Another of the movies that's been in the FXM rotation lately and that I haven't blogged about before is Everything Happens at Night. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 4:40 AM, so I recently watched it to post about here.
Robert Cummings plays Ken Morgan, Paris correspondent for a New York paper. He's about to escape a club where his boss is, but his boss has urgent news for him. Remember the story about the peace advocate Dr. Norden and how he was assassinated by the Nazis last year? Well, somebody's been sending unsigned letters that sound suspiciously like the same exact style Norden would use, meaning Norden might still be alive and moving from one location to another to stay one step ahead of the Nazis. The lastest information implies that this person, if it is Norden, is in a small village in Switzerland. Morgan is to go there and find out whether that really is Norden.
Now, you'd think this would really be putting Norden at risk if it is him, but as in a movie like Five Star Final, you've got editors and reporters who don't care about the damage they do to their subjects. So Morgan heads off to San Palo and gets the last available hotel room, this being a a small town during ski season. And just after Morgan arrives, who should show up but Geoffrey Thompson (Ray Milland), claiming to be a British botanist but obviously a journalist also on the trail of Norden to get the story.
Eventually they meet Louise (Sonja Henie), a lovely young woman who is playing nursemaid to a guy in town to get the mountain air for his health. Both journalists presume that this is Norden, but Louise isn't about to tell. Still, the obvious thing to do is to gain her confidence, although both journalists fall in love with her along the way, complicating matters. But since Morgan is the one who gets the ice skating fantasy sequence, it's a good guess that he's the one who's going to wind up with Louise in the last reel.
You can probably guess that Louise is in fact taking care of Norden, but the movie takes a really dark turn after that. Morgan files the story and Thompson tricks the telegraphist to send it to Thompson's editor in London; when the story breaks the Nazis now know precisely where Norden is. The chagrined journalists try to spirit Norden out of France, but the Nazis show up for a little covert action. How they lost track of him and didn't already have a bunch of spies in town, I'll never know.
Generally, you know what to expect when you see that Sonja Henie is the star of a movie. Surprisingly, however, Everything Happens at Night is much darker than the other of her movies I've seen. Henie wasn't much of a serious actress, but she's nice to look at and passable as a romantic lead. But she only gets the one ice skating number here, and not a finale. All along the way, Everything Happens at Night feels like a movie that can't decide what exactly what it wants to be, and never really gets the two sides together in a satisfying way.
Yet, because of this failure, Everything Happens at Night might still be more interesting than the Henie movies that are a higher overall quality or have the better ice skating numbers. The movie did get a DVD release courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme, in case you're unable to catch it on FXM.
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