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What am I doing standing here kissing you?
The demise of FilmStruck made the national news this morning. My mother heard it discussed on the radio; she texted to let me know about the "praise and regret." I am experiencing whatever you call grief when it's more than half grievance, because there was no good reason to shut the service down. I've signed up for the Criterion Channel, of course, but I would have preferred WarnerMedia to get its head out of its portfolio and keep its original, niche, incalculable service alive. In any case, tonight when I looked at the TCM buffer for the first time all week, I saw one film which had been on my watchlist at FilmStruck and which I had never gotten around to, being distracted by early Ernst Lubitsch and wartime Ealing and a whole lot of film noir I never reviewed. I watched it, obviously. I know a sendoff when I see one.
Tim Whelan's The Divorce of Lady X (1938) is a British screwball comedy filmed in Technicolor and starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. Any of these factors would make it weird enough to be worthy of note; it's like lagniappe that it's actually good. London's the setting, on a night so acridly fog-bound that a traveler returning from abroad is forced to ditch his cab and check into the nearest hotel where the attendees of a fancy dress ball for charity are just receiving the same bad news about their travel plans. Not that you could convince Olivier's Logan that it's any of his concern. A brisk and glossy young barrister, he's as beautiful as a blackbird and much more insufferable, refusing the hotel manager's request to open the outer room of his newly nabbed suite to his stranded fellow guests with eloquent relish: "I've been traveling for two days, I've had an extremely filthy crossing, my train was two hours late at Victoria Station . . . What I need really very badly is a good night's sleep, and I shall have that though every lady in London thinks me a cad, a brute, and a beast. Good night!" His specialty in court is divorces, but that's really no excuse for his reaction to the gate-crashing of Oberon's Leslie, as he deduces with the patronizing assurance of those whom the comedy gods are about to destroy that his unwelcome visitor must be an unfaithful wife caught out on an adventure, così fan tutte. "I've met too many women like you before—conceited, sure of yourself, and sure of your power over men!" Of course he's attracted to her, dark-haired, petite, and cheerfully take-charge in the blue-and-white crinoline of the Second Empire; of course it just makes him more judgmental and it's worse the next morning when the particulars of his latest client's petition—tallying so neatly with his topsy-turvy night at the Royal Parks Hotel—convince him that he's just become the co-respondent in his next case. Eager to disclaim male culpability, he delivers himself of a courtroom denunciation of the frailties of woman that would well become an MRA ("Modern woman has disowned womanhood, but refuses man's obligations. She demands freedom, but won't accept responsibility. She insists upon time to develop her personality and she spends it in cogitating on which part of her body to paint next. By independence, she means idleness. By equality, she means carrying on like Catherine the Great!") and it is just his luck that his audience includes the very single, very incensed Leslie. Last night she listened to his blithering chauvinism with a grave, wide-eyed sincerity before conning him out of first his pajamas and then his bed; now she sets her sights on his heart. He hasn't got a chance. She's a screwball heroine. She's nobody's fool, and the world is hers.
I don't know why Olivier didn't do more comedy. Removed from a leading man's protected status of serious business, his improbable good looks are revealed as an invitation to all the subversion the screenwriters can throw his way—anything that flawless is asking to get messed up. His Shakespearean voice flies up half an octave, cracks in helpless temper or despairing adoration; he loses fights with his own assumptions and inanimate objects; he tries to pretend he isn't doing nervous things with his hands. He's enough of a flustered romantic under his slim stuffed shirt that we understand what Leslie might see in him beyond the satisfaction of the game, but we won't be sorry to see him taken down a few pegs, or even a few more after that. For her part, Oberon is perfectly in key with the sexiness and the recklessness of her genre. Her Leslie is a delicate trickster with no time for disapproval: when Logan shakes a reproving finger at her, she catches it. "You do like talking about yourself, don't you?" She understands there are risks to playing with affections, especially when some of them are her own. But he's so crashingly confident, how can she resist playing up to his smitten anxieties about the oft-married and equally oft-divorced Lady Mere, flaunting her supposedly scandalous reputation while he ties himself in knots about his own—nobody but nobody is ever going to believe that they passed a night as innocent as any alibi he's ever demolished in court. "Four marriages in five years and two—episodes," he groans. "You don't seem to appreciate my frankness," she sighs. I note that she's a Leslie before it was a popular female name; his first name is the embarrassing Everard, which she makes a point of signing across his mirror in rose-pink lipstick before she leaves. More than once, the camera catches him holding her discarded fancy dress against himself as if trying to slip inside the truth of "Lady X," the serial gold digger all his professional evidence adds up to or the sweetly confounding stranger of the Royal Parks Hotel. It's not all parody, even when the screenplay by Lajos Biró, Ian Dalrymple, and Arthur Wimperis sets its most romantically melodramatic conversation to the overheated zither of a Russian nightclub. Screwball stands or falls by fast talk and chemistry and The Divorce of Lady X has both:
"But then I didn't like you in your office. I much preferred you in your bedroom."
