Trouble in Paradise 9781839022067, 9781839022036

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Acknowledgments A book like this is a lot like an old Hollywood movie: you’ve got your stars, your supporting cast, your production team and, of course, your writer (that would be me), but the writer’s work would be nothing without the happy collaboration of everybody on the studio lot. And if there’s a studio, there’s got to be a studio head who makes the production possible in the first place – that would be Rebecca Barden, my editor at BFI, ably assisted by Veidehi Hans. I am so grateful to both of them. The stars are unquestionably J. Hoberman and Joseph McBride, the former providing direction and encouragement early on and the latter saving me from all kinds of embarrassments by reading a rough draft of this book and making many corrections and suggestions. Nobody sees a film or reads a book without the benefit of a great production design team. So here: Thanks to Colin Verdi for the cover art, to Louise Dugdale for cover design, to Philippa Hudson for copy-editing, and to Sophie Contento for managing production. The large ensemble of supporting players includes a trio of translators: Jane Desmarais helped with French, Isabella Bertoletti with Italian and Natasha Grigorian with Russian. Liz Valentine of Gale/Cengage Learning supplied a key document about Max Reinhardt, while Taryn Jacobs of Turner Classic Movies provided important information about the broadcast history of Trouble in Paradise at TCM. The coronavirus pandemic prevented me from doing as much archival research as I would have liked, but Kristine Krueger, Ashley Johnston, Louise Hilton and John Damer of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in Beverly Hills, California, provided a great deal of assistance and information by remote means. Permission to reproduce the Belgian poster

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advertising Trouble in Paradise in the Mike Kaplan Poster Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, is gratefully acknowledged. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Camille, for helping to make our particular paradise mostly trouble-free for the last quarter-century.

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Introduction ‘Beginnings are always difficult,’ says the master criminal Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) at the start of Trouble in Paradise (1932). Which beginning? The start of the dinner that will lead to his affair with Lily (Miriam Hopkins) or the start of the film itself? Ernst Lubitsch, the director, eventually adopted what is now called the classic style of Hollywood film-making, whereby technique is subordinate to story: the audience is supposed to get lost in the narrative to the point that they do not notice how the film has been put together. Here, however, the director appears almost to be asking the audience to do just that: to think about how the film itself began, even though Monescu’s remark is completely a part of the story. He’s dressed in a tuxedo, standing on the balcony of a hotel room in Venice, lost in reverie, when a waiter approaches him and asks, ‘What shall we start with, Baron?’: GASTON (coming to)

Oh, yes … Well, that’s not so easy.

(Half to himself)

Beginnings are always difficult.

WAITER

Yes, Baron.

GASTON (directly to the waiter, presenting a problem)

If Casanova suddenly … turned out to be Romeo



… having supper with Juliet – who might become



Cleopatra … How would you start?

WAITER

I would start with cocktails.1

At this point Monescu looks down from the balcony and sees Lily approaching in a gondola. The story has begun, even though we don’t quite know whether Gaston will turn out to be Casanova or Romeo, or whether Lily might become Juliet or Cleopatra.

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Difficult beginnings

The ‘countess’ arrives

Trouble in bed

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The story of Gaston and Lily has indeed begun, but the film has begun at least twice before this, or maybe three times, counting the opening credits and the opening title song. Those credits begin with the image of an extremely ornate bed (call it Venetian) and the title of the film: first the words Trouble in appear, then Paradise a few seconds later, the combination of words and image suggesting, however briefly, that the film will be about trouble in bed. In a way it is. ‘Most any place / can seem to be a paradise / while you embrace’, the high tenor voice croons over Trouble in, followed by ‘just the one that you adore’ as Paradise completes the title. After the opening credits, the first thing we see is a faintly illuminated doorway – the back of a building, evidently – and a heavy-set man approaching a trash bin. The camera, along with a stray dog, follows him as he carries the bin and dumps it into a gondola full of garbage. So the film begins in Venice, but in a way that is wildly different from the clichéd beginning of most movies about Venice: an establishing shot of the Grand Canal and the Rialto Bridge, with gondoliers plying their boats about in the water. We know Lubitsch is toying with movie clichés for sure when we hear the garbage man start to sing the refrain of ‘O sole mio’. A number of critics maintain the garbage man sings in the post-synchronized voice of Enrico Caruso, but that can’t be right.2 Besides, the joke seems to be that the song is in Neapolitan dialect – in Venice: so the film begins with a movie cliché after all, but it’s the wrong cliché. Cut to the dark interior of a hotel room for the next beginning. We continue to hear the garbage man sing, but we also hear an irritating buzzing sound as a dark figure of a man dashes over the hotel balcony and shimmies down a tree. Then, we see this figure in silhouette remove some kind of disguise from his face. Back in the hotel room, the camera retreats to reveal the feet and legs of a prostrate man on the floor. Another cut takes us outside the hotel room where two ‘professional’ women persistently ring the doorbell to suite no. 253/59 and speak frustrated Italian. ‘What did you tell me?’ says one. ‘I told you to come here to meet a gentleman,’

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Two ‘business’ associates

says the other. ‘Your usual stories!’ is the retort. Then the camera is on the other side of the room looking through the balcony window so we can watch the prostrate man struggle to his feet before collapsing to the floor again. Next, the camera glides along the outside of the hotel, rounds a corner and comes to rest, looking in on Gaston dreaming on the balcony of his room as the waiter approaches to ask him how he would like to start. Beginnings are always difficult.

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1 Lubitsch’s Career Lubitsch himself had multiple beginnings. As the favourite son of a Russian émigré who ran a clothing shop ‘for large women’ in Berlin, Lubitsch first began as a rather incompetent clerk in the family firm. Then he began an acting career as a nineteen-year-old protégé of the great Max Reinhardt, the revolutionary stage director. Lubitsch’s short stature and facial features – a cross between a cherub and a gargoyle – meant he could never play the lead, but he brought character and energy to the smallest role. These qualities come through in his screen acting debut as a marriage broker catering to the needs of finicky men in Die ideale Gattin (The Ideal Wife) (1913). Only twenty-one, Lubitsch looks older (and unrecognizable), thanks to a fake beard and moustache. His screen credit as ‘Karl’ Lubitsch perhaps reflects a stage actor’s doubts about the artistic legitimacy of film performance. If so, those doubts dissipated once Lubitsch started directing himself, as in Als ich tot war (When I Was Dead) (1916). (He had directed at least seven films before this one, but these are either lost or fragmentary.) In this film about a man who solves his marriage problems by pretending to be dead, only to take a job as a servant (thinly disguised by a wig) in his own home so he can be around his wife, Lubitsch not only takes screen credit under his real name but also plays a character called ‘Herr Ernst Lubitsch’. The shop clerk turned actor turned director combined all three vocations when he directed himself in Schuhpalast Pinkus (Pinkus’s Shoe Palace) (1916), a highly successful Lustspiel (comedy). Lubitsch plays the role of Sally Pinkus (Sally, pronounced ‘Solly’, is short for ‘Solomon’), a young man who fails his way to success by getting expelled from school and fired as an apprentice shoe salesman. He is on the verge of being fired from a second shoe job when he alters the label on a pair of slippers to stroke the vanity of a wealthy woman

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Pinkus’s Shoe Palace (1916): a star is born

Sally in action

so she will think her feet are smaller than they are. She is so charmed by Sally that she finances his own ‘Shoe Palace’. After he hustles his way from schlepp salesman to stylish entrepreneur, Sally is on the point of writing the woman a cheque to repay the loan but suddenly has a better idea: ‘But why divide it up? Marry me and it’ll all be in the family.’ The woman accepts the two-for-one deal – she gets Sally as both husband and business partner. Pinkus’s Shoe Palace was the most successful of the several ‘store comedies’ featuring Lubitsch, including the one that made him a star, Der Stolz der Firma:

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Die Geschichte eines Lehrlings (The Pride of the Firm: The Story of an Apprentice) (1914), directed by Carl Wilhelm. Indeed, critics regard Pinkus’s Shoe Palace as a near-remake of The Pride of the Firm because both follow the comic formula of the guileful bumbler who succeeds in the end through sheer chutzpa. Now, it is hard to see the character Lubitsch played in these comedies, variously called Sally, Solly or Max, as anything other than a Jewish stereotype, an obvious point of controversy today. And while there is nothing subtle about Lubitsch’s performance, at least two things about Pinkus’s Shoe Palace suggest that there is more to the film than initially meets the eye. First, the film reflects a particular form of Jewish experience that was specific to Berlin at the time, which was, after all, the period of World War I. Lubitsch’s father was an émigré from the Russian Empire and so did not have full German citizenship, one ramification of his status being that his son was not a citizen either and so could not serve in the Imperial Army. Lubitsch was therefore exempt from conscription and free to pursue his stage and film career. Moreover, as eastern Jews or Ostjuden, the Lubitsches would have been further down the social scale than Berlin’s Westjuden. These western Jews had become more fully assimilated into German bourgeois culture and sought to distance themselves from the more overtly Jewish Ostjuden. The buffoonish character Lubitsch played in his store comedies may have confirmed the Ostjuden stereotype in some ways, but the security and sophistication the character achieves at the end of Pinkus’s Shoe Palace works against that stereotype. A second aspect of the film that makes it interesting today is the way it looks forward to Lubitsch’s later career. The director would return to the world of his youth in The Shop around the Corner (1940), one of his most charming and humane comedies. But in a more general sense the way Sally Pinkus goes from schoolboy prankster to urbane sophisticate (wearing spats, no less) suggests the arc of Lubitsch’s career as a director who goes from all those slapstick Lustspielen in Berlin to the stylish romantic comedies he made in Hollywood.

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One aim of this book is understand how elements of Lubitsch’s German career might have found their way into his classic Hollywood films, an exercise that is easier to do with his comedies than with that other genre the director mastered in Germany: the historical epic, or, to use the German term, Kostümfilm (costume film). Such films as Madame DuBarry (1919), set against the background of the French Revolution, and Anna Boleyn (1920), about the ill-fated wife of Henry VIII, made Lubitsch’s reputation in Europe and prompted comparisons to D. W. Griffith, whose racist epic The Birth of a Nation (1915) established the guidelines of the genre: lavish costumes, huge sets, crowds of extras and some small-scale personal drama echoing the larger historical conflict. Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), an epic cinematic account of the Second Punic War (218–201 bce), also helped establish the genre, but in a late assessment of his career Lubitsch said his Kostümfilme ‘differed completely from the Italian school’. That school, he claimed, involved ‘a kind of grand-opera-like quality’, whereas he ‘tried to de-operatize my pictures and to humanize my historical characters’.3 Only recently have the films Lubitsch made during his German period come to be fully appreciated. There are at least two explanations for the phenomenon, the first aesthetic, the second political. First, most of the films Lubitsch made in Germany could not be placed in the context of the avant-garde cinema of the time, notably expressionism, that brand of art first manifest in painting that sought to capture images not as they were observed but as they were experienced, and not just by human beings. For example, the painter Franz Marc (1880–1916), the leader of the expressionist school known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), asked, ‘How does a horse see the world?’4 The best-known cinematic effort to represent reality from the subjective perspective of the participant rather than from the objective view of an outside observer is Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari) (1920), which seeks to represent reality as it is experienced by an insane person.

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The mise en scène of this film is distinguished by angular, distorted sets; dramatic, chiaroscuro lighting; and exaggerated, pantomimic acting. These features – especially the dramatic lighting effects – are supposed to reveal the influence of Reinhardt, according to the critic Lotte Eisner, who relegated Lubitsch to the second rank of German film-makers because he did not put his experiences with Reinhardt to expressionistic effect: Lubitsch, who was for a long time a member of Max Reinhardt’s troupe, was less sensitive to his influence than other German filmmakers. A typical Berliner, who began his career with rather coarse farces, Lubitsch saw the pseudo-historical tragedies as so many opportunities for pastiche.5

The assessment is unfair: in fact, Lubitsch employed expressionistic devices in cinema before Wiene did, but he did so in one of his ‘coarse farces’ – namely, Die Puppe (The Doll) (1919), about a man who thinks he has married a life-sized female automaton, but which is, in fact, a real woman only pretending to be an automaton. Evidently, Lubitsch was not sufficiently serious to be included in the ranks of avant-garde, experimental film-makers, despite his seemingly endless capacity for cinematic innovation. The Doll (1919): a real doll

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The second likely reason Lubitsch’s German films have been underappreciated involves their political placement in what is undoubtedly the most celebrated theory about interwar German cinema, Siegfried Kracauer’s famous argument in From Caligari to Hitler (1947) that the films of the period unconsciously anticipated the authoritarian rule of Adolf Hitler. Kracauer cites The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, for instance, as a film that ‘glorified authority and convicted its antagonist of madness’, making Dr Caligari ‘a premonition of Hitler’, given the character’s ability to use ‘his hypnotic power to force his will’ upon others, as Hitler did ‘on a gigantic scale’.6 Although Kracauer names a few such authoritarian types in Lubitsch’s films, such as Henry VIII in Anna Boleyn, his main indictment of the director concerns his treatment of vast sociopolitical changes, such as the French Revolution, as the product not so much of historical forces as of personal psychology. Of Anna Boleyn, Kracauer says, the director ‘did not have to distort the given facts very much to make history seem the product of a tyrant’s private life’.7 Of Madame DuBarry (released in the US as Passion in 1920), Lubitsch’s film about the machinations of the titular mistress of Louis XV and her contentious relationship with Marie Antoinette, Kracauer says the ‘Lubitsch pageant […] drains the Revolution of its significance’: Instead of tracing all revolutionary events to their economic and ideal causes, it persistently presents them as the outcome of psychological conflicts. It is a deceived lover who, animated by the desire for retaliation, talks the masses into capturing the Bastille.8

Poor Lubitsch is here accused of ‘degrading the French Revolution to a questionable adventure’, revealing the political ‘nihilism’ that is symptomatic of ‘strong antirevolutionary, if not antidemocratic, tendencies in post-war Germany’.9 Hence in Kracauer’s view, Lubitsch does not glorify authoritarianism so much as soften the ground for the tyranny to come by weakening belief in democratic institutions. From Caligari to Hitler was first published in 1947, the

