Mantrap  /  Midnight Madness

Directed by F. Harmon Weight 

“Its very title reeks of strange people, mystery, suspense!” reads the advance publicity for this silent melodrama, loosely inspired by The Taming of the Shrew and directed by F. Harmon Weight. Secretary Norma Forbes (Jacqueline Logan) accepts the marriage proposal of Michael Bream (Clive Brook), wealthy diamond miner. Norma reveals to her boss and actual love interest (Walter McGrail) that she’s only marrying for the money. Having eavesdropped through a conveniently open door, Michael, despite his genuine affections, schemes to teach his gold-digging fiancée a lesson. From New York, the newlyweds sail second class to South Africa, where Michael leads his wife to believe that he is down-and-out. They settle in a bleak shack near a mine, where Norma discovers the hardships of life in the African jungle. She sends a cable to her former employer, divulging her whereabouts. A fight ensues, which leaves Michael bound up and prey to a lion. At last realizing her affection for her husband, Mrs. Bream returns with a shotgun – setting up a suspenseful climax that can only result in no lady or no lion.

In 1925, Cecil B. DeMille, by then one of Hollywood’s most bankable film directors, broke off with Paramount and the confines of the studio system to set up his independent DeMille Picture Corp. While the company’s biggest hit was the highly successful 1927 biblical epic The King of Kings, it mostly produced smaller melodramas, often involving the messy tangles of romance and capricious lovers. Ultimately, however, DeMille’s entrepreneurial efforts were met with a lack of success. In 1928 he returned to the studio system and signed with MGM, later rejoining Paramount, where many of his greatest successes were eventually produced.

Midnight Madness is mostly noteworthy as a remnant of this transitional period of DeMille’s career, and those of others. Little remains of the directing career of F. Harmon Weight who although noted in contemporaneous press reports as showing exceptional promise, did not survive Hollywood’s conversion to sound. The stardom of leading lady Jacqueline Logan (who achieved her biggest success as Mary Magdalene in The King of Kings) likewise waned with the onset of talking pictures. Meanwhile, Paramount star Clive Brook, often cast as the reserved Englishman, successfully bridged the sound gap and continued his prolific career in Hollywood and later in his native Britain.

Jennifer Rhee

DeMille Pictures Corp./ Pathé Exchange, Inc. Producer: Hector Turnbull. Screenwriter: Richard N. Lee. Based on the play "The Lion Trap, a Comedy in Four Acts” by Daniel Nathan Rubin. Cinematographer: David Abel. Editor: Harold McLernon. With: Jacqueline Logan, Clive Brook, Walter McGrail, James Bradbury, Oscar Smith.

35mm, b/w and tinted, approx. 65 min.

Preserved by Sony Pictures Entertainment and UCLA Film & Television Archive from a 35mm nitrate print. Laboratory services by Film Technology Company, Inc. Additional laboratory services by The Stanford Theatre Film Laboratory.

This film was preserved through a partnership of the New Zealand Film Archive, the American archival community, and the National Film Preservation Foundation, as part of a project supported by Save America’s Treasures, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Park Service, Department of the Interior.