"Our bedroom."
"My bedroom."
"Surely that's the proper place to judge your future husband?"
It has a well-assembled supporting cast, too, most notably Morton Selten as Leslie's cynical but kindly grandfather, J.H. Roberts as Logan's just plain cynical colleague, and above all Ralph Richardson as the marriage-worried Lord Mere, who drifts around with an umbrella looking vaguely bemused by everything until he gets suspicious enough to go on a vaguely bemused drunk. And the Technicolor photography by Harry Stradling is in fact luscious: the opening credits scroll like the neon signs of Piccadilly Circus. The sets and the costumes have a confectionary sweetness, all mint-cream and lavender and ribbon-blue and gold. The relevant pajamas are a heinously cherry-ish candy-stripe; they make Oberon look like a boiled sweet and their effect on Olivier can only be anticipated. (It's bad.) Even a borrowed pair of horn-rims pops red as licorice. Occasionally I feel Oberon has been too palely made up, but I suspect there's something about race at work there. Miklós Rósza is responsible for the score including the overheated zither and I approve. If it's not as madcap as Bringing Up Baby (1938) or as close to the bone as The Lady Eve (1941), both of which feel like the movie's closest relatives in terms of subject-object reversals and garden paths, Alexander Korda can still be proud of his decision to produce it in the wake of the unfinished 1937 I, Claudius. I'd love to be able to compare it with its quota quickie original Counsel's Opinion (1933), but since all that seems to survive of the older film is its entry in the BFI 75 Most Wanted, I'll just have to cross fingers for broom closets in Argentina.
I still understand why I've never seen it listed among the great screwball comedies. The leads never lose their chemistry, but the last third of the film feels increasingly diffuse and overstuffed, as though the screenwriters have mistaken the piling-on of plot twists for the fun of letting them play out. I am generally in favor of solidarity between female characters, but the much-discussed Lady Mere (Binnie Barnes) works infinitely better as a Maguffin than she does as a person onscreen; the action feels sidetracked every time it dives out of the points of view of its protagonists and I really don't know the purpose of the third-act fox chase unless someone thought it would show up nicely in color. The picture slows itself down just as it should be winding up for a sparkling whiplash and it's not fatal, but it does the story no favors in a genre so dependent on precision timing and unimpeachable absurdity. It pulls itself together in time for the ending, however, which would be only a comeuppance if not for the telltale shy flicker of happiness across Logan's face as Leslie demurely does his proposing for him—he may be seasick, professionally shaky, and feel at the moment like an absolute fool, but he's loved by a woman who turned him upside down and shook him like a dicebox and in the screwball universe there's no greater proof of devotion. Now I'm sorry they were never paired with a better script that wasn't Wuthering Heights (1939). This action brought to you by my proper backers at Patreon.
Tim Whelan's The Divorce of Lady X (1938) is a British screwball comedy filmed in Technicolor and starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. Any of these factors would make it weird enough to be worthy of note; it's like lagniappe that it's actually good. London's the setting, on a night so acridly fog-bound that a traveler returning from abroad is forced to ditch his cab and check into the nearest hotel where the attendees of a fancy dress ball for charity are just receiving the same bad news about their travel plans. Not that you could convince Olivier's Logan that it's any of his concern. A brisk and glossy young barrister, he's as beautiful as a blackbird and much more insufferable, refusing the hotel manager's request to open the outer room of his newly nabbed suite to his stranded fellow guests with eloquent relish: "I've been traveling for two days, I've had an extremely filthy crossing, my train was two hours late at Victoria Station . . . What I need really very badly is a good night's sleep, and I shall have that though every lady in London thinks me a cad, a brute, and a beast. Good night!" His specialty in court is divorces, but that's really no excuse for his reaction to the gate-crashing of Oberon's Leslie, as he deduces with the patronizing assurance of those whom the comedy gods are about to destroy that his unwelcome visitor must be an unfaithful wife caught out on an adventure, così fan tutte. "I've met too many women like you before—conceited, sure of yourself, and sure of your power over men!" Of course he's attracted to her, dark-haired, petite, and cheerfully take-charge in the blue-and-white crinoline of the Second Empire; of course it just makes him more judgmental and it's worse the next morning when the particulars of his latest client's petition—tallying so neatly with his topsy-turvy night at the Royal Parks Hotel—convince him that he's just become the co-respondent in his next case. Eager to disclaim male culpability, he delivers himself of a courtroom denunciation of the frailties of woman that would well become an MRA ("Modern woman has disowned womanhood, but refuses man's obligations. She demands freedom, but won't accept responsibility. She insists upon time to develop her personality and she spends it in cogitating on which part of her body to paint next. By independence, she means idleness. By equality, she means carrying on like Catherine the Great!") and it is just his luck that his audience includes the very single, very incensed Leslie. Last night she listened to his blithering chauvinism with a grave, wide-eyed sincerity before conning him out of first his pajamas and then his bed; now she sets her sights on his heart. He hasn't got a chance. She's a screwball heroine. She's nobody's fool, and the world is hers.