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same year Lubitsch died, so the fact that Kracauer wrote without the benefit of later, more generous assessments of the director’s career may explain why his criticism is so severe. That criticism was not exactly borne out by the history Kracauer himself lived through, since the Nazis hardly embraced the man whose films supposedly predicted their rise to power. Kracauer does acknowledge that the Nazis ‘denounced Lubitsch for displaying “a pertness entirely alien from our true being”’,10 but, leaving aside the point that Madame DuBarry and the other historical epics could well be subjected to a range of political interpretations, it still seems strange that Kracauer would choose to ignore the well-known condemnation of Lubitsch during the Third Reich. After all, Hitler stripped Lubitsch of his German citizenship in 1935 and used his image as a representation of ‘The Archetypal Jew’ on posters in Berlin train stations. In 1940, footage of Lubitsch was used to help demonstrate the ‘degenerate’ nature of Jews in the notorious propaganda film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew).11 Eisner’s and Kracauer’s negative criticism of Lubitsch’s German films notwithstanding, those films were enormously popular in Germany and eventually led to his entrée into the Hollywood studio system. The fame Lubitsch achieved as the ‘German Griffith’ reached the US when Madame DuBarry became one of the first films since the end of the war to break the xenophobic ban against the distribution of ‘Teutonic’ movies in the country. The success of that film and others prompted the star Mary Pickford to invite Lubitsch to Hollywood to direct her in a feature. Her brand as ‘America’s Sweetheart’ had begun to fade, so she looked to Lubitsch to take her career in a different direction. At first the vehicle of choice was to be Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall, a historical novel of 1902 set in Elizabethan England (Pickford made the film with another director in 1924), but Lubitsch persuaded her to take the title role in Rosita (1923), a story about a Spanish street-singer set in the eighteenth century that he had already begun to develop with his long-time screenwriter Hanns Kräly back in Berlin. So while Lubitsch’s costume

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dramas helped him get to the US, it is hard to see in them that combination of elegance and ellipsis that so distinguishes later comic romances like Trouble in Paradise. One possible explanation for the turn in Lubitsch’s career towards elegant understatement is his openness to the new direction in narrative cinema suggested by Charlie Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923), which Lubitsch saw after completing Rosita, just as he was gearing up to make The Marriage Circle (1924). Chaplin’s film disappointed audiences because his beloved Little Tramp character was nowhere to be seen (Chaplin appears briefly in the film in a Hitchcock-like cameo). Subtitled A Drama of Fate, the film tells the story of Marie (Edna Purviance) and Jean (Carl Miller), a provincial couple who plan to leave their French village for Paris. On the night they intend to run off together, Jean’s father is stricken ill and dies. When Jean does not show up at the train station, Marie assumes she has been jilted and boards the train. The next time we see her, a year has passed, and she has been set up in swanky style as the kept woman of Pierre, a wealthy playboy acted with insouciant suavity by Adolphe Menjou. Jean goes to Paris later with his widowed mother, rents a studio and struggles to become an artist. By chance he meets his former lover, and complications emerge when Jean learns that Marie is another man’s mistress. Soon thereafter, Marie and Pierre are dining in an elegant restaurant when Jean shows up and shoots himself. After his suicide, Marie and Jean’s mother reconcile and decide to leave the corrupt metropolis and return to their village, where they establish a home for orphan girls. Lubitsch saw A Woman of Paris as ‘a great step forward’ in the art of film-making because Chaplin respected the audience enough to leave ‘something to the imagination’.12 Indeed, the year-long ellipsis left it up to the audience to imagine how Marie managed the transition from provincial farmgirl to pampered mistress. How important A Woman of Paris was to Lubitsch’s development remains a topic of some debate, not least because his German films also contain elements of the later Lubitsch. One

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element of those films that appears in a few of the German silents is the romantic triangle, a recurring plot device in a number of the director’s American comedies, including The Marriage Circle and the other films Lubitsch did for Warner Bros. after he and Pickford parted ways (Rosita was not a flop, but the star and the director did not play well together). In Das fidele Gefängnis (The Merry Jail) (1917), comic entanglements ensue when both the husband and wife have to negotiate their way around respective third parties to the marriage. When the dapper, top-hatted husband decides to go to a lavish gala instead of spending a night in jail as he has been ordered to do by the warden, his place is taken by his wife’s would-be lover when the police show up at the couple’s home to arrest him. The wife insists on the stratagem to save face, and the aspiring lover complies in an effort to please her. Once incarcerated for the night, he has a merry time in jail playing cards with his fellow inmates and drinking with the sodden jailkeeper. Meanwhile, the wife finds the invitation to the prince’s ball and decides to go herself – in disguise, of course. Sure enough, the husband falls for the mysterious masked woman he meets there, but she spurns him because he’s married. The next morning, the husband, very drunk, is staggering along the street when a policeman asks to see his papers. By way of identification he produces the The Merry Jail (1917): wifemistress

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warrant for his arrest, whereupon he is marched off to the merry jail and meets ‘himself’ being processed for release. The authorities, quite reasonably, have doubts about who is who. Happily, his wife confirms the true husband’s identity, then reveals her own as that of the masked woman at the ball, and the husband is only too pleased to learn that his new mistress is also his wife. If this plot sounds like a retelling of the Johann Strauss operetta Die Fledermaus (1874), that’s because it is. Indeed, Lubitsch would return to such middlebrow Mitteleuropa culture as light opera for cinematic inspiration time and time again. In fact, he remade The Merry Jail in Hollywood as So This Is Paris (1926) (the later film gives screen credit to Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy for the French play that was also one of the sources for the Strauss operetta). Trouble in Paradise was based on another Mitteleuropa source, a Hungarian play by Aladár László. So that’s something else the stylish romantic comedy has in common with the rollicking romantic farce that is The Merry Jail. Also, the earlier film was made during the ‘turnip winter’ of 1916–17 when wartime Berliners were practically foraging for food;13 Lubitsch shows us the irascible chambermaid Mizi, who has also crashed the party along with her masked mistress, drinking champagne and gorging on foie gras. Trouble in Paradise played during one of the worst years of the Great Depression; Lubitsch shows us an incorrigible pair of jewel thieves in evening clothes living off other people’s money. The director can hardly be credited with inventing the cinema as a form of escapist fantasy, a relief from hard times, but it is striking that Lubitsch was able to take artistic advantage of similar socio-economic circumstances twice in his career – first in Germany during and after World War I, then in the period of the Great Depression following the Crash of 1929. Yet even this congruence does not adequately explain the comic concord, rather rough and approximate to be sure, between the German Lubitsch and the Hollywood Lubitsch. The transition he made from slapstick to sophistication seems to depend not so much on artistic development but, rather, on artistic adaptation.

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Whatever the circumstances, whether societal or cinematic, Lubitsch had a gift for adapting and adjusting them to his own highly particular talents and tastes. When cinema technology made talking pictures possible, Lubitsch responded by adapting his love of operetta to the screen and invented the movie musical, starting with The Love Parade (1929). When the US economy collapsed, Lubitsch adapted a Hungarian play about an elegant thief as an escapist antidote that also resonated with contemporary financial anxieties in Trouble in Paradise: the jewel thieves fall on hard times, and the dapper Gaston quotes the comment often associated with Herbert Hoover – ‘Prosperity is just around the corner.’ Lubitsch’s ability to adapt to whatever the situation called for by relying on a combination of charm and cleverness is something he has in common with the characters he played in Pinkus’s Shoe Palace and other store comedies. Maybe shoe business is no business like show business, but it is striking that after beginning as a shop clerk, a theatre actor, a film star and a director, successively, of slapstick farces, costume spectacles, urbane silent comedies and musical fantasies about imaginary aristocrats, Lubitsch decided to start with champagne: Trouble in Paradise marks yet another beginning, and not just for Lubitsch, but for the art of cinema.

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2 Scenario After the elegant gentleman on the balcony accepts the waiter’s suggestion that the best way to start would be with cocktails, he sees the equally elegant lady gliding underneath in the gondola. He waves; she waves back, then turns to look back at him as the gondola moves out of frame. Evidently inspired, Gaston gives further instructions to ensure ‘the most marvellous supper’: ‘And waiter … you see that moon? I want to see that moon in the champagne.’ The waiter dutifully makes a note while muttering, ‘Moon in champagne.’ An additional comment makes clear what kind of evening Gaston is hoping for: ‘And as for you, waiter …’ (the script says the waiter’s eager response – ‘Yes, Baron?’ – means he is ‘expecting a tip’), ‘I don’t want to see you at all.’ The waiter starts to leave but notices something clinging to the back of Gaston’s tuxedo jacket – a single leaf, which Gaston accepts from the waiter, glances at briefly and tosses aside. Soon enough, we will be able to interpret this detail as a piece of evidence connecting Gaston to whatever happened in the darkened hotel room: he was the man who went over the balcony and clambered down the tree. The next scene gives us more information about that earlier beginning. A hotel telephone operator switches from Italian to English when she answers a call from suite 253/59: ‘Yes, sir! Right away!’ She connects to the hotel manager and reports that there has been a robbery. Soon the hotel is abuzz with the news as the word spreads among waiters and maids. At this point Lily enters Gaston’s room, ‘excited and out of breath’, the script says. Because of all the hubbub over the robbery? No, because she has just avoided being seen by the Marquis de la Tours, only to run into King Boris of Alconia. She’s worried about gossip: ‘when the king tells the marquis he saw me, the marquis will tell the marchesa. And the marchesa is

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the best friend of the Duchess of Chambro. And she will phone the Princess de Costa.’ With the possible, accidental exception of ‘the Marquis de la Tours’, these are all fake aristocrats, fictional royalty the like of which populated Lubitsch’s earlier musicals. The ruse is revealed when the Duchess of Chambro herself calls Gaston’s room and asks for Lily – revealed to us, that is. As a ‘Countess’ herself, Lily sustains the ruse for the sake of the ‘Baron’ by keeping up the high-class chatter on her end of the phone call: ‘Dinner tomorrow – at your palace.’ A cut reveals the woman on the other end of the The Love Parade (1929): the princess bride

The Duchess of Chambro

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call, Lily’s ‘companion, maid, and intimate friend’, who tells her to ‘slip up the back way’ when she comes home and complains about something ‘that darn dog of yours did’. Lily’s reply: ‘So, he really did! How charming! Well, my compliments to the duke.’ The fake Baron suggests to the fake Countess that she leave to avoid the scandal, but Lily decides to stay; she suggests they start with cocktails. Meanwhile, M’sieu François Filiba (Edward Everett Horton) is standing in the middle of the room where he was robbed, still a bit groggy from the attack. He tells the hotel manager what happened to him, and the hotel manager translates the details for the benefit of the hotel detective and other officials. Filiba says he’s expecting ‘two, uh … two business associates’ (a white lie – prostitution is a business, after all) when he hears a knock at the door. He opens it and lets a ‘fine-looking man’ who claims to be a doctor into his room. This ‘doctor’ insists on inspecting the tonsils of M’sieu Filiba – ‘Tonsili!’, the manager exclaims. Filiba obligingly says ‘ah’ but remembers nothing else about the encounter. All he knows is that when he comes to he’s been robbed of his wallet and the 20,000 lira it contained. The Italians are astounded: ‘Ventimila!’ Filiba sums up: ‘When I woke up I still had my tonsils but my pocketbook was gone.’ ‘Was it lots of money?’ That’s the sound bridge to the next scene: Gaston asking the gossipy waiter about the details of the robbery he has himself perpetrated, adding: ‘You’re not safe anywhere nowadays.’ The waiter has just poured champagne for Lily and Gaston, who assures the waiter he won’t tell anyone the news about the theft. ‘You can trust me,’ he says, and the waiter leaves the room. What follows is one of the best sustained stretches of warmth and wit in the entire film. The screenwriter Samson Raphaelson offers it as an example of the happy result of his collaboration with Lubitsch when ‘they were struggling over a scene’. (The two men ‘wrote’ by pacing around a room talking and acting out bits while a secretary took notes, which Raphaelson later polished into a script.) If they were stuck, Raphaelson would say, ‘Here’s a bad example of what I mean’, and then offer ‘a certain kind of nonsense’, mere

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‘conversational doodlings’ in an effort to break through the impasse. To his surprise, Lubitsch began to take such nonsense seriously, or, rather, comically.14 A native New Yorker, Raphaelson had his first success on Broadway in 1925 with The Jazz Singer, adapted as the first talking picture in 1927 (Lubitsch had encouraged Warner Bros. to acquire the rights to the play).15 All told, Raphaelson authored ten plays and more than twenty screenplays, nine for Lubitsch and the rest for other directors, including Alfred Hitchcock (Suspicion, 1941). At a time when motion pictures were not ordinarily considered fine art, Lubitsch assured his collaborator that he would achieve lasting fame for his work in the theatre, not the movies.16 The scene that started out as a conversational doodle begins in the midst of the elegant champagne dinner when Lily turns to Gaston and says, ‘I’ve got a confession to make to you. Baron, you are a crook. You robbed the gentleman in two fifty-three, five, seven and nine. May I have the salt?’ Utterly unfazed, Gaston passes the salt ‘with an elegant gesture’ and then makes his own confession: ‘Countess, you are a thief. The wallet of the gentleman in two fiftythree, five, seven and nine is in your possession. I knew it very well when you took it out of my pocket. In fact, you tickled me. But your embrace was so sweet …’ The music swells dramatically as Gaston gets up from the table, goes to the door and locks it; he returns and takes Lily by the shoulders as if to kiss her, but instead he shakes her about like a rag doll until the wallet of the gentleman in two fiftythree, five, seven and nine drops to the floor. He puts it back into his inside jacket pocket and gestures to the Countess to be seated and resume her dinner. The affection the pair feel for each other has been building for some time, but now it comes out into the open when Gaston returns the jewelled brooch he lifted from Lily, adding, ‘There’s one very good stone in it,’ whereupon she asks, ‘What time is it?’ and smiles as Gaston gropes about for his missing watch. She returns it to him, having reset it to the correct time: ‘It was five minutes slow, but I regulated it for you.’ They bow to each other ‘like two Chinese

