In recent years scholars have directed their attentions to Frances Marion’s occupations as screenwriter and director, yet her role as producer remains surprisingly overlooked. Frances Marion Productions was formed by Producers Distributing Corporation in February 1925, under the wing of their second production unit, Metropolitan Pictures, with the initial feature announced in March that year as Ten to Midnight, an adaptation of Balzac’s Père Goriot. Filming was postponed, and Simon the Jester (directed by George Melford) became her first released production in November, prompting Bill Reilly in Moving Picture World (7 November 1925) to urge cinema owners to capitalize on her name recognition: “Frances Marion is a sales instrument for the exhibitor.” For reasons that currently remain unclear, the venture was short-lived, and in January 1926, while filming was on-going with Paris at Midnight, the new title for the Balzac adaptation, she moved to Samuel Goldwyn Productions, permanently ending her career as producer.
Marion was unafraid of tackling well-known authors, and presumably the dramatic possibilities within Père Goriot, one of Balzac’s undisputed masterpieces, drew her to the material. She was not, however, a screenwriter to hone closely to her source material, as she herself admitted in a March 1926 Photoplay article, “Why Do They Change the Stories on the Screen?,” and indeed Paris at Midnight takes amusingly cavalier liberties with the novel. Most notable of these is the figure of Vautrin, the alias of master criminal Jacques Collin and one of Balzac’s most richly realized characters. As played by Lionel Barrymore, the Vautrin of Paris at Midnight is very much the man he claims to be, rather than the one he truly is in the novel: he may have an inglorious past, but as he states, “I am like Don Quixote, I have a fancy for defending the weak against the strong.” It’s unlikely Marion misunderstood Balzac’s multi-layered delineation of this rivetingly duplicitous figure, but rather that she was adapting the master for “that vast audience of ours, an American audience whose inspiration is founded on the optimism of hope.”
While the script veers off course with Vautrin, elsewhere it’s true to the spirit of Balzac on both micro and macro levels. Jetta Goudal, as the impossibly beautiful Baroness Delphine de Nucingen, was an inspired piece of casting, resembling a borzoi in her fine-boned elegance. She’s a woman who demands to be worshipped, which is exactly how Balzac created her: mercurial and solipsistic, she blithely leads naïve young Eugène de Rastignac (Edmund Burns) into financial ruin just as she and her sister Anastasie (Jocelyn Lee) drive their father Papa Goriot (Emile Chautard, in his American screen acting debut) into dire poverty. Equally close to Balzac’s imagination are Madame Vauquer (Mathilde Comont, best remembered as the rotund Persian prince in The Thief of Bagdad) and the denizens of her boarding house, a motley assortment of physical shapes and characters all with a weakness for money.
Direction was assigned to E. Mason Hopper, a prolific filmmaker with a wide-ranging background who’d worked with Marion on The Love Piker (1923). While the surviving French print has a number of truncated scenes that hamper a full appreciation of the film, several extant sequences show off Hopper’s visual flair, most notably two scenes with Vautrin putting on a disguise before a mirror, and the lavish Bal des Quat’z’Arts, of which sadly only a fraction remains. What does exist, together with a number of enticing stills, shows a fancy-dress ball of grandiose proportions, purportedly featuring 200 dancers (including future fan-dancer extraordinaire Sally Rand) choreographed by Marion Morgan, a highly respected choreographer who was also Dorothy Arzner’s companion (Ramon Novarro, before stardom, was part of her company). Photographs reveal several risqué numbers with athletic performers in skimpy garments cavorting among elaborately costumed guests – no costume designer is credited, although the notoriously persnickety Goudal is said to have created her own clothes. What it all had to do with Balzac is open to question, but it certainly made for grand spectacle and was widely commented on in the press.
No doubt cognizant of the license with which Marion adapted one of France’s most celebrated novels, the French distributor Erka-Prodisco titled the film simply Un Père, changing a number of character names, including Goriot himself, renamed Luneau. No one had any doubt of the source material however, and French critics were less kind than their American colleagues. Albert Bonneau, in Cinémagazine (24 December 1926), spoke for many when he bewailed that “Out of modesty the title was changed and Balzac’s name was not mentioned, but the characters in the novel are so well known that we find them all, with their quirks and passions, exaggerated to the level of caricature.” Despite such criticism, Paris at Midnight remains an enjoyable film, far more entertaining than Jacques de Baroncelli’s plodding Le Père Goriot (1921); Biograph’s 1915 Père Goriot, directed by Travers Vale, appears not to have survived.

Jay Weissberg