I’ve seen Midnight Run all the way through only three or four times. But—way back when—I had a roommate who subscribed to HBO, and, for the month or so that it was showing, I watched it from whatever point I stumbled up on it—ten minutes here, an hour there… in terms of accumulated minutes, I’ve sat in front of that film more than any other except, perhaps, The Matrix.
I couldn’t get enough of it.
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I’ve always liked comedies (who doesn’t?), and for a long time had a string of favorites. The first comedy I remember falling in love with was What’s Up, Doc—partly, I’m sure, because of my pre-teen crush on Barbra Streisand’s Judy Maxwell.
That stayed a favorite until The Jerk came along (“I was born a poor black child…”); then came Stripes (“That’s the fact, Jack!”), and then Steve Martin bounded back with All of Me (“Our body? It’s my body!”)
But then, in that Burbank townhouse living room, Midnight Run took the top slot, and hasn’t let go for three decades.
I didn’t know a lot about De Niro, but I knew he was a serious actor. Some of that was from reputation—films I hadn’t seen yet, like Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, and Raging Bull—as well as from experience—films I had seen, like The Untouchables and the creepy Angel Heart. So I was surprised to see him in a comedy—and even more surprised to see how funny he was as the bounty hunter, Jack Walsh. (I wasn’t alone in that surprise: in a retrospective, Rolling Stone critic Alan Sepinwall wrote that the film came out at “a time when few believed he could be the star of a mainstream comedy.”)
I knew even less about Charles Grodin. I’d seen few of his movies (that’s still true), yet I felt like I recognized him; perhaps I’d seen him in one of the TV shows he’d been on, or perhaps he just seems recognizable. Either way, he was perfect as “The “Duke,” the neurotic accountant who’d embezzled funds from a mob boss. Indeed, at a film festival a few years back, De Niro told an audience, “[Grodin’s] character was irritating and Chuck knew how to do that, to work that.”
Roger Ebert nailed what I love about Midnight Run: The film has “amusing undertones while still working seriously on the surface.” There may be madcap antics from time to time, and even a few predictable running gags with their inevitable payoffs (“Look out, Marvin!” “If you think I’m falling for that shit again, you’re crazy!”). But, for the most part, everyone plays their comedic role seriously. Even the mob boss’s dumb muscle play it straight—earnest tough guys, eager to please, but not smart enough for the situation they find themselves in.
[By the way, do I need to announce that spoilers are coming for an over 30-year-old movie? Just in case: spoilers ahead…]
That serious surface allows the film to depict a huge range of emotion. On the one end of the spectrum, there’s the laugh-out-loud arguments between Walsh and the Duke (some of which remind me of arguments with my teenager):
The Duke: Jack, let’s be fair about this. You lied to me first. At the river—
Jack Walsh: What?
The Duke: At the river!
Jack Walsh: Oh, get the—
The Duke: At the river!
Jack Walsh: You lied to me first. You got some fuckin’ nerve.
The Duke: No, no, you lied to me first.
Jack Walsh: You lied to me first.
The Duke: (Beat.) Yes! Yes. I lied to you first, but you had no knowledge I was lying about my fear of flying at the river, when you lied to me. So as far as you knew, you lied to me first!
Jack Walsh: I can’t even argue. I don’t even know what the fuck you’re talking about.
The Duke: You’re saying you lied to me first, as far as you knew.
On the other end of the emotional spectrum, there’s the deep sadness of the long, awkward silence, with emotion clearly roiling beneath a restrained surface—De Niro’s forte—when Walsh comes face to face with his daughter after not having seen her for nine years. It’s as moving a scene as any I’ve seen, in any genre.
Of course, lots of comedies have emotional range. Romantic comedies are often structured around this range, raising emotional stakes through moments of pathos—similar, perhaps, to the way thrillers may use comic relief to heighten suspense. So what is it about Midnight Run that has kept it at the top of my list for some thirty years?
What sets Midnight Run apart, for me: the way it places a fundamentally noir hero into a comic structure.
It’s a tricky combination. Noir thrives on ambiguity; if the hero wins (and that is by no means guaranteed), the victory is often bitter or Pyrrhic. But—aside from dark or black comedy, which Midnight Run is emphatically not—comedy most often has an unambiguously happy ending. The two structures don’t obviously mix.
Like many good noir heros (Marlowe, Spade, et al.), Jack Walsh is sardonic, cynical, and isolated, but with a strict, if somewhat ambiguous, personal code. For one thing, he’s not for sale:
The Duke: How much exactly are you getting for me?