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The garter gag

mandarins’, but such politesse cannot be sustained once Gaston says, ‘I hope you don’t mind if I keep your garter.’ An astonished Lily feels for her missing garter on her legs under the table as Gaston takes it from his breast pocket, kisses it and keeps it. The script says, ‘Lily is delighted. This is the highest compliment ever paid to her.’ She leaps from her chair and into Gaston’s lap. ‘Darling!’ she exclaims as they kiss. ‘Who are you?’ He identifies himself conclusively: ‘You remember the man who walked into the Bank of Constantinople and walked out with the Bank of Constantinople?’ Lily is thrilled: ‘Monescu!’ Indeed: the ‘Baron’ is none other than the notorious Gaston Monescu. The name of the character was inspired by one Georges Manolescu, a glamorous criminal known as ‘the prince of thieves’ whose memoirs, published in 1902, provided the basis for A becsületes megtaláló (The Honest Finder), the Hungarian play adapted for the screen as Trouble in Paradise. The screen credits give the name of the original playwright as ‘Laszlo Aladar’, reversing the first and last name of the man better known as Aladár László (1896– 1958). László came to the US from Hungary via Germany in 1938, evidently fleeing the Nazis (he was Jewish), to pursue a screenwriting career.17 A Paramount contract writer named Grover Jones gets a

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screen credit for adaptation (according to the studio, he helped with the translation of the László play),18 but most of the writing – the dialogue, certainly – was evidently done by Raphaelson. Raphaelson, in turn, says he did not read the play, or any of the other plays that served as a basis for the scripts he worked on with Lubitsch,19 whose love of Hungarian culture seems to have been boundless. How Lubitsch came to know this particular play is not clear (it was staged in Hungary in 1931), but his approach to it for screenwriting purposes was the same as that of any other play he adapted: the story served as a scaffolding used to build something original (Lubitsch and Ben Hecht used only one line of Noël Coward’s original dialogue in their adaptation of Design for Living, 1933).20 In a way, Manolescu’s memoirs may be more relevant to the film than the play based on those memoirs. They also served as the basis for Thomas Mann’s short story of 1911, Felix Krull, expanded much later into Confessions of Felix Krull: Confidence Man (1955). Mann found inspiration in the linkage of criminality and style that Manolescu’s career involved, as well as in the kinship between deception and fiction. These relationships apply to Trouble in Paradise as well, where we see certain commonalities between thievery and cinema, both reliant on a combination of style and illusion. At a less abstract level, there are elements of Trouble in Paradise that reflect some of Manolescu’s insights into the gullibility of wealthy Europeans at the turn of the century. When they travelled, they tended to regard the staff of a grand hotel with the same level of trust accorded their personal servants back home, a failing Manolescu took advantage of time and time again.21 When M’sieu Filiba opens his door to the hotel ‘doctor’ he falls into the same kind of trap Manolescu often set for his victims. It is no great stretch to see Lubitsch doing something similar, setting cinematic traps for his audience again and again. For example, we might suspect that Lily is not a real countess because of Hopkins’s deliberate overacting, but we don’t know for sure until we see her frowsy roommate posing as the Duchess of Chambro, a hefty woman

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Goodbye to Venice

wearing a flowered smock and sitting in a messy bedroom. Gaston, by contrast, is genuinely believable as a baron, and it is telling that the prelude to the identity reveal is a series of thefts culminating in the most improbable one of all – wallet, brooch, watch, garter. The series of deceptions, which we never see, also presages the couple’s unseen lovemaking. After Gaston embraces Lily on the sofa and mutters his endearments – ‘My little shoplifter! My sweet little pickpocket! My darling!’ – the kissing couple dissolve away before our eyes, so all we see is the empty sofa. Next, the curtains to the window overlooking the Grand Canal are opened to let the moonlight stream in, and a moment later the door to suite 300/02 opens slightly, as Gaston’s arm ‘in the sleeve of a dressing gown’ reaches around to hang a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on a hook below the room number. The Venice segment of the film ends as it began – with the operatic garbage man singing another verse of ‘O sole mio’ as he plies his gondola through the canal. If the Venice segment ends with an anti-cliché image, the next section begins with the most clichéd establishing shot imaginable: an image of the Eiffel Tower. Or is it? This Eiffel Tower looks a great deal like the RKO Pictures logo, first introduced in 1929, complete with animated radio signals and accompanying beeps of Morse code

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(the sound is virtually identical in both cases). So Lubitsch appears to be having some fun here evoking a rival studio in a Paramount Picture. Since the Eiffel Tower had been used as a wireless transmitter since 1913 (first telegraphs, then radio in 1921),22 the image does serve Lubitsch’s diegetic purposes, not only by introducing the viewer to Paris but also to new plot developments: the segment opens with the Paris police reporter at the microphone updating the radio audience on the activities of ‘the world famous international crook, Gaston Monescu’. It seems he has targeted the international peace Welcome to Paris

The RKO logo

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conference in Geneva and taken ‘practically everything, except the peace’. The Swiss police apprehended him, but he managed to escape ‘in an unexplainable manner’. For the record, there was a peace conference in Geneva in 1932, initiated on 2 February, in which the world powers, including Germany and the Soviet Union, attempted to negotiate significant arms reductions. But given Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933 and the rapid militarization of Nazi Germany, the effort proved fruitless and was abandoned in April 1934.23 The mention of the Geneva conference is only one of many contemporary references in the film, a fact that belies the common charge that Trouble in Paradise is just a sparkling bagatelle of a movie, mere escapist entertainment without social relevance. In truth, the film includes a fair amount of social commentary: the radio broadcast segment that begins with the police report including a reference to real-world events the contemporary audience would know about is followed by a light-hearted jingle advertising the wonders of the scents produced by the parfumerie Colet and Company, thereby making an unmistakable connection between ‘world famous’ crime and high-end consumerism. ‘Remember – it doesn’t matter what you say; it doesn’t matter how you look; it’s how you smell,’ says the spokesman before launching into song, with lyrics It’s how you smell

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accompanied by a series of images that for all the world look like television advertisements: ‘Cleopatra was a lovely tantalizer. But she did it with her little atomizer.’ The song continues to play over a long, advancing shot of a miniature of the Colet et Cie factory, then a shot of numerous workers exiting the factory gates. Cut to the directors’ room with the camera moving towards Giron (C. Aubrey Smith), chairman of the board, admonishing the widowed Madame Mariette Colet (Kay Francis), owner of the firm, to do what her deceased husband would do ‘in times like these’: cut salaries. She has better things to do – a luncheon engagement, and besides, ‘business bores me’ so best leave the salaries ‘right where they are’. Then, in a remarkably efficient series of twelve shots running slightly under two minutes, we learn a great deal about Mariette. She goes to a shop and buys a diamond-encrusted purse for 125,000 francs after rejecting one for 3,000 francs as ‘entirely too much’. A series of wipes follows, showing various shopkeepers and servants – a furrier, a shoe salesman, a chauffeur, a butler, a maid, a gardener – bidding hello or saying goodbye, or uttering an obsequious ‘Yes, madame’ or ‘No, madame’. The sequence brings us back to Mariette, or, rather, to her voice covering a medium shot of the back of a man with his head downcast: ‘No, no, François! I tell you no!’ She’s gazing dreamily screen left as she continues: ‘You see, François, marriage is a beautiful mistake which two people make together.’ She turns her head and says, firmly, ‘But with you, François, I think it would be a mistake.’ Cut back to the man, who turns slowly, dejected. It’s M’sieu Filiba. Here, we see Lubitsch not only making the narrative connection in conventional cinematic fashion but also violating those conventions. With Mariette speaking and looking screen left after the shot of the man’s back, the logic of the cinematic space leads us to think he’s to her right. But it turns out that he’s in front of her, slightly to her left. The ‘mistake’ (Mariette’s word) has to be by design: the viewer notices, unconsciously perhaps, that something is not quite right about the spatial relationship between the two characters – a cognate, surely, of the emotional disconnect.

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M’sieu Filiba, dejected

‘A beautiful mistake’

Another wipe reveals a second dejected middle-aged suitor, the Major (Charlie Ruggles), moping on the golf course as Mariette, smartly dressed (as always), tees up a shot and offers ironic assurances: ‘Down be so downhearted, Major. You’re not the only one I don’t love. I don’t love François, either.’ Nonetheless, the fabulously wealthy young widow needs appropriate male escorts for social occasions, so she lets both of them accompany her to the opera. As she’s getting dressed for the evening, the pair sit glumly, not speaking to each other. The Major maintains his gruff silence

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The Front Page (1931): tonsils

until François insists that they make small talk: ‘For heaven’s sake, man, say something!’ The Major turns and looks at François, then looks straight ahead and utters one word: ‘Tonsils’. The running tonsils gag may have been inspired by a scene involving Horton in a hit film made one year before Trouble in Paradise, Lewis Milestone’s The Front Page (1931). In that film, Horton plays a hypochondriac newspaperman who at one point opens his mouth so another reporter can look down his sore throat. ‘Tonsiline’, a patent medicine, is the suggested remedy. In Trouble in Paradise, when Horton hears the Major say ‘Tonsils’ he directs one of his patented double takes at Ruggles, who sits expressionless. By the time the two middle-aged suitors arrive at the opera house with Madame Colet, Filiba is so upset that he refuses to sit in the box with Mariette and the Major. Instead, he makes a point of his displeasure by saying ‘Goodbye!’ – twice – and sulking in the loge lobby. Mariette insists that the Major apologize, so he reluctantly goes to the lobby and says to Filiba: ‘See here, my good man. You’ve been saying goodbye for the last half hour, and staying on. I wish you would say how do you do, and go!’ The Major goes back to the box, sits down and answers Mariette’s questioning look: ‘Well, he left. I tell you, apologizing is a gift!’ The two settle down to the

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opera – the operetta, actually – which, in typical Lubitsch fashion, we never really see. A brief shot of the conductor gives way to a close-up of the score as the soprano sings, ‘I love you! I love you!’ The pages of the score turn rapidly as if blown by a wind, signifying the progress of the piece. Now the soprano sings, ‘I hate you!’, and the chorus echoes the sentiment: ‘She hates him!’ Trouble in Paradise was Lubitsch’s first non-musical talking picture, so perhaps the nod to operetta here is a comic homage to the genre he has left behind (at least for the moment: he would return to the form with The Merry Widow in 1934, and in 1947 with That Lady in Ermine (1948; Lubitsch died shortly after shooting began on the film, completed by an uncredited Otto Preminger)). Here, the dramatic moment in the operetta the characters see serves as overstated commentary on the dramatic moment of the film the characters are in, because Mariette is extremely displeased with the Major, given the way he has behaved with François. We don’t know exactly what has happened, but we can guess, given the testy ‘tonsils’ moment earlier. But there is more. The Major reaches for her hand, she pulls it away, and the two of them argue. This action is presented to us like an iris shot in a silent film, because it is from the viewpoint of a man in the audience sitting in the mezzanine who has trained his opera glasses on the couple sitting in the box. The binoculars focus on the jewelled purse Mariette bought earlier for 125,000 francs, resting on the edge of the box. Next, we see an anxious-looking Mariette leaving the ladies’ room and returning to the box. She can’t find her handbag. On the edge of the box where it was before sits a pair of opera glasses. Mariette and the Major leave the box and look about frantically in the lobby. He is so focused on the search that he follows Mariette into the ladies’ room but is brusquely ushered out by the indignant attendant. The operetta concludes and people pour out of the boxes and head down the stairs; Mariette and the Major leave with them. The camera holds on the lobby space until a dissolve brings us back to the same space, whereupon the camera pans right to reveal Gaston Monescu, dapper in top hat and cane,

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as he emerges from the men’s room and nonchalantly heads down the stairs. More comic business follows with the Major going into the same shop where Mariette bought the expensive purse, only to find that François has got there ahead of him and purchased what appears to be an equally expensive replacement, but in a different style. That brief scene probably takes place a day or so after the robbery, and the next not long after that – long enough, anyway, for Mariette to put an ad in the newspaper offering a reward of 20,000 francs for the return of the bag. We see Lily and Gaston reading the paper: Gaston reads a review of the operetta and disagrees with the critic’s estimation of the tenor; Lily sees Mariette’s ad and insists Gaston do the ‘honest’ thing and return it. He agrees after some quick calculations, figuring that if he fences the purse he’d get only 5,000 francs. A moment before, Gaston says, ‘Prosperity is just around the corner’, a Rotary Club slogan that had been around at least since 1923,24 but came to be associated with President Herbert Hoover’s empty assurances after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Now it looks as though the couple is about to turn that corner, just in time for their two-year anniversary together. In fact, they plan to use the money to return to the same hotel in Venice where they met, and to celebrate by taking the royal suite, rooms 253, 5, 7 and 9. The next scene returns us to Mariette’s art deco mansion, where a throng of honest finders line up with hopes of getting the reward. Mariette dismisses one hopeful woman who has found a bag that doesn’t resemble the lost one at all, whereupon the next finder enters and describes the bag exactly – ‘diamonds in the back, diamonds in the front, diamonds all over’ – with a heavy Russian accent. The man has not come to return the bag but to upbraid Mariette for spending so much money on something so frivolous ‘in times like these’. He’s a Bolshevik, who then starts ‘quoting’ Trotsky in Russian. The screenplay gives this translation: ‘Anyone who spends a fortune on a silk purse is a sow’s ear.’ He also says ‘Phooey!’ again and again, in a tone approaching an epic level of indignation (likely derived

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from German pfui – ‘Shame!’ or ‘For shame!’ – the word had been popularized in the 1930s by the columnist and radio commentator Walter Winchell).25 Fortunately for Mariette, Gaston arrives just in time to save her from further proletarian rancour. He says to the Bolshevik – in Russian – ‘Please leave us,’ whereupon the Bolshevik replies, ‘And who are you?’ Gaston, still speaking Russian, is insistent: ‘Get out of here, or I will throw you out!’ The man leaves, shouting out a final cascade of ‘Phooeys’ for good measure as he goes out of the door. ‘His phooey is worse than his bite,’ says Gaston. He returns the bag and begins to examine other precious objects in the room, introducing himself as M’sieu Laval. Gaston’s gallantry in this scene is evidently unlike anything Mariette has encountered before. The screenplay says she is ‘perplexed’ – ‘Their relationship has somehow been transformed.’ The suave figure of this M’sieu Laval is quickly put in contrast to François, walking jauntily down a Paris street after purchasing the new bag that he plans to give to Mariette. She’s just now watching as Gaston removes the contents of her purse item by item, including a love letter from the Major. ‘Oh, you didn’t read it!’ she exclaims. ‘Naturally I did,’ he says, and when Mariette blushes in black and white, he puts her at ease by telling Paris, Paramount

