📽️ I had fun watching the pre-Code “This is the Night,” dir. Frank Tuttle (Paramount, 1932). Its primary purpose was to be a bit racy and full of laughs. (Thelma Todd’s character loses her dress more than once, catching it in a car door, in a cabinet drawer, and on a fence…) The story begins in Paris, before moving to Venice. It is free of fascism, despite the Italian setting, but the incorruptible protagonist played by Lili Damita is clearly hungry in an early scene, a Depression-related circumstance to which the wealthy men appear oblivious. The comedy takes enough twists and turns that it’s not clear who will end up with who for much of the time.

Two-page color advertisement featuring ad copy and stylish sketches of a couple in the dark, cupid taking aim at a woman, an a woman who has lost her dress next to a man.

Advertisement from The Film Daily (January–June 1932).