to identify the film and the actors and thereby win a prize. At that time I had never seen "History," but knew of it and its two stars, and was therefore able, on hearing the distinctive voices of Arthur and Boyer, to identify the film and be awarded a free fancy haircut.

theowinthrop I saw this for the first time in 1986 when it was on television. It's romance, and the superb acting of Clive, Boyer, and Arthur (abetted by Carillo and Lebedev), and the speed of events in it captivated me. And then came that "Titanic" - style ending, when the ship is nearly sunk on an iceberg was wonderful. The film just swept me into it. I rarely have found an undiscovered film that did that to me.Colin Clive died prematurely of pneumonia in 1937, only a few months after this film was made. Remembered today for Victor Frankenstein in two films, he was more than simply the man who shouted "IT'S ALIVE!!". The two films that show his real acting ability that are still shown are his performances in this film and CHRISTOPHER STRONG (as the romantic lead opposite the young Kate Hepburn). JOURNEY'S END would be a welcome addition to this list, but I have never even seen it listed on cable (and I wonder if the film still exists). But his insanely jealous and vicious Bruce Vail must stand for all of his acting abilities until JOURNEY'S END reappears. Fortunately it is sufficient. Clive never is shown in a favorable manner in the movie. He is constantly watching Arthur's every move, and he constantly torments her. But this is how he treats everyone in his path. Ivan Lebedev was supposed to be a willing tool for a scheme to blackmail Arthur into returning to Clive. Lebedev is knocked out by Boyer, and looks dead when Boyer leaves with Arthur. Clive comes onto the scene, and sees that Lebedev is more valuable as a corpse than as a living servant - he kills him to have a weapon against Arthur and Boyer. Similarly, he is willing to sink his flagship on it's maiden voyage, killing hundreds of innocent people, to kill Arthur and Boyer. His suicide at the film's end really does not ameliorate his actions - in fact one wonders if he kills himself out of shame or because he believes his wife is dead (like a typical domestic violence wife killer). At the same time, had he not killed himself, Clive knew what he would have faced - he had screamed an order at the Captain of the ship by radio to continue sailing at top speed into the icepack, despite the Captain's misgivings. This was heard by his Board of Directors. As they sit glued to the radio, hearing the probable news of the ship's sinking, they keep glaring at Clive. Had the boat sunk, and he not committed suicide, they would have testified against him at his trial for mass murder.He would have been probably hanged.The name of his character is Bruce Vail, and one wonders why this shipping owner is named "Bruce". His ordering of his largest flagship, on it's maiden voyage, to sail at top speed into waters full of ice, may be based on another Bruce, who also died in 1937. That was J. Bruce Ismay (more properly "Joseph Bruce Ismay"), the former Chairman of the White Star Line, who was a survivor of the sinking, in 1912, of R.M.S. Titanic. Ismay ordered Captain Smith to sail the new ship at top speed to try to capture the Atlantic Blue Riband (a momentary victory had it been successful - the Titanic was not built for speed, like her Cunard rivals Lusitania and Mauritania). He may have kept some of the ice messages Smith was to get from the Captain (most Titanic experts don't believe this, but the public did). But worst of all, unlike Astor, Strauss, Guggenheim, Widener, Butt, Millett, Stead, and the other celebrities on the ship, Ismay entered a lifeboat, and tried to keep his obvious survival from becoming glaringly public. It did not work, and he was (despite generous attempts at whitewashing him by Lord Mersey) pilloried by the public as a coward. He was forced out of all his business directorships, and the chairmanship of the shipping line his father founded. And he lived in exile at an estate at Connemara in Ireland. It really did not help. Children would follow him even there yelling "Coward, coward!" He was destroyed by the disaster that destroyed his flagship.I believe that the shadow of Mr. Ismay is used to coat the character of Mr. Vail, possibly unfairly but probably based on the popular view of Ismay. Bruce Ismay died of diabetics in 1937. Unlike Bruce Vail he did not have to blow his brains out.