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her there is no need to feel embarrassed: ‘A lady as charming as you would, and should, get love letters.’ Putting on what we might now call a ‘gay’ manner, Gaston is in the midst of advising Mariette on cosmetics (lipstick colour, face powder, eye shading) when the Major himself is announced. Gaston echoes Mariette’s sigh and goes out to handle the matter. Shifting to his best professional bearing, Gaston explains that Madame is too agitated over the handbag ordeal and cannot be disturbed just now, although it’s nothing serious. ‘Just as you say, doctor,’ replies the Major, completely cowed. As he is leaving, François arrives, so the Major makes a point of reviewing the afternoon’s developments with Jacques, Mariette’s butler – the handbag has been found; Madame is not feeling well; she won’t be seeing anyone today, this evening or tomorrow. When Jacques shuts the door, the Major has his moment, turning to François: ‘Well, that leaves you holding the bag. Goodbye!’ The Major’s ‘Goodbye’ works as another sound bridge as Lubitsch cuts back to Gaston saying ‘Goodbye’ to Mariette as he rises to leave. She struggles through her embarrassment to bring up the ‘delicate matter’ of the 20,000 francs reward. Gaston puts her at ease by reminding her of hard times, ‘the stock market, bank crash’. As ‘a member of the nouveau poor’, he’ll take the money. She goes upstairs to write him a cheque; he does, too, after pointing out that she does not know his first name. She needs to know what it is in order to make out the cheque, so he tells her, ‘whispering ardently’ – ‘Gaston!’ Still speaking ‘ardently’, he adds: ‘And do you know what I’d like to have you do with that cheque?’ ‘What?’ Mariette asks, ‘softly, curious’. The screenplay says Gaston is ‘passionate’ now: ‘Make it out to cash!’ It has been obvious for some time that money is the currency of desire in this film, and never more so than here. But that obviousness is mostly on the page; on the screen the exchange value of passion comes across as somehow understated, at least in this scene. Mariette goes to her office and searches for her chequebook but cannot find it. She looks about for Gaston, but, for the second time, he has vanished. She finds him in the adjoining

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A bed, untroubled

bedroom, staring down at the mattress. An evident connoisseur of antiques, Gaston correctly identifies the bed as early eighteenth century, around 1730, to be precise. The bed was once used by Mariette’s secretary, who was discharged because she put the bed to such good use – she was ‘too happy’ in it, says Mariette. Gaston turns his attention from the bed to the wall safe, suggesting that perhaps the secretary put the missing chequebook in the safe. He watches carefully as Mariette turns the knob on the safe so he can memorize the combination. The chequebook isn’t there, but Mariette is surprised to find the safe contains 100,000 francs in cash. Gaston takes on a severe tone: ‘But, madame, you keep a hundred thousand francs … in your safe … at home?’ Too much? wonders Mariette. No, Gaston insists, it’s not enough, not ‘in times like these, when everything is uncertain’. ‘Very sensible,’ says Mariette, as she goes to another room and settles on a small settee. Gaston sits beside her and continues to upbraid her for her imprudent behaviour: first she loses her bag, then she misplaces her chequebook, not to mention using the wrong lipstick (Gaston insists on crimson). When Mariette asks what else is wrong, Gaston says:

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Everything! … Madame Colet, if I were your father … (with a smile) which, fortunately, I am not …

MARIETTE (coquettishly) Ye-es? GASTON

And you made any attempt to handle your own



business affairs, I would give you a good spanking



… in a business way, of course.

MARIETTE (complete change of expression, businesslike)

What would you do if you were my secretary?

GASTON

The same thing.

MARIETTE

You’re hired!

At that, Mariette slumps back on the settee with a wry, suggestive smile on her face. The mixture of business and the promise, at least, of sado-masochistic pleasure repeats the theme of monetized romance, but the scene is played with such understated grace that the audience is charmed at least as much as Mariette, now Gaston’s employer-cum-victim. There is so much of the unseen in the segment that we almost don’t notice the most important thing that doesn’t happen – Gaston never gets the 20,000 francs reward. Next, we see the secretary in action. Back in the directors’ room Giron speaks both for himself and on behalf of his fellow board members, whose recommendation that workers’ salaries be reduced was rejected by Madame Colet, when he objects to a proposed reduction of their salaries, ‘in times like these’. In fact, he threatens to resign. Gaston calls his bluff: ‘Speaking for Madame Colet as well as myself – resign!’ Giron instead agrees to take the matter under consideration. The next scene finds Gaston in an insurance office reviewing Mariette’s coverage against various forms of loss with an agent. When told Madame is insured for 400,000 francs against burglary, he orders an increase to 850,000 francs. Gaston has also taken charge of Mariette’s diet; ‘No potatoes!’ he says to the cook. ‘Yes, M’sieu Laval,’ replies the cook, beginning another sequence of wipes echoing the one earlier when the servants responded to Madame Colet. After the cook, next up is the butler: ‘No, M’sieu

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‘Is this what you mean?’

Laval.’ Then a ‘pretty little maid in Gaston’s bedroom, holding a duster’: ‘Maybe, M’sieu Laval!’ Finally, Mariette herself, lying on a mat doing exercises while Gaston looks on, swings her legs over her head and asks, ‘Is this what you mean, M’sieu Laval?’ Dressed like a trainer, he replies, ‘Absolutely, Madame Colet.’ The shot of Mariette with her bum on display is one of many examples of what makes Trouble in Paradise a pre-Code film (even though, strictly speaking, the Motion Picture Production Association started issuing moral guidelines in 1930). The combination of wipes and dialogue, both so similar to the earlier sequence that served to emphasize the nature of Mariette’s lifestyle, now demonstrates how completely Gaston has taken over both the firm and the household. Mariette seems concerned that he might be working too hard and invites him to one of her parties: ‘Just a little tango – no?’ The song covering the title is in tango rhythm and has sounded non-diegetically at different points in the film. This is the first moment when the music that thus far has been outside the world of the characters enters their reality. The tango, after all, is the dance of love, so the music adds the promise of passion to Mariette’s flirtatious prattle: ‘Oh, you with your messy old papers and contracts and money-money-money – all those uninteresting things.’ Gaston’s reply is the essence of dramatic irony:

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‘They’re very interesting to me, madame. And somebody in this house should worry about money.’ The next morning finds Gaston dictating a letter to someone out of frame. We hear the sound of typing as Gaston says, ‘New paragraph. Furthermore, it is Madame’s wish …’ As the camera pulls back, the shot widens to reveal the secretary’s new typist – Lily, whose criminal alias is now Mademoiselle Gautier. He’s composing a letter instructing the bank to deposit half of the interest on Mariette’s investments into her account, ‘the other half, contrary to custom, shall be delivered in cash into Madame’s personal custody’ – that means, Gaston adds to Lily, ‘that on the second of June we’ll have eight hundred and fifty thousand francs’. This may be the first real clue that Gaston has developed a soft spot for Mariette, since the amount of the anticipated theft is precisely what she is insured against in the event of burglary. She doesn’t stand to lose anything. Lily, however, adds that the mark has ‘a jewelry’s worth of fortune’ (that jokey line was improvised on set by someone, since the screenplay says, blandly, ‘And her jewelry is worth a fortune!’). ‘No jewelry!’ insists Gaston. ‘If we’re broke, all right. I might pick up a million-franc necklace. But in times like these when we’re doing a cash business – why take a chance on jewelry?’ The phrase ‘in times like these’ runs like a refrain throughout the film as overt social commentary on the Great Depression, but here it ironically refers not to hard times but to the fortunate circumstances in which the two thieves find themselves. They have the opportunity, thanks to Gaston’s machinations, to steal a fortune in cash without worrying about the middleman, as they would if they had to fence jewellery. But Gaston has missed Lily’s meaning. She has her eye on one of Mariette’s necklaces – ‘you know, that one with the seed pearls?’ – that she wants for herself: ‘It would go just beautifully with my neck.’ Gaston is moved and the two embrace, but the butler interrupts to summon ‘Mademoiselle Gautier’ for a talk with Madame. She’s in bed having breakfast and has asked to see the new typist to talk to her about Gaston. He’s working too hard, she thinks, and

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Where the necklace goes

wants the new girl to do more to help – but not too much. Mariette insists that Mademoiselle Gautier leave at 5:00 p.m. sharp and, as an added incentive, she gives her a 50 franc pay rise, even though most employers are reducing salaries, ‘in times like these’. Hopkins’s acting here recalls the earlier scene in the hotel with Gaston when she was posing as a countess. Now she is pretending to be a working girl, ‘playing the part of a modest, polite little secretary’, a part that evidently calls for overstatement. Lily is quick to attend to Mariette’s needs – serving her two lumps of sugar and stirring her coffee for her – and even returns a diamond ring to Madame that she finds on the floor. The sight of an open box of jewellery almost proves too much – Lily actually sits on her hands at one point to restrain her larcenous impulses. Her false attempts to elicit sympathy – ‘You see, Mother is dead’ – run smack against Mariette’s unfeigned sangfroid: ‘Yes, that’s the trouble with mothers. First you get to like them and then they die.’ When Lily leaves the meeting with Mariette, she is furious: she knows perfectly well what the rise is really about. Gaston asks what Madame wanted. ‘You!’ says Lily, bitterly, ‘And she’s willing to pay as high as fifty francs!’ He tries to defuse Lily’s jealousy by telling her that his feelings for Mariette are strictly mercenary: ‘so far as I’m concerned, her whole sex appeal is in that safe!’ Moreover, there is

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more sex appeal arriving on the first of the month – only ten days hence: ‘Eight hundred and fifty thousand francs’. Lily grudgingly agrees to follow through with the plan, passionately clinging to Gaston and making her feelings clear: ‘Darling, remember you’re Gaston Monescu. You’re a crook. I want you as a crook. I love you as a crook. I worship you as a crook. Steal, swindle, rob – but don’t become one of those useless, good-for-nothing gigolos!’ The next shot is an extreme close-up of a clock showing 5:00 p.m. – Lily’s Mariette-mandated quitting time. We hear her voice over the image, ‘Good night, Gaston darling,’ and Gaston’s ‘Good night, sweetheart.’ We hear the sound of a kiss before Lily exits, with a warning: ‘Well, I’ll leave you alone with that lady, but if you behave like a gentleman, I’ll break your neck.’ The shot dissolves to the same clock, now reading 5:12; we hear a knock on the door and Gaston’s voice saying, ‘Come in.’ So now we know the clock is in his room. We hear Mariette’s voice pretending disappointment that Mademoiselle has left already, because she wanted to ask her to ask Gaston if he would ‘be good enough to go out to dinner with me tonight’. They both find the remark very funny. Another dissolve back to the clock reveals that more time has passed, and not just because the hands read 9:05; the clock also casts a long shadow. This time (!), the only Mademoiselle Gautier’s quitting time

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Mariette’s starting time

The phone rings, the clock ticks

sound accompanying the image is the ringing of a telephone, which goes unanswered. The next time we see the clock the face is so dark we can hardly read the hands, which show that it is now 10:50; a door opens and illuminates the clockface fully, as we hear Gaston and Mariette ‘arguing’ over how well they dance together: ‘Oh no, it’s the way you lead,’ she says; ‘No, madame, it’s the way you follow’ – ‘No, m’sieu!’, ‘Yes, madame.’ Mariette suggests they settle the dispute in the living room, since ‘the evening is still young’. The next shot shows a different

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What time is it, again?

The night is young

clock chiming the hour of 11:00 p.m., before the camera pans left to show an open bottle of champagne in an ice bucket. Next, there is a long shot through a window of a distant clock tower; we cannot see the hands, but we hear the chimes – more than one, so it must be midnight. Once again, the camera pans left, this time revealing a full moon through another window. The tone of the chimes changes as we see the last clock in the sequence, the one on the landing at the top of the stairs between the doors to Mariette’s bedroom on the left and Gaston’s office on the right, showing the time as 2:00 a.m.

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Time for champagne

Midnight in Paris

Time to say good night

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The camera pans left yet again, and now, finally, we see Mariette in medium shot wearing an elegant gown, saying good night to Gaston outside her bedroom door at the top of the stairs. A cut to another medium shot shows Gaston, dressed in a tuxedo, standing outside the door of his office, saying good night as well. Then a long shot holds both figures in the frame – ‘They look at each other for a vibrant moment,’ the screenplay says – as Mariette turns out the light and goes into her room. The romantic theme music swells as Gaston steps forward. Will he go to her room? No, he pulls the cord on the clock that turns off its illuminated face, wheels around and goes into the office; he closes the door, and we hear the click of the lock from inside. One last pan left, accompanied by suspenseful music, holds on Mariette’s door, and we hear the click of her lock as well. Gaston, it seems, has behaved like a gentleman. This celebrated sequence of nine shots covering nine hours of narrative time takes a little less than two and a half minutes of screen time. If it is not the most commonly cited example of the famous ‘Lubitsch touch’, it should be, because it captures perfectly the director’s ability to evoke audience involvement by means of indirection and innuendo. Perhaps unlike the mass of directors, Lubitsch trusts the audience to make the inferences they need to make in order to understand the action. A lesser director might have included a cut-in of a disappointed Lily hanging up the telephone after the clock shot covered by the ringing sound, but Lubitsch puts his trust in the intelligence of the viewer. He also depends on the viewer to recall earlier moments of the film, most obviously the two prior sequences of wipes featuring shots of various minor characters saying ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to Madame Colet in the first sequence, then the same characters doing the same with M’sieu Laval. Here, the principals respond to each other: ‘No, m’sieu!’, ‘Yes, madame!’ Less obviously, when the camera pans from the art deco clock to the open bottle of champagne, then in the next shot from the chiming clock tower to the full moon in the open window, we cannot help but recall Gaston’s instructions to the Venetian waiter early in the film: ‘I

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want to see that moon in the champagne.’ And at the very end of the sequence, when Lubitsch finally lets us see the characters, he doesn’t need to show them rushing into each other’s arms because he knows that by not showing them doing so he lets us know they want to. In the clock sequence we hear but do not see the characters. In the next segment, we see but do not hear them, at least at first. This is another ‘silent movie’ segment, like the earlier one of Mariette and the Major silently arguing, seen through Gaston’s opera glasses. There’s a garden party going on, but the scene is shot from Mariette’s living room through closed windows that do not permit us to hear anything. We see Madame looking around for someone, and in the next shot the camera finds Gaston talking to two attractive women. Cut back to Mariette, moving screen left out of frame, then joining Gaston in the next shot. She smiles and says something to the women, then the camera pans right to follow her and Gaston until they stop long enough for Mariette to express displeasure with her secretary’s flirtatious ways, but she smiles again soon enough and leads Gaston by the hand to another group of guests to engage in small talk, still unheard. The camera pans right again and comes to rest on Giron, looking sour and businesslike, in no mood for the party to which he has evidently not been invited anyway. He wants to see Madame; the butler Jacques assures him she will be with him shortly. The camera – and the microphone – have moved to the garden as Giron looks out of the window at Gaston, who is speaking with the Major (who calls Gaston ‘captain’). Mariette leads Gaston away to introduce him to her other guests, which include M’sieu Filiba. This is the first time the thief has encountered the man since he robbed him in Venice, and even the supremely unflappable Gaston registers concern – an anxious glance back – that the presence of Filiba is a danger to his present scheme. This complication is soon followed by another, after Mariette speaks to Giron, who makes clear to her that he thinks M’sieu Laval is not who he appears to be. Giron is not the only one who has suspicions; a woman at the party tells Filiba after he asks who this M’sieu Laval is, ‘I don’t know. She says he’s her secretary.