Jack Walsh: I don’t think that’s any of your concern, but I’ll tell you, just to tell you. A hundred thousand.
The Duke: A hundred thousand. Does that mean you’d take a hundred thousand to let me go?
Jack Walsh: Not by a long shot.
The Duke: Two hundred thousand?
Jack Walsh: I never took a payoff in my life, and I’m not going to start with someone like you.
These aren’t empty words, either. Jack is an outsider—working as a bounty hunter, and “unpopular with the Chicago Police Department,” where he used to work—precisely because he refused to “go on the payroll” of a major drug dealer. This refusal cost him his job, his reputation, and his family.
Further, The Duke’s bounty represents much more than just a plump payday for Jack. It represents freedom: he plans to use the money to open a coffee shop, escaping the hard life of the bounty hunter. A hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand? That would change his life forever. But he won’t be bought; he will only take the money if he earns it without feeling like he has compromised his code.
Much of the movie involves Jack wrestling with the contradictions that inevitably arise from his strict code—self-reliance, professional pride, dispassionate commitment, law and order, etc. But the central contradiction in the film, and the focus of Jack’s arc, is embodied in The Duke, who embezzled money (i.e., broke the law) from a mobster:
Jack Walsh: If you’d left Johnny Serrano alone, this wouldn’t be happening.
The Duke: When I found out I was managing accounts that were fronts for Serrano, I couldn’t just sit back and do nothing.
Jack Walsh: Yeah, but John, you still took what didn’t belong to you.
The Duke: How can you be on the side of a mobster?
Jack Walsh: I’m not on the side of a mobster.
The Duke: You’re on his side if you’re not on my side.
Jack Walsh: I’m not on anybody’s side. I’ve got nothing to do with it.
The Duke: You’ve got everything to do with this. You’re taking me to jail. You know I’ll be killed.
Jack Walsh: Well, that’s not my problem.
“I’m not on anybody’s side”; “that’s not my problem.” It’s clear that Jack is on the defensive, and The Duke is winning this argument. Jack’s aloof cynicism can only take him so far.
And this is why I love the ending. Jack gets The Duke to the airport in Los Angeles in time to collect the bounty. And he could have collected that bounty with a relatively clear conscience, at this point: the mobster Serrano is already under arrest, and the evidence that will sink him is already in the hands of the FBI, so the danger to The Duke has been seriously reduced. Jack could hand The Duke over to the bail bondsman, collect his $100,000, and start his new life.
But he doesn’t. Instead, he takes the handcuffs off The Duke, in one of the classic bromance scenes in film:
Jack Walsh: would have been a nice coffee shop.
The Duke: Oh, Jeez. Oh… I don’t get it.
Jack Walsh: I did what I wanted to do, John. I got you to LA before midnight, so…
The Duke: I don’t know what to say.
Jack Walsh: Don’t say anything. Knowing you, you’d make me want to put those [handcuffs] back on you.
The Duke: Thanks.
Jack Walsh: No, John, thank you.
I don’t think we can take Jack’s words at face value here. Certainly, his personal code includes professional pride, and meeting the deadline aligns with that. We also know that this professional pride made him angry at the bail bondsman for hiring a second bounty hunter; earlier, Jack had said that he was “half thinking not to turn [The Duke] in, just to watch Eddie go down the fucking toilet.”
But that “No, John, thank you,” suggests something deeper—perhaps a renewed clarity around what justice really means.
A noir thriller would have had Jack walk out the door, empty-handed but with code more or less intact. But Midnight Run is a comedy, and comedies have happy endings. So Jack walks off into the night sporting a money belt with three times the bounty he’d foregone (“It’s not a payoff; it’s a gift. You already let me go”). Satisfying, in the way only comedies can be satisfying.
I’ve seen a lot of great comedies over the past decades; some of them even had De Niro in them (though they tend just to parody his persona, which I find disappointing). But none has made me want to say that I have a new favorite comedy. Midnight Run is still at the top of the heap.
This is part of a series, echoing the “10 Day Movie Challenge” that I got sucked into on Facebook:
Every day I must select an image from a film that has impacted me in some way, present it without a single explanation and nominate somebody to take the challenge by starting his/her own post and selecting someone to continue.
Without a single explanation? Nice try.
Previous posts:
- #day1 – For your eyes only
- #day2 – Wait until dark
- #day3 – Blade runner
- #day4 – Flashdance
- #day5 – Star wars
- #day6 – The aristocats
- #day7 – Life of Brian
- #day8 – Ghost in the shell