I don't know why Olivier didn't do more comedy. Removed from a leading man's protected status of serious business, his improbable good looks are revealed as an invitation to all the subversion the screenwriters can throw his way—anything that flawless is asking to get messed up. His Shakespearean voice flies up half an octave, cracks in helpless temper or despairing adoration; he loses fights with his own assumptions and inanimate objects; he tries to pretend he isn't doing nervous things with his hands. He's enough of a flustered romantic under his slim stuffed shirt that we understand what Leslie might see in him beyond the satisfaction of the game, but we won't be sorry to see him taken down a few pegs, or even a few more after that. For her part, Oberon is perfectly in key with the sexiness and the recklessness of her genre. Her Leslie is a delicate trickster with no time for disapproval: when Logan shakes a reproving finger at her, she catches it. "You do like talking about yourself, don't you?" She understands there are risks to playing with affections, especially when some of them are her own. But he's so crashingly confident, how can she resist playing up to his smitten anxieties about the oft-married and equally oft-divorced Lady Mere, flaunting her supposedly scandalous reputation while he ties himself in knots about his own—nobody but nobody is ever going to believe that they passed a night as innocent as any alibi he's ever demolished in court. "Four marriages in five years and two—episodes," he groans. "You don't seem to appreciate my frankness," she sighs. I note that she's a Leslie before it was a popular female name; his first name is the embarrassing Everard, which she makes a point of signing across his mirror in rose-pink lipstick before she leaves. More than once, the camera catches him holding her discarded fancy dress against himself as if trying to slip inside the truth of "Lady X," the serial gold digger all his professional evidence adds up to or the sweetly confounding stranger of the Royal Parks Hotel. It's not all parody, even when the screenplay by Lajos Biró, Ian Dalrymple, and Arthur Wimperis sets its most romantically melodramatic conversation to the overheated zither of a Russian nightclub. Screwball stands or falls by fast talk and chemistry and The Divorce of Lady X has both:
"But then I didn't like you in your office. I much preferred you in your bedroom."
"Our bedroom."
"My bedroom."
"Surely that's the proper place to judge your future husband?"
It has a well-assembled supporting cast, too, most notably Morton Selten as Leslie's cynical but kindly grandfather, J.H. Roberts as Logan's just plain cynical colleague, and above all Ralph Richardson as the marriage-worried Lord Mere, who drifts around with an umbrella looking vaguely bemused by everything until he gets suspicious enough to go on a vaguely bemused drunk. And the Technicolor photography by Harry Stradling is in fact luscious: the opening credits scroll like the neon signs of Piccadilly Circus. The sets and the costumes have a confectionary sweetness, all mint-cream and lavender and ribbon-blue and gold. The relevant pajamas are a heinously cherry-ish candy-stripe; they make Oberon look like a boiled sweet and their effect on Olivier can only be anticipated. (It's bad.) Even a borrowed pair of horn-rims pops red as licorice. Occasionally I feel Oberon has been too palely made up, but I suspect there's something about race at work there. Miklós Rósza is responsible for the score including the overheated zither and I approve. If it's not as madcap as Bringing Up Baby (1938) or as close to the bone as The Lady Eve (1941), both of which feel like the movie's closest relatives in terms of subject-object reversals and garden paths, Alexander Korda can still be proud of his decision to produce it in the wake of the unfinished 1937 I, Claudius. I'd love to be able to compare it with its quota quickie original Counsel's Opinion (1933), but since all that seems to survive of the older film is its entry in the BFI 75 Most Wanted, I'll just have to cross fingers for broom closets in Argentina.