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And he says he is her secretary. Maybe I’m wrong – maybe he is her secretary.’ Filiba’s curiosity about Gaston’s identity is aroused, which Gaston seeks to defuse by asking Filiba point blank if the two of them have met before. He says no, and even feels insulted at the prospect: ‘That man never met me, and he knows it. Trying to make social connections!’ Meanwhile, after Giron insults Mariette by telling her that she risks becoming the target of Paris gossip if she keeps M’sieu Laval on as her secretary (‘You know what Paris is saying about the Countess Falconier and her chauffeur?’), she asks Gaston to look over some financial records with Giron, who has been working for the Colet family ‘for more than forty years’. Giron makes a point of emphasizing his tenure with the firm and contrasting it with Gaston’s brief period of employment – ‘Three weeks, I believe’; Gaston corrects him: ‘Two weeks and three days.’ Even more pertinent to Gaston’s destiny is the period of ‘more than thirty years’ that Giron claims to have known ‘the Lavals of Marseilles’, where Gaston says he’s from. Even as Giron is making his suspicions clear, Gaston looks up and sees Filiba at the window looking at him quizzically from the garden terrace. Gaston’s Laval alias is threatened from two sides, but he dispatches one threat easily enough. Having noticed something amiss in the report Giron has prepared, after a testy exchange with him Gaston takes the report and locks it in a drawer, pocketing the key. He promises Giron that he’ll come by his office tomorrow ‘and tell [him] all about the Lavals of Marseilles’. Back in the garden, the mystery of M’sieu Laval takes another comic turn when Filiba, still perplexed, snuffs out his cigarette in an ashtray shaped like a gondola. ‘We see that his mind is grappling,’ the screenplay says, ‘trying to connect gondola, Venice, and Gaston.’ From Gaston’s perspective, there’s no time to lose. He rushes up to the office where Lily is typing away and tells her he’s just run into Filiba. She’s confused at first, but Gaston helps her work out who he is – ‘Venice – Grand Hotel – room two fifty-three—’, he says, and Lily completes the sentence: ‘Five, seven and nine!’ The butler appears and

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The gondola ashtray

announces that M’sieu Filiba wants to see Gaston before he leaves. Gaston obliges, whereupon Filiba asks if he has ever been in Venice. ‘No,’ says Gaston, quickly, then turns the tables on Filiba, asking if he has ever been in Vienna, Amsterdam, Constantinople. No, he hasn’t been in any of those cities, and Gaston is particularly incredulous to hear he has not been in Constantinople, which, he insists, is superior to Venice: ‘at least you have streets’, he says, and ‘sultans, pashas—’. ‘And harems …?’ submits Filiba; ‘All kinds,’ Gaston adds, suggesting even kinkier entertainments than those Filiba had in mind with the two Italian call girls at the start of the film. Filiba whispers a question to Gaston and Gaston whispers his reply. The soundtrack switches to a hootchy-kootchy tune during this whispered exchange, so we know Gaston must have invented some salacious details about Turkish harems that he knows will titillate the hapless bachelor. Filiba seems to be satisfied, but at the last moment that quizzical look crosses his face again, which is enough for Gaston to know he may have bought a little time, but not much. He rushes back to the office and tells Lily, ‘We have to clear out.’ The couple are obviously well practised in knowing exactly what they need to do to ‘clear out’. Gaston calls the train station and gets two tickets on the night train to Berlin under the name ‘El Señor Don

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Ignacio Fernandez’. Lily experiences a moment of regret, knowing in two more days the safe would hold another 850,000 francs. They’ll only be able to take the 100,000 francs already there. Gaston waxes philosophical: ‘A bird in hand is worth two in jail.’ Lily calls the Spanish consulate as ‘La Señora Ignacio Fernandez’ and, speaking in Spanish, lines up a visa for the trip to Berlin. They’ll meet at the train station. ‘By the way, how is your German?’ It’s great, she says: ‘Grossartig – kolosal!’ Gaston says they’ll meet at midnight – ‘Also, um zwoelf Uhr’ – ‘Am Berliner Zug,’ adds Lily, on the Berlin train. They say ‘Auf wiedersehn’ to each other with a quick kiss, as Lily hurries off to pack for the trip. Once she’s out of the room, Gaston picks up the telephone and puts on his most suave manner. He calls a flower shop and orders five dozen ‘deep red roses’ to be delivered tomorrow morning at 10:00 a.m. with a card reading, ‘In memory of the late M’sieu Laval’. The call ends with a bit improvised on set: ‘What? … Charge it to Madame Colet.’ There is quite a flurry of languages in this scene, none of them subtitled (not surprising in view of the fact that it was only in 1930 that English subtitles were used in a foreign-language film).26 Besides English, we hear four different languages in the film: Italian (the garbage-gondolier, the call girls, the hotel staff), Russian (the Bolshevik and Gaston), Spanish (Lily as Señora Ignacio Fernandez) and German (Gaston and Lily) – and the English that the audience hears is ‘really’ French. The ‘French’ spoken by the three principals is all accented differently: Herbert Marshall’s Gaston has his elegant British accent, Miriam Hopkins’s Lily speaks with a Southern lilt from her native Georgia, and Kay Francis’s Mariette never lets her Oklahoma origins become known, although, of all the characters, her slight, natural lisp occasionally suggests the merest hint of a French accent. Altogether, the variety of languages and the mixture of accents create the impression of both internationalism and individualism. The primary characters come across as foreign yet familiar, quite distinctive in their linguistic differences. These qualities are perhaps less pronounced with the supporting comic characters, the Major and Filiba, as we see in the next scene,

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with the Major laying out the place cards for a dinner party to which he has invited both the unobtainable Mariette and his rival, Filiba. A brief cut-in shows Filiba in his underwear, shaving, still wondering where he might have seen this M’sieu Laval before. Mariette is also getting herself ready to leave for the Major’s party and has already asked Jacques to have the chauffeur ready her limousine. She asks Gaston how her dress, hair and lipstick look, his respective responses – ‘Beautiful. Marvellous. Crimson!’ – speak volumes about his unsaid feelings for Mariette, and she knows it. Echoing Lily’s earlier formulation, she says, ‘M’sieu Laval, I’ve got a confession to make to you … You like me. In fact, you’re crazy about me.’ It’s true: Gaston is supposed to rob the safe and meet Lily at midnight, but he is in Mariette’s thrall. They kiss once, then again, and Gaston confesses, ardently, ‘I love you,’ to which Mariette replies, ‘I believe you,’ then starts to leave for the party because, she says, she wants ‘to make it tough’ for him. They embrace again, and Mariette says, ‘We have a long time ahead …’ What follows is another one of those memorable Lubitsch ‘touch’ sequences, this one improvised on the set, according to Raphaelson. Lubitsch’s usual practice was to write most of the shots into the screenplay and film accordingly, which explains why he could shoot a script so quickly. Here, the published script calls for the camera to simply hold on Gaston and Mariette embracing as she says her lines: ‘We have a long time ahead. Weeks, months, years! Think of that, Gaston – the future lies bright before us.’ But Lubitsch, Raphaelson said, acted on his inspirations, showing the couple in a mirror when Mariette says, ‘Weeks …’, in another mirror when she says, ‘months …’ and, finally, their embracing shadows on the bed as she says, ‘years! …’ The sentiment she expresses is all the more poignant because we know that the couple do not have years ahead of them – more like a few hours. After Mariette goes off to the Major’s party, Gaston calls Lily and tells her they won’t be leaving on the midnight train after all but will take a morning train instead. So Gaston is planning on having one night with Mariette.

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‘Weeks …’

‘Months …’

‘Years …’

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Mariette also has a night of lovemaking on her mind: that much is obvious as she puts down her champagne glass and lounges dreamily on a sofa after the Major’s dinner. The Major and Filiba notice her mood as well. They both finally accept that they don’t stand a chance with the alluring widow, and that acceptance draws them together: they are becoming friends, as both disparage Gaston as a mere secretary, dull – ‘No color, no sparkle – but dependable’, the kind of man women marry. ‘Funny,’ the Major says, ‘the first time I saw him I thought he was a doctor!’ Finally, the penny drops for Filiba: he stands and rushes to Mariette, still dreaming on the sofa, and sputters out: ‘Tonsils! Positively tonsils!’ Mariette is understandably baffled and disbelieves Filiba’s fuller explanations, which she takes as her cue to leave the party. After all, she has told Gaston she would be back by 11:00 p.m. Meanwhile, at almost the same time that Filiba has his revelation, Giron figures out Gaston’s true identity as Monescu. When he confronts him, Gaston appears chastened at first and agrees to be out of the house by morning (which he had planned to do anyway), but he turns the tables on Giron, observing that the long-time manager of Colet and Company has chosen not to call the police because he himself is a crook. Gaston has examined the books and knows Giron has been embezzling money from the firm for years. Faced with this intelligence, Giron clears out and Gaston begins to ready Mariette’s bedroom for the coming tryst by dimming the light. He goes to the window to pull down the shade, looks out and sees Lily glaring at him from the window of the office bedroom on the opposite wing of the house. She has figured things out. He rushes to her and finds her opening the safe in a fury. She’s taking the 100,000 francs and going as far away from Gaston as the money will take her. ‘I wouldn’t fall for another man’, she says, ‘if he were the biggest crook on earth.’ Gaston is on his heels: ‘Now, Lily—’, he says. ‘Yes, M’sieu Colet?’, Lily replies, in one of the screen’s all-time great put-downs. She rushes out of the room, but just at that moment Mariette arrives and Lily disappears somewhere inside the

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house. Mariette goes up the stairs to find Gaston holding the door open to her own room, but she goes to his, ‘as if to say, “This is where it’s going to be”’. Gaston follows, helps Mariette take off her wrap and watches as she removes her jewellery. She asks, ‘When a lady takes off her jewels in a gentleman’s room, where does she put them?’ ‘On the night table’ is Gaston’s gallant reply. ‘But I don’t want to be a lady,’ Mariette says, and begins turning the knob of the safe. Gaston stops her with: ‘What would you say if you found your safe had been robbed?’ She wouldn’t say anything but would act – she would call the police. At this, Gaston goes to the phone and picks up the receiver, explaining that Madame has indeed been robbed, not of a mere 100,000 francs, but of millions over the years – by her husband’s school friend and manager of the family firm, Adolph J. Giron. When she hears this, Mariette takes the receiver from Gaston’s hand and puts it back on the hook. She doesn’t want to face the scandal. This bit of bourgeois hypocrisy is too much for Gaston: ‘I see! You have to be in the social register to keep out of jail. But when a man starts at the bottom and works his way up – a self-made crook – then you say, “Call the police! Put him behind bars! Lock him up!”’ Indignant, he goes to the safe and opens it so Mariette can see that she has been robbed of much more than the millions Giron embezzled: ‘You wanted a hundred thousand francs, and I thought you wanted me,’ she says. Gaston, ‘deeply moved’, tells her as the clock strikes eleven: ‘I came here to rob you … but unfortunately I fell in love with you.’ The declaration gets no reaction from Mariette, who asks, quietly, ‘Why did you take the money?’ Gaston stands speechless (‘the truth is too complicated’, the screenplay says). As Mariette leaves for her room, Gaston again looks across to the wing of the building opposite and sees Lily at the window glaring at him – she has seen everything we have seen ‘and has come to her own conclusions’. Mariette is surprised to find Mademoiselle Gautier in her room, and even more surprised to see her wave the banknotes at her and say, ‘I took it – all by myself. Now you can have your little romance!’ When Gaston shows up, Lily

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looks at him but speaks to Mariette: ‘You wanted to buy him for fifty francs. Well, you can have him for nothing!’ At that, she tosses the wad of bills aside; it lands on the bed, of course. But Lily keeps recalculating the exchange value of romantic relationships. First, she says to Gaston, ‘You were willing to sacrifice a hundred thousand francs for her.’ Then, she turns to Mariette, and says (not unlike the Bolshevik earlier): ‘You were willing to pay a hundred and twentyfive thousand francs for a handbag. You can pay a hundred thousand for him!’ At that, she takes the wad of bills from the bed after all, and makes her exit, addressing Mariette first, then turning to Gaston, as she says, ‘Goodbye, Madame Colet [pause] and Company!’ Mary Pickford once said of Lubitsch, ‘He was a director of doors. Everybody came in and out of doors …’27 She was being dismissive, but the observation contains an element of artistic truth. Here, after Lily leaves, slamming the door behind her, Gaston follows, leaving Mariette staring at the closed door and listening to muffled voices and footsteps going up and down the spiral staircase. More than a half-minute passes before Gaston comes back through the door to say goodbye and muse about what might have been: ‘It could have been marvellous,’ he says. ‘Divine,’ she says. ‘Wonderful,’ Gaston says, adding that, come tomorrow morning, when she awakens to a policeman serving a warrant rather than a maid serving breakfast, ‘then you’ll be glad you’re alone’. ‘But it could have been glorious,’ she insists. ‘Lovely,’ Gaston agrees. Finally, they kiss goodbye, and just as he is about to go out of her bedroom door, Gaston turns to her and says:

You know what you’re missing?

CLOSE-UP MARIETTE (She shuts her eyes and dreamily nods.) CLOSE-UP GASTON (In doorway.) GASTON (shaking his head) No … (Out of his coat pocket he takes the

necklace of seed pearls.) That’s what you’re



missing! … Your gift to her.