I still understand why I've never seen it listed among the great screwball comedies. The leads never lose their chemistry, but the last third of the film feels increasingly diffuse and overstuffed, as though the screenwriters have mistaken the piling-on of plot twists for the fun of letting them play out. I am generally in favor of solidarity between female characters, but the much-discussed Lady Mere (Binnie Barnes) works infinitely better as a Maguffin than she does as a person onscreen; the action feels sidetracked every time it dives out of the points of view of its protagonists and I really don't know the purpose of the third-act fox chase unless someone thought it would show up nicely in color. The picture slows itself down just as it should be winding up for a sparkling whiplash and it's not fatal, but it does the story no favors in a genre so dependent on precision timing and unimpeachable absurdity. It pulls itself together in time for the ending, however, which would be only a comeuppance if not for the telltale shy flicker of happiness across Logan's face as Leslie demurely does his proposing for him—he may be seasick, professionally shaky, and feel at the moment like an absolute fool, but he's loved by a woman who turned him upside down and shook him like a dicebox and in the screwball universe there's no greater proof of devotion. Now I'm sorry they were never paired with a better script that wasn't Wuthering Heights (1939). This action brought to you by my proper backers at Patreon.
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GOSH. Colour! Are you sure it's British and not just a cunning front?
I'll add it to my list, in case TalkingPictures shows it. (Thankfully at the moment our rather wonderful channel full of elderly films and TV is still going, not that it's of any use to you, I realise.) Although I may have to wait for a good day, in case I faint at the colour.
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It looks pretty damn British to me! The director is American for no discernible reason except I assume he emigrated; he wrote silent comedies in the U.S. and directed talkies in the UK. I seem to have seen Sidewalks of London (1938), Q Planes (1939), and The Thief of Bagdad (1940), although in all fairness there were like half a dozen directors on that last.
(Thankfully at the moment our rather wonderful channel full of elderly films and TV is still going, not that it's of any use to you, I realise.)
No, but I'm happy you have it. I don't need my friends to suffer.
Although I may have to wait for a good day, in case I faint at the colour.
Good luck!
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Talking PIctures do have rather a nice twitter account, though, which may be of occasional interest for the pics and gifs and info: https://twitter.com/TalkingPicsTV
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The Divorce of Lady X may be the earliest British color film I've seen. My previous benchmark would have been The Four Feathers (1939), the next year. [edit] I went looking to see what the earliest color film in Britain is supposed to be and the BFI had the subject covered.
Talking PIctures do have rather a nice twitter account, though, which may be of occasional interest for the pics and gifs and info
Thank you! I clicked through and got Night of the Demon (1957), so I'm not complaining.
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Oh, cool! I never really thought about it enough to go looking, but that's very interesting. I like the pics from them.
Thank you! I clicked through and got Night of the Demon (1957), so I'm not complaining.
They're rather fun. They've been showing the 60s/70s series Public Eye lately, so even though I don't have a twitter I look every now and then to see people enjoying the series. (And am very amused that many of them had exactly the same WHAT IS THIS, wait it's brilliant reaction to S4 that I did. And my Mum and Dad, actually. PE is so mundane it goes out the other end somehow.)
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Very likely, and if it was just after the attempt on I, Claudius, they may also have been working out how to hide scars from Oberon’s car accident.
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I wondered about that, but the scars from the car accident were supposed to be slight compared with the later scars from the allergic reaction. It's just impossible not to notice in some scenes that her face is a different color from her shoulders or her hands. (In other scenes she looks fine.) It made me think also that makeup techniques must have changed between black-and-white and color in the same way as costuming and set dressing: things show up differently. I don't remember ever thinking before that Oberon looked painted over, but I've never seen her in color anywhere else.
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Probabaly was just racism, then.
makeup techniques must have changed between black-and-white and color in the same way as costuming and set dressing
I saw this in an account of Max Factor’s career, so there’s probably a lot of bias; but the claim was that Technicolor movies didn’t really take off until makeup products were devised that looked good in the new medium— which does make plausible sense. (Factor then discovered that the actresses kept stealing the new makeup to wear offscreen, and realized there was a whole new market opening up.)
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Agreed. Especially since Technicolor's whole shtick was realism, and nothing looks less real faster than a person's face being off (see: where we came in).
Now I want to rewatch A Matter of Life and Death and see if I can discern the changes in technique between the color and black-and-white portions of the film. They might not be visible. I might just not know what to look for.
[edit] For what it's worth, the Technicolor story is attested by Wikipedia. Also, I'm sure it was serious, but there's something about the phrasing of the line "Because Max Factor was recovering from being hit by a delivery van at the time . . ."
(Factor then discovered that the actresses kept stealing the new makeup to wear offscreen, and realized there was a whole new market opening up.)
That story, I've heard, and find entirely believable.