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CLOSE-UP MARIETTE (For an instant she is taken aback; then she smiles.) MARIETTE (graciously)

With the compliments of Colet and Company!

Gaston bows, smiling gently, and leaves, closing the door behind him. The camera holds on the door briefly until the shot dissolves to one of Lily and Gaston in the back seat of a taxicab, the streetlights through the back window of the cab suggesting that they might make the midnight train to Berlin after all. But Lily, sitting with her arms crossed, is still visibly upset. Gaston begins groping about in his jacket pocket looking for the strand of seed pearls, Madame Colet’s – and his – gift to her. An alarmed look crosses his face as Lily looks at him slyly before the realization dawns on him, just as Lily fishes the strand of pearls out of her décolleté, reaches behind her back for the now-famous, diamond-encrusted handbag and drops the pearls inside it. Gaston beams approval as Lily opens her other purse – the one that should contain the 100,000 francs – only to find it empty. Now it is her turn to look alarmed, as Gaston smiles, pulls the banknotes out of his jacket pocket and stuffs them into the open purse on Lily’s lap. Lily responds with an ecstatic ‘Gaston!’ This recapitulation of the ‘foreplay’ scene in the hotel when the pair of thieves show off The pearls, the purse …

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… and the cash

their pickpocketing skills to one another – culminating in the garter gag – makes the erotic analogy that has run through the film as clear as it can be: Gaston and Lily don’t have sex in the back seat of the taxi, exactly, but the action of jamming the cash into the open purse is a pretty bold metaphor for 1932. Of the thieving, loving couple, the screenplay says, simply, ‘Together forever, they embrace and kiss.’ What the screen says, however, is an awful lot more than that.

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3 Performance The opening credits of Trouble in Paradise name seven ‘players’, in this order: Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Herbert Marshall, Charlie Ruggles, Edward Everett Horton, C. Aubrey Smith and Robert Greig. That’s not just a list of actors but of acting styles, none of which is the least like the others. The observation can perhaps best be brought home by way of the two comic performances by Ruggles and Horton, each of whom inflects the fatuousness of the characters they play in different ways. Ruggles gives the taciturn Major a kind of baffled dignity, while Norton imbues the voluble Filiba with something akin to dithering desperation. These two actors were among the premier comic performers of the 1930s, but their careers extended

The Butler and the Bachelors: Robert Greig, Charlie Ruggles, Edward Everett Horton

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well beyond that golden decade, each continuing to act in film and television well into the 1960s (curiously, both did voice work for The Bullwinkle Show, aka Rocky and His Friends, the arch cartoon series that ran from 1959 to 1963). Born in the same year, 1886, they both died in 1970. Ruggles had earlier taken comic roles in two of Lubitsch’s musicals, The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) and One Hour with You (1932).28 Horton became a Lubitsch regular after Trouble in Paradise, appearing in Design for Living, The Merry Widow, Angel (1937) and Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938). He is perhaps better known than Ruggles is today because of the roles he took as Fred Astaire’s comic sidekick in The Gay Divorcee (1934) and Top Hat (1935), but the two were equally celebrated in the 1930s. Ruggles tells a story about how Lubitsch expected comic fireworks when he paired them in Trouble in Paradise but was initially disappointed. To get the effect he wanted, sometimes Lubitsch would position Ruggles closer to the camera in a scene featuring Horton, then pull Horton aside and tell him, ‘Aha, you see that Ruggles step up and steal your scene? You see, eh? Well, you going to let him get away with it?’ Then he’d do the opposite with a scene featuring Ruggles: ‘See, what did I tell you? That guy Horton is stealing your scenes. Better start something.’ Later, he sent them both invitations to the preview of the film, telling them to come see how each stole scenes from the other.29 The last two players on the credit list, C. Aubrey Smith and Robert Greig, likewise give distinctive performances, but here the difference is mainly due to the roles they play as Giron, who runs Madame Colet’s business, and Jacques, the butler who manages her household. Greig (1879–1958) made a career of playing manservants after his Broadway success as Hives the Butler in the Marx Brothers’ farce Animal Crackers, in 1930, a role he brought to the screen two years later. In 1932, in addition to playing Jacques in Trouble in Paradise, Greig took the title role in Jitters the Butler, a two-reel RKO vehicle for the vaudeville antics of the comedy team of Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough. Clark and McCullough were, at best, secondrate practitioners of the manic style perfected by the Marx Brothers,

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but Greig traded up – way up – when Preston Sturges cast the rotund character actor in The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan’s Travels (1941) and The Palm Beach Story (1942). If there is something a little odd about the casting of the impeccably British-seeming Greig (he was actually born in Australia) as a French butler, the choice of C. Aubrey Smith (1863–1948) as Giron might seem, at first, even odder. The British community in Hollywood was considerable, to say the least, led by such luminaries as Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock, but none of them made a show of his Englishness quite like Smith did, flying the Union Jack at his Beverly Hills home, getting his news solely from the London Times (two weeks late) and serving as president of the Hollywood Cricket Club.30 But Smith had played a Frenchman before, most recently as the avuncular Duc d’Artelines in Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932), released a few months before Trouble in Paradise. The movie convention of suspending disbelief and accepting that the English in the film is ‘really’ French is part of the artifice of the times. But casting the Cambridge-educated Smith as Giron makes a lot of sense because the actor’s high-toned British pedigree seems perfectly suited to the character. Indeed, Lubitsch used Smith’s upper-crust Englishness quite effectively, especially in the scene near the end of the film where Giron’s haughty hypocrisy, sneering class-consciousness and superior sense of tradition play out in his confrontation with Gaston. Of the several uncredited actors, George Humbert (1880–1963) stands out for his performance as the hotel waiter. It’s not entirely clear what his real name was (unconfirmed accounts say Umberto Gianni), but there is no question about his Italian origins. In the silent era and beyond, his ethnic look allowed him to play Mexicans as well as Italians, but mostly Italians in bit parts, often in unnamed roles (the waiter, the doorman, the fruit vendor, etc.). His ethnic expertise led to a kind of Hollywood side hustle as an acting coach specializing in ‘Italian mannerisms’ (Gloria Swanson was supposed to have been a client).31 His greatest film success prior to Trouble

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in Paradise was his performance as the Italian musician Filippo Fiorentino in King Vidor’s Street Scene (1931), a role that Humbert originated on Broadway in the Edgar Rice play on which the film was based. Lubitsch obviously got Humbert to dial back the ‘Italian mannerisms’ when he played the waiter in Venice, because there is nothing overstated about the performance. In fact, the waiter seems cowed and confused by Gaston’s elegance and sophistication, never more so than when he responds to the question of how he would start the evening if Casanova suddenly became Romeo and Juliet transformed herself into Cleopatra. The screenplay indicates that the waiter delivers his line ‘in a professional and prosaic tone’, but when Humbert says, ‘I would start with cocktails,’ he imparts an element of bemused uncertainty in his response that is far from prosaic. Humbert’s ethnic understatement is countered by the ethnic overstatement of another uncredited actor, Leonid Kinskey (1903– 92). He plays the Bolshevik who upbraids Madame Colet over spending so much money on a diamond-encrusted purse ‘in times like these’. A specialist in playing ‘foreigners’, Kinskey saw his career take off after his bravura performance in Trouble in Paradise. He went on to play a similar character – some kind of radical ‘agitator’ – in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933). The Russianborn Kinskey resisted being typecast as ‘the communist’ and actually turned down some such roles,32 but his bold screen presence and heavily accented English made him perfect for small, ethnic parts in numerous films in which he played characters with names like Ivan, Boris, Zinski and, most famously, Sascha, the bartender in Casablanca (1942). Two more uncredited character actors merit mention here: Eva McKenzie (1889–1967) and Nella Walker (1886–1971). McKenzie, a bit-player in countless silent Westerns, was coming off a well-received comic turn as the maid Hester in Vin Moore’s Virtuous Husband (1931) when she was cast in Trouble in Paradise as Lily’s frowsy roommate, aka ‘the Duchess of Chambro’. She is on screen for a mere ten seconds, but her brief performance tells us a lot and implies more: she is clearly in on Lily’s scam and

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so must be her partner (she warns her, after all, to ‘slip up the back way’ when she comes home) but also has some ruse of her own going on (‘I can’t talk now’). Walker, likewise, makes the most of her limited screen time (about a minute) as Madame Bouchet, the highsociety matron at Mariette’s garden party who tells M’sieu Filiba that Gaston might actually be Madame Colet’s secretary despite the fact that everyone says he’s her secretary. Her delivery is a delightful mix of wry disdain and knowing worldliness. Despite her origins in vaudeville, Walker made a speciality of playing society ladies, perhaps most notably in King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937), where she plays Mrs Grosvenor, grandmother of the wealthy man who marries Stella’s daughter.33 The variety of acting styles evident in the performances of the credited supporting roles (Ruggles, Horton, Smith and Greig), as well as in those of the uncredited parts (Humbert, Kinskey, McKenzie and Walker), is even more apparent in the performances of the three stars: Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis and Herbert Marshall (in the billing order of the opening credits). Lubitsch had directed Hopkins once before in The Smiling Lieutenant and would do so again in Design for Living. As the anecdote about Ruggles and Horton shows, Lubitsch often encouraged rivalry between actors if it suited the characters they played. In The Smiling Lieutenant, the lively blonde Hopkins, a newcomer cast opposite the demure brunette Claudette Colbert, often tried to steal scenes from the (slightly) more established actress, who, like Hopkins, had come to Hollywood from Broadway with the advent of the sound era in motion pictures. Lubitsch had a special attraction to blondes, so the flirtatious Hopkins often tried to manipulate him, or, at least, Lubitsch allowed her to think she could manipulate him. The dynamic on the set of Trouble in Paradise between two very different actresses appears to have repeated that of The Smiling Lieutenant, with Hopkins now trying to upstage Kay Francis. An oft-repeated story about the rivalry has Hopkins moving about to force Francis out of the shot in the breakfast scene where Mariette manoeuvres Lily into leaving

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the office at 5:00 p.m. sharp so she can start her affair with Gaston. Lubitsch’s solution was to nail the chair in which Hopkins was sitting to the floor so she could not move around in the shot.34 Hopkins was known for her versatility as a performer, a quality that made her well suited to the role she played in Trouble in Paradise. Indeed, she really plays three parts – the Countess, Lily and Mademoiselle Gautier, the typist. Of course, Herbert Marshall’s Gaston also has two additional facets as the bogus Baron and the fake secretary, Laval, but the three aspects of his character are not distinguished one from the other as clearly as Hopkins delineates the Countess and the typist from Lily. She makes a much more overstated Countess than Marshall does a Baron, but the overstated acting is a necessary part of the performance, signalling that her pose as the willowy, would-be aristocrat is part of a con. If anything, ‘Mademoiselle Gautier’ is even more of a caricature than ‘the Countess’ (there are moments when Hopkins fairly mugs for the camera in her scene with Francis), but the effect of all this overstatement is to suggest that there really is a Lily giving shape to the two exaggerated versions of herself, that there is a real person – and a real personality – beneath it all, and that that person is, in turn, a heightened version of the vivacious Hopkins herself. Hopkins mugs it up

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Time and again, commentators claim that Lubitsch always managed to draw out the best performances from his actors, that when a Miriam Hopkins or a Herbert Marshall act they do not create characters so much as make the characters reflective of some truth about themselves, so that what winds up on the screen is authentic and believable. Marshall himself explained to an interviewer that once ‘a player is cast in a Lubitsch picture his troubles are over. He can be completely assured […] that Lubitsch will bring out in him a better performance than he ever suspected himself capable of giving.’35 The statement at first seems hard to square with Lubitsch’s observation about Marshall: ‘He is one actor who doesn’t need direction.’36 But the contradiction goes away if we think of the part and the personality as concordant. Lubitsch let the actor be himself, in other words, because the suave, urbane bearing of Herbert Marshall was not so different from Gaston Monescu’s. The gossip surrounding Marshall and his two female co-stars suggests as much, since the on-screen attraction to two women was supposed to have been enacted off screen, with Marshall having affairs with both Hopkins and Francis.37 The truth of these rumours is suspect in the case of Francis (her diary records no such liaison),38 but the longrunning affair that the married Marshall had with Gloria Swanson shows that he was not exactly cast against type in Trouble in Paradise as a ladies’ man with an inexhaustible supply of seductive charm. Another biographical detail with relevance to the film concerns Marshall’s service in World War I: he lost a leg at the Battle of Arras in 1917 (he once told a reporter that he went into the war ‘with both feet, as you Americans say’ – meaning ‘enthusiastically’).39 His artificial leg left him with a lumbering walk that would have been incongruous with the suave character he played in Trouble in Paradise: this is why there are so few full shots of Marshall walking in the film – and that’s a body double you see scampering up and down the spiral staircase so many times. As for Madame Colet, that part obviously does not require recourse to the sort of deception necessary for the other two leading

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roles. Throughout the film, Francis sustains the role of the wealthy widow who both deserves and does not deserve to be robbed. On the one hand, the Bolshevik is right to claim that no one should indulge in the kind of extravagance Mariette pursues ‘in times like these’, but, on the other hand, she does show sympathy for the working man in her first scene when she refuses Giron’s demand to cut salaries. In that scene, the claim that ‘business bores me’ serves a purpose larger than business, as Francis reveals the wealthy widow’s cunning ability to use her presumed inability to run the company to make decisions and manage the business after all – the way she wants. Then, the very next scene has Mariette declining the purchase of one handbag as too expensive, only to purchase another for more than forty times the cost of the first. Much of this oscillation from shallow to substantial is written into the script, of course, but depends for its effect on the wilful submissiveness of Francis’s performance. Also, the 1932 audience would likely have registered some of the emotional charm Francis conveys as victim-cum-seductress against the background of some of her recent roles, such as the gold-digging call girl who finds the right guy in George Cukor’s Girls about Town (1931). The dramatic situation of that film is effectively reversed in Trouble in Paradise when Gaston, after having very nearly become the good-for-nothing gigolo Lily fears he might, falls in love with the wealthy widow. The screenwriter Curt Siodmak said of Francis in Trouble in Paradise that ‘Lubitsch brought out the best in her’,40 echoing the kind of comment Marshall and so many others have made about the director’s gift for working with actors. Indeed, acting was essential to the technical side of Lubitsch’s directing since he performed all the parts himself so his actors could know what he wanted in basic outline, even down to the smallest gestures. The reports are that Lubitsch’s illustrative performances were rather broad, which is understandable given that his own experience as a screen actor was limited to the mostly pantomimic silent era. But there is another side to his directing that is much harder to characterize than his care

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for the way an actor opened a door or put on a hat. Lubitsch never offered a full-blown theory of acting, but it seems hard to imagine that his thinking was not informed by his years of working with the revolutionary stage director Max Reinhardt. Reinhardt’s stage techniques have long been recognized for their influence on German film-making, during the early 1920s especially. In her book on German expressionist film, The Haunted Screen (first published in France as L’Écran démoniaque, 1952), Lotte Eisner singles out the chiaroscuro effects of Reinhardt’s stage lighting as being particularly influential, as well as his handling of crowd scenes (which inspired Lubitsch’s directing in his costume films). She also observes that almost all the major film actors in Germany from the pre-World War I period to the early Weimar era – Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt, Paul Wegener, and many others – received their training as members of Reinhardt’s stage company.41 Reinhardt initially regarded cinema as an inferior art form (he tried his hand making a few films in Germany), but with the advent of sound technology he came to see it as an opportunity for achieving the ‘total work of art’ (Gesamtkunstwerk) combining multiple media, part of the legacy of Richard Wagner that Reinhardt had long honoured as a stage director. In fact, in connection with his film of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), inspired by his legendary production of the play at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Reinhardt said that cinema was well on its way to becoming ‘a Gesamtkunstwerk for the masses’.42 Reinhardt’s influence on Lubitsch has not been fully assessed, partly because of Eisner’s mean-spirited estimation of Lubitsch’s work as an inferior, ‘mechanical’ application of his mentor’s methods. What Reinhardt has to say about the art of acting, however, resonates with what we know of Lubitsch’s approach to film performance. For one thing, Reinhardt stressed the importance of the ensemble above all and discouraged actors under his direction from thinking of themselves as ‘stars’: ‘A musician in a quartet, however great an artist he is in his own right, must never place himself outside the ensemble.

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He must adapt himself to the harmony of the whole.’43 Lubitsch’s early experience directing Mary Pickford in Rosita suggests, at first, that he was ill-suited to the Hollywood star system, but the problems he had in that film are likely due more to the director’s limited grasp of English. In any event, Lubitsch became increasingly comfortable with some of the biggest names in Hollywood (like Greta Garbo, for instance), and the stars gravitated towards him because they wanted to be in a ‘Lubitsch film’, precisely because of the reputation he acquired for eliciting memorable performances. In 1924, apropos of the observation that what such disparate figures as Wagner, Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg had in common was a focus on the actor, Reinhardt wrote, ‘Today and for all time, man must stand at the whole art of the theatre, man as actor.’ He added that theatre was at its best when all involved with a production ‘imaginatively assumed the actor’s part’.44 This focus certainly squares with Lubitsch’s technique of directing by performing all the parts in a screenplay himself for the purpose of instructing his actors. But there is more to Reinhardt’s philosophy of acting beyond this similitude that seems to explain Lubitsch’s own philosophy. In a 1926 interview, Reinhardt had this to say about the actor and his role, when a Berlin newspaper reporter asked him, ‘Should the actor remain above his role or become one with it?’: In the theatre, as in every art, all we are ultimately seeking is the personality, and the stronger and greater this is, the more satisfied we are. If the actor as a personality were to disappear within his role and were not himself perceptible, then our expectations would be disappointed. The art of acting is an art of revelation, not one of transformation! To transform oneself externally with makeup, in tone, movement and gesture, that is, to present something other than what one really is, seems to me to be beneath the art of acting.45

Lubitsch echoed the Reinhardt approach in a 1923 interview about his style of directing, when he told the New York Times that he liked

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his actors to ‘have on as little make-up as possible’ and to eschew ‘sweet, nice acting, which is unreal’. He was referring specifically to The Marriage Circle, but his remarks resonate as a statement of general principle: ‘We want to touch the emotions of the people who see this picture’, he said.46 Also, in a book chapter from 1924 Lubitsch explains the importance of an actor ‘gesturing’ with his entire body to get the personality of the character on the screen: ‘The gestures of an actor must be so characteristic of his part and at the same time so expressive that the audience can understand him even when his back is turned to the camera.’47 The comment concerns silent screen performance, of course, but it also seems like another statement of general principle; after all, in Trouble in Paradise, when Horton has his back to the camera (see p. 33) we nonetheless understand the ‘gesture’ as a register of Filiba’s dejection when Mariette declines his proposal of marriage. But Reinhardt says more about stage acting that seems to match Lubitsch’s philosophy of film performance: The actor does indeed undergo a transformation, he takes on a destiny foreign to himself, but he does not become another person. He immerses himself in his role, and when he re-emerges he has not of course become another person, but he is possessed by a foreign destiny, animated by foreign passions and experiences. An actor’s reward consists in the ecstasy of this transformation; the audience’s reward is the revelation of the personality.48

This way of thinking makes a lot of sense in the context of Trouble in Paradise, where, you might say, the actors do not become different people – they just live different lives on the screen from the ones they live off the screen. Of course, most stars of the period established a screen persona that remained substantially the same from picture to picture and, with the help of the director, found ways to subtly inflect their performances to make character and persona coexist. But Reinhardt’s philosophy helps to explain the particular inflection the stars’ personae assumed under Lubitsch’s direction. His tendency

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to cast (mostly) American actors to play either European characters or American characters in a European setting means that an actor in a Lubitsch film was put in the position of literally being ‘animated by foreign passions and expectations’, as Reinhardt puts it, of undergoing a transformation that had nothing to do with costume or makeup. In a way, the approach to performance captures something essential about Lubitsch himself, who was, after all, a European living out his own foreign destiny in Hollywood.

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4 Production Design Together with Charles D. Hall of Universal, Cedric Gibbons of MGM and Van Nest Polglase of RKO, Hans Dreier of Paramount dominated art direction in the motion picture industry during the studio era (Dreier started with Paramount in 1923 and worked his way up to supervising director, a post he held from 1927 to 1950). Even when these legendary art directors did not themselves supervise the production design of a particular film, they assigned design duties to one of their hand-picked, studio-trained assistants, thereby assuring that each major studio had its unique signature style.

Lubitsch on set when the film was called The Honest Finder

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Universal more or less cornered the market in Gothic design with Frankenstein (1931) and its sequels, while MGM, RKO and Paramount all vied for the most stylish version of art deco. Gibbons’s style may have been somewhat restrained in Grand Hotel (1932), but he later became known as ‘the great pastry chef’ of art deco. His rococo stylings led Lubitsch to comment, after making The Merry Widow at MGM, ‘There is Paramount Paris, and Metro Paris, and of course the real Paris. But Paramount’s is the most Parisian of all.’49 In fairness, The Merry Widow is set in belle époque Paris, so Gibbons’s characteristic excess might be excused for historical reasons, but there is still an over-the-top, confectioner’s quality to the design. As for Polglase, no one would call the Venice of Top Hat ‘the most Venetian of all’ because the art deco fantasy of the city in that film is so ostentatiously stagey as to be incongruous with the very idea of Venice. By contrast, Dreier adopted an altogether different style for the Venice scenes of Trouble in Paradise and used a restrained, tasteful version of art deco for the Paris settings. The difference in the two designs is consistent not only with the different look of each city but also with the two most profound influences on Dreier’s aesthetic sensibility – first Max Reinhardt, then the Bauhaus School. The dark, chiaroscuro style of Dreier’s Venice reveals the The Merry Widow (1934): Paris, Metro

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Top Hat (1935): Venice, RKO

expressionist influence of Reinhardt, while his Paris betrays evidence of the clean, modernist style of the Bauhaus. Trained as an architect in Munich, Dreier worked on films for the German production company UFA (Universum Film AG) in Berlin before coming to Hollywood at Lubitsch’s invitation in 1923 to design the sets for Forbidden Paradise (1924). Only the fourth film of Lubitsch’s US period, Forbidden Paradise is a ‘period’ drama with contemporary costumes that looks forward to his movie musicals set in imaginary European kingdoms. Pola Negri stars as a sort of flapper czarina conducting her intrigues and affairs in settings that Dreier designed to look like a cross between a Byzantine church and a Russian palace. The mixture of historicist and contemporary design elements in Forbidden Paradise reflects, in embryo form, the dual expressionist-modernist influence Dreier underwent in Germany prior to his immigration to the US. A more ornate historicist style dominates in the 1924 Paramount production (Lubitsch was on loan from Warner Bros.), with only a few contemporary touches inserted for comic contrast (characters in feudal costumes wear wristwatches and drive around in limousines), while in Trouble in Paradise the two styles are not mixed but clearly demarcated into the two major settings of the film, Venice and Paris.

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In Top Hat, Polglase embraced the kitsch cliché of Venice wholeheartedly, making the Adriatic capital look like a Las Vegas theme park. In Trouble in Paradise, Dreier did as Lubitsch wished and avoided clichés, not only in the opening shots of the backs of buildings but also by avoiding images of Venetian landmarks. Occasionally, in the background of some shots we glimpse plausible suggestions of the dome of the basilica and the campanile in Piazza San Marco. Mostly, however, such landmarks are not that important to the establishment of a sense of old-world elegance, provided by the kinds of set dressings One night in Venice

Dinner with Dreier

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we see when Lily and Gaston dine together in the hotel room: the gleaming champagne bucket; the long-stemmed glasses; the elegant, bordered tablecloth; the chandelier dripping with crystal; the equally elaborate wall sconce; and the fireplace in the background topped by the massive faux-baroque sculpture all convey an impressive level of opulence, style and taste. The hotel dining room set serves to stage the action in traditional fashion without challenging the two-dimensional constraints of the screen, the movement within the frame being almost entirely left to right or right to left. Other sets, however, offer a sense of cinematic space that creates a greater impression of depth, as when the hotel staff gossip about the robbery in the royal suite. Here, the maid in the foreground speaks to another maid in the background as a male servant ascends the stairs. The prominent horizontal line of the background balustrade, the strong verticals of the columns, and the contrasting diagonals of the banisters and foreground balustrade all contribute to a complex sense of space. The effect here will be repeated many times in the Paris segment – though not in so angular a fashion but rather in a more curvilinear form, in keeping with the art deco settings of that segment. Art deco is indisputably moderne, but architecturally speaking, the style is not identical with modernism (the kitsch deco of Top Hat Cinematic space

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makes that point clear). The term, after all, is a shortened form of art décoratif, and modernism eschews decoration in favour of simple lines and clean, uncluttered surfaces. At the same time, art deco can be made to harmonize with modernism if the decorative element is minimized, which is what Dreier does in Trouble in Paradise. Early on in the Paris segment, there is a perfect amalgamation of art deco and modernist style in the shot of the entrance to Colet et Cie, Paris: the name of the company is lettered in deco style, while the background matte shows office and factory buildings in the architectural style of Art deco meets Bauhaus

Le Corbusier on the patio

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the Bauhaus. Much of the furniture in Madame Colet’s modernist home looks like it could have been designed by Le Corbusier, as the shot of the gardener on the patio shows. Indeed, Dreier is supposed to have used some of his own Bauhaus-designed furniture to dress the set.50 The elegant functionalism of the patio furniture is only one of many modernist features in Madame Colet’s home – including paintings that suggest Modigliani – but the design element that is most prominent in Dreier’s set is the graceful spiral staircase that curves up to the second floor. The staircase first appears in the shot of the butler Jacques as part of the montage introducing Madame Colet’s several servants in their respective domains. In numerous shots thereafter, the massive art deco chandelier that centres the curving space of the stairway also appears, as in another shot of Jacques, this one looking down on the butler from the second-floor balcony. Later, Madame Colet is seen on the stairway from Gaston’s perspective on the balcony in a shot that also affords a view of a party in the room on the first floor (a room curtained off in that initial shot of Jacques at the base of the staircase). The first-floor space is shot from a different angle earlier, when the group of rewardseekers assemble after Madame Colet places the newspaper notice Modigliani, almost

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‘Yes, Madame’

Jacques looks up

Mariette descending a staircase

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A modernist interior

A Parisian telephone

A Venetian telephone

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about her lost purse. With the staircase and chandelier visible to the left of the frame, this shot offers clear evidence of Dreier’s interest in Bauhaus design, the clean, curving surface of the second-floor wall at the top of the frame forming a strong geometric counter to the strict grid of the door at the centre of the shot and the windows to the left. As these images of the interior of Madame Colet’s home show, the architectonic design of the set gave Lubitsch and his cameraman Victor Milner numerous opportunities to shoot from unusual angles, creating a more interesting sense of cinematic space for the viewer. In addition, Dreier fills that space with all kinds of beautiful objects that sometimes complement the modernist setting and sometimes contrast with it. An example of the former is the clock sequence, with each of the three clocks offering a different take on the art deco aesthetic. Another example of this type of stylistic consistency is the elegant art deco telephone that rings when Lily tries to reach Gaston, a contrast with the old-fashioned style of the telephone she uses in Gaston’s hotel room in Venice when she takes the call from the ‘Duchess’. For stylistic contrast with his modernist interior, by the doorway to the patio Dreier placed a pair of Chinese figurines, which Gaston examines after he returns Madame Colet’s purse; they are in their place later in the film when Jacques brings a message to Giron. Even though the figurines are not in the modernist style, they illustrate the modernist taste for ‘Oriental’ and ‘primitive’ art, and the like. More important, the figurines effectively ‘anchor’ the viewers in the scene, allowing them to orientate themselves in the cinematic space because they have seen the objects before. If there is a fashion cognate with the graceful, curvilinear style of art deco, it would be the bias-cut gown that started out as the brainchild of Madeleine Vionnet, a Parisian couturier whose innovations revolutionized the look of women’s dresses in the 1930s. The technique of cutting fabric on a bias, across the grain of the weave, had been used earlier only for collars, cuffs and other details before Vionnet began assembling the whole dress from bias-cut

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Objets d’art …

… stay where they are

panels in the late 1920s.51 Gowns made from bias-cut fabric hugged the female form and draped elegantly on the body – or rather certain types of bodies, mainly those that were tall and slender like Kay Francis’s or proportionately petite versions of the same like Miriam Hopkins’s. The two female stars of Trouble in Paradise were dressed in gowns designed by Paramount’s own master of the bias-cut, Travis Banton, who realized to the full the potential of the technique for plunging décolletage in both the front and the back. Hopkins makes her first appearance in a gold lamé bias-cut evening gown with the

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Gowns by Banton

angled fabric panels clearly visible, the dress following her curves and gleaming like the champagne bucket to her left. How much an image like this one might be critiqued for the objectification of women’s bodies depends on the ideological predispositions of the viewer, of course, but any such critique needs to take account of the diegesis, which makes Lily’s seductive appearance an indispensable part of the profession she practises as a cosmopolitan pickpocket. At the same time, there is no denying that images of beautiful women in sexy gowns formed part of the Hollywood business model. Indeed, haute couture and modernist design come together in Trouble in Paradise so seamlessly as to make the distinction between aesthetic artefact and commercial product moot: clearly, the film is both things at the same time, but then so is a Le Corbusier chaise longue. In any event, the design aesthetic of the film was a significant part of its appeal in 1932. A critic for the New York Sun praised the ‘impeccable, tasteful modernity of its settings’, adding that the film ‘almost makes one believe that modernistic décor has some permanent and lasting value […] At any rate, at its best, its lines, angles and tasteful oddities are peculiarly susceptible to photography; and Lubitsch takes full advantage of these.’52 As several newspapers reported at the time, ‘[b]ecause of the widespread duplication by

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furniture manufacturers of the settings of “Trouble in Paradise”’, Lubitsch sought to protect the settings of his next film, Design for Living, by taking out a government patent on the designs – remarkable proof of the popularity of ‘the moderne motif’ in the film.53 Although the title of that film refers to the ménage à trois, it also suggests the famous phrase ‘machine for living’ that Le Corbusier used to describe the rational, planned nature of the modern house. In the world of set design, it is hard to imagine a better example of a ‘machine for cinema’ than the one Dreier created for Trouble in Paradise: Madame Colet’s modernist home. Truth in advertising

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5 Reception Trouble in Paradise opened in New York City on Tuesday, 8 November 1932 – election day. On Wednesday the 9th, the New York Times ran the banner headline, ‘Roosevelt Winner in a Landslide’, while on page 28 of the paper the Times film critic, Mordaunt Hall, reviewed Trouble in Paradise as ‘a shimmering, engaging piece of work’, adding that it ‘points no moral’. Neither the headline proclaiming Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s landslide victory nor the critic’s concerns about the lack of a moral message were good harbingers of the film’s eventual fate, the first because the Great Depression obviously continued after FDR became the 32nd President of the US, the second because concerns about the morality of motion pictures would escalate in the coming years. Even though a mood of optimism swept the country immediately after FDR’s election, he would not take office until 4 March 1933, by which time Trouble in Paradise had gone into general distribution and was not doing particularly good box office in the Depression-ravaged heartland. Lubitsch first broached the idea to Raphaelson for a film based on The Honest Finder in early 1932, the last full year of the Hoover administration and one of the worst years of the Depression, when the total number of unemployed – 12,060,000 available workers – was greater than the number working in an entire sector of the economy, agriculture, which employed 10,170,000.54 In January, Hoover established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) to bail out failing banks, insurance companies, building and loan associations, and the like, to the tune of $2 billion. By July 1932, when Raphaelson polished off the script and Lubitsch began shooting, the New York Stock Exchange had bottomed out at 41.22, a drop of 90 per cent since the high of 381.17 on 3 September 1929, seven weeks before the Wall Street Crash. Also in July 1932, Congress

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passed the Emergency Relief and Construction Act authorizing the RFC to issue $1.5 billion in bonds to the states to finance public works projects to address unemployment, as well as $300 million – a modest amount considering the scope of the problem – for relief to the poor.55 These efforts had little effect as the economy continued to crater. In September, as Lubitsch finished shooting, the New York Times ran a story about ‘the rush of pictures’ in Hollywood, speculating that ‘the greatest production spurt in the last three years’ might possibly ‘herald the end of the depression’.56 In early October, when Lubitsch decided to change the title of his film from The Honest Finder to Trouble in Paradise, newspapers reported jobless riots in England and Europe, even as industry leaders, like the president of Bethlehem Steel, identified high business taxes as the real problem.57 By the end of the year, the unemployment rate was 23.6 per cent (second highest in US history, exceeded only by 24.9 per cent in 1933) and US GDP was -12.9 per cent, the worst to date, showing just how unreliable that great production spurt in Hollywood was as a bellwether of the general economy. Indeed, Trouble in Paradise lost money at the box office and played a role in Paramount Studio’s financial problems. Along with RKO, Fox and Universal, Paramount declared bankruptcy in 1933,58 proving that whatever optimism might have attended Roosevelt’s election, its near-term economic effect on the entertainment industry was nil. That other harbinger of difficulties ahead – Hall’s reservations about the film’s moral value – proved to be prescient. The critic sounded the same doubts a few days after his initial review, complimenting Lubitsch on his ability ‘to make a good picture out of the poorest of tales’. However much the director’s charming, ‘well-dressed thieves’ might impress in terms of style, ‘the handsome man and the attractive girl are never to be taken seriously, which excuses the absence of anything akin to a moral in this diversion’.59 Nonetheless, Trouble in Paradise made Hall’s list of ten best films of 1932, along with another Lubitsch film, One Hour with You, his musical remake of The Marriage Circle. Hall still tempered his

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praise of the film by saying that Lubitsch ‘avoided all the moviesque pitfalls […] with this scant tale’. (Other films on Hall’s list included Edmund Golding’s Grand Hotel, with Greta Garbo leading the roster of big-name stars, and Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starring Miriam Hopkins.) Norbert Lusk of the Los Angeles Times expressed no moral reservations in his review; in fact, he was quite effusive in his praise: [T]he film combines to extraordinary degree the subtlety, slyness, and delicacy associated with Lubitsch at his best and the forthright virtues of humour, suspense and a well-developed plot which moves steadily forward to a thoroughly satisfying conclusion. Its gayety [sic] is keyed to a normal comprehension, its story conforms to the sound dramatics and through it all there bubbles surprise and more surprise, without any hint of strain or even effort.

The critic’s only doubts were that all the subtlety and slyness might make the film fall short of ‘box-office appreciation in the “sticks”’, a concern that seems linked to an advance in Lubitsch’s treatment of romance over the series of movie musicals he made with the rakish Maurice Chevalier, starting in 1929 with The Love Parade. Trouble in Paradise, Lusk says, contains ‘none of that sticky sexiness and sly lubricity employed by the director to foster popular belief in Chevalier as a Don Juan’.60 The fan magazine Photoplay likewise remarked on the film’s accessibility and reserve: ‘The theme and dialogue are sophisticated, in tune with the times, but Ernst Lubitsch directs with such finesse that it doesn’t offend. Neither will it be over the heads of an average audience.’61 A closer look at ticket sales and comments from theatre owners across the US mostly validates the reviews, including questions about how the film might play outside the major cities. Following a long tradition associated with theatrical productions, Trouble in Paradise premiered in Boston prior to New York, playing at the palatial 4,350-seat Metropolitan Theatre on Tremont Street (the theatre

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Lobby of the Metropolitan Theatre, Boston

is still in existence today as the Wang Theatre). The Boston Globe commented on the qualities that made the film ‘an artistic success’ – ‘[d]istinguished direction, brilliant acting, clever comedy’ – but also expressed the sort of snooty reservations stereotypically identified as ‘Bostonian’: ‘Even the most sophisticated patron occasionally likes to see goodness rewarded and badness its punishment but in “Trouble in Paradise” it would appear that the wicked flourish […] and that badness pays dividends.’62 The trade magazine Motion Picture Herald reported that, with tickets priced at the 35–75 cents range, the Metropolitan’s gross for the week was a respectable $37,500, slightly better than the $36,500 pulled in the previous week by Six Hours to Live, a supernatural murder mystery, but well below the weekly high for the year at this theatre, the $44,500 gross earned in late January by No Limit, a romantic comedy starring Clara Bow. The next week the Metropolitan ran Mervyn LeRoy’s Three on a Match, starring

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Joan Blondell, Warren William and Bette Davis, which bettered the gross of Trouble in Paradise by $1,000.63 The Boston box office in the last week of October seems to typify the level of business the film did in other major cities for the month of November – good, but not great. Trouble in Paradise did reasonably well, sometimes outperforming whatever film had played the previous week (as happened at the 3,600-seat Paramount Theatre in Los Angeles), and sometimes not (the case at both the 2,000-seat Newman Theatre in Kansas City and the 3,300-seat Allen Theatre in Cleveland).64 But the film was not breaking attendance records – not by a long shot. At the 2,100-seat Rivoli in New York City, for example, the two-week total of $50,750 sounds impressive, but that gross was less than the one-week total of $67,100 for Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which ran at the theatre in early January.65 As the numbers for the Newman in Kansas City and the Allen in Cleveland show, Trouble in Paradise did not do as well in the Midwestern heartland of the US as it did in Boston, New York and Los Angeles. The story is the same – or worse – in the mid-sized town of Omaha, Nebraska, where the weekly gross of $5,200 at the 2,900-seat Paramount fell behind the business done by other films at that theatre and by those at the Orpheum, a comparable venue with 3,000 seats. Over a two-week period at these two theatres, the weekly gross for Trouble in Paradise was outperformed by Robert Florey’s Those We Love ($18,500), George Archainbaud’s Thirteen Women ($8,750), Victor Fleming’s Red Dust ($8,250), Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang ($7,500) and the combined gross of $9,000 from two films that ran at the Orpheum in the same week, Edward Sutherland’s Secrets of the French Police ($4,250 in three days) and William A. Wellman’s The Conquerors ($4,750 in four days).66 Even more telling are the comments made by theatre owners in medium-sized and small towns collected in the section titled ‘What the Picture Did for Me’ in the Motion Picture Herald. In December, the owner of the Majestic Theatre in Bowie, Texas, described Trouble in Paradise as a ‘very fine picture for the sophisticated’ but reported

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poor attendance: ‘Very few went in but most of them that did liked it.’67 That assessment was repeated in January 1933 by a theatre owner in Columbia, Indiana: ‘A highly sophisticated picture, but if you can get them in, they will like it.’ This owner also observed that the picture depends too much on dialogue to draw ‘the small town clientele’ looking for action, not talk.68 Disappointment over the lack of action is also part of this scathing report from February 1933 by the owner of the Ritz Theatre in Phillipsburg, New Jersey: They just wouldn’t come out to see this one and I can’t blame them. It certainly was a box office flop for me. Did not please 50% of those who saw it and I am still hearing about how it was disliked. Too draggy and nothing to hold interest. Lots of film wasted, could have been put in two reels. I have found that a little action along with the dialogue has a better chance of drawing in the small towns.69

The more sympathetic owner of the Moon Theatre in Neligh, Nebraska, knew the picture was good, ‘but darned hard to make the farmers and plain folk think that way’. He recommended it to his fellow theatre owners anyway (‘Look for it. It’s a pip’), and, in an appreciative nod to the ‘high class’ style of the film, added that ‘the best looking clock that was ever in pictures is in this’. What the Los Angeles Times said about small-town audiences missing the ‘sticky sexiness and sly lubricity’ of the earlier Lubitsch musicals is borne out by the comments of the owner of the Liberty Opera House in Marathon, New York, who thought Herbert Marshall gave ‘a marvelous imitation of a dead man’: ‘Is that posture he assumes the masculine version of the debutante slouch? Maurice Chevalier might get away with this sort of rot, but not this Marshall lad with the shoe button eyes and the turned up nose.’70 That hostile assessment from early March 1933 may reflect frustrations brought on by the continuing economic crisis, which a theatre owner in Portland, Oregon, acknowledged: even though the picture ‘pleased nearly everyone’, it did only average business, ‘due

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to bank moratorium no doubt’,71 a reference to the ‘Bank Holiday’ Roosevelt ordered once he was inaugurated on 4 March 1933. The unprecedented level of economic distress in the heartland cannot be underestimated as a reason for the film’s lacklustre showing outside the major cities, but the basic disharmony between Lubitsch’s cosmopolitan style and the tastes of ordinary movie patrons cannot be overstated, either. The owner of the Princess Theatre in Lincoln, Kansas, summed up the problem when he called the film ‘[t]oo sophisticated for my town’, adding that ‘[t]he kind of people who would like this picture don’t ever come to the show.’72 For the small-town audience, the strong reviews in the big-city newspapers obviously did not matter, nor did the listing of Trouble in Paradise as one of the ten best films of 1932 by the National Board of Review (I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang topped the list, but the other nine films were not ranked). The National Board of Review had been issuing a ‘Ten Best’ list only since 1930, its primary function, initially, being to work with the film industry to discourage censorship of motion pictures, especially by local authorities. Founded in 1909 as the National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures, in 1916 the organization began to review films and – for a fee – issue its seal of approval, originally an open pair of scissors superimposed on a four-pointed star, later simply the words, ‘Passed by the National Board of Review’ on the main titles.73 These words appear at the bottom of the title card at the beginning of Trouble in Paradise giving the credits for writing, music, photography and ‘gowns’. The National Board of Review, which started out as a citizens’ group, eventually came into conflict with the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), the trade association formed in 1922 with Will H. Hays serving as president. Hays had been Postmaster General during an era when the US Post Office was an extremely active agent of government censorship (the 1921 suppression of the serial publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses perhaps being its most notorious success). The Hays Office exercised only moderate control over motion picture content

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until the adoption of a Production Code on 17 February 1930. This code was in effect when Trouble in Paradise was produced and distributed in 1932; it mandated that ‘[t]he sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld.’ Moreover, motion pictures should in no wise imply that ‘low forms of sex relationship’, i.e. those outside marriage, ‘are the accepted or common theme’. The Code also cautioned against representations of criminal activity ‘in such a way as to throw sympathy with the crime as against law and justice’. In fact, based on an early script when the film was still titled The Honest Finder, the Hays Office sent a memo to the Studio Relations Office of the American Association of Motion Picture Producers objecting to the comic treatment accorded the Italian police in the hotel room after Filiba reports the robbery.74 Obviously, the contrast between the heavily accented, arm-waving carabinieri and the sophisticated bearing of Lubitsch’s pair of elegant criminals could not be greater. Lily and Gaston are as sympathetic as they are sinful, but the director got away with it because in 1932 the MPPDA did not