I did not know that Max Factor was a real name for years. It always sounded like such a brand name—and such an '80's brand name, too, so futuristic—that when I discovered it was strictly speaking short for Maksymilian Faktorowicz my reaction was a combination oh, of course it is and wait, really?!
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I am delighted.
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I didn't remember that line!
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That's great!
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This is a very good review and ought to go in the book. Plus I've never seen Olivier in anythiing where his masculine gravitas didn't clank.
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I'm trying to figure out if it was Korda's first Technicolor feature. It certainly predates the others I've seen.
This is a very good review and ought to go in the book. Plus I've never seen Olivier in anythiing where his masculine gravitas didn't clank.
Thank you! Olivier dispenses entirely with gravitas in this movie and should have done it more often.
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Generally I suspect that he must have been one of those actors who are visceral on stage (going by all descriptions) but never manage to translate this to the camera because the live audience feedback is missing and they're never entirely at ease with said camera. "Never entirely at ease" being more noticable in comedy than in drama, maybe that's why he mostly went with the later, in as much as he had a choice.
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Well, if that was the case during the filming of The Divorce of Lady X, he translated it beautifully into the character's awkwardness instead of his own.
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I'm happy to have ended up living in a romantic comedy, just slightly this side of screwball :-)
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It's a nice thing to be able to say.
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That made me realize there are actors I've never seen in color, and that means some I never will.
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I once watched a really terrible Bela Lugosi movie, just because it was his only color film.
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I tried to find a shot of the appalling pajamas, but they were mostly, for the good of humanity, concealed:
I once watched a really terrible Bela Lugosi movie, just because it was his only color film.
I respect that. What was it?
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So at first I thought Leslie was pretending to be a fictional Lady Mere, but reading on I realize she's an actual character--so ... does Leslie pretend to be her, or is it just that Logan's anxieties about Lady Mere make him fearful of Leslie?
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It works for me in context of its genre, which is different from recommending it in real life—I wouldn't recommend lying to a prospective partner as much as Leslie does, either, even if she does it for far more righteous reasons. I think it helps that the script makes it clear that while in general Logan thinks he knows all about women and he's wrong, his divorce-court rhetoric exceeds his actual beliefs, being the product of an inaccurately but acutely guilty conscience and falling all over himself to shift the metonymic blame. That still doesn't make it reasonable behavior, however, and so the script is on Leslie's side as she sets out to show him he doesn't know a thing about women, starting with her.
So at first I thought Leslie was pretending to be a fictional Lady Mere, but reading on I realize she's an actual character--so ... does Leslie pretend to be her, or is it just that Logan's anxieties about Lady Mere make him fearful of Leslie?
His latest client is Lord Mere: Logan takes the case without ever having seen Lady Mere, but on learning that she was seen leaving the rooms of an as yet unidentified man at the Royal Parks Hotel on a timetable that tallies with the departure of Leslie-no-last-name who he's already sure was a cheating wife, he puts two and two together and comes up with the five that Leslie must have been Lady Mere, in which case he's the other man in his own case and he panics. The next time they meet, he addresses her as Lady Mere and she decides to run with it just to see how far she can get him to go. As in most farces, this imposture lasts only so long as no one who could identify the real Lady Mere ever meets Leslie when she's out with Logan, but since he's actively invested in steering clear of her supposed husband and she's not actually trying to carry off the pretense with anyone but her mark, it lasts a plausible while. (The person who eventually finds her out is the real Lady Mere and she finds the whole thing hilarious.) I apologize if that aspect was not sufficiently clear from the review.
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And re: the principle of not pursuing a man who gives the speech Logan does, what you write here makes perfect sense, from the dictates of genre to the particulars of this movie, and again, reading in the morning, I'm entirely on board.
... It's enough to make me think I really shouldn't read things when I'm that tired, but I can get kind of dogged about pursuing my social time (my online social time) when I'm tired, and defusing that motivation may be hard...
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I'm glad! I hope it's easily found.
... It's enough to make me think I really shouldn't read things when I'm that tired, but I can get kind of dogged about pursuing my social time (my online social time) when I'm tired, and defusing that motivation may be hard...
I don't mind you having asked the questions. I have definitely seen movies where the romantic buy-in didn't work for me—Kansas City Princesses (1934) still comes to mind even after two years because it did such a catastrophic job of flipping a character from threat to love object. Different people have different tolerances even within the rules of a genre.
As to the rest: sympathies. I have also been working to spend less of my immediate before-bed time online, but it's tough if that's the only time you really have to yourself.
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And thank you for the sympathies. I *do* have other chances to be online, and I think you're wise--and I would be wise--to avoid being online right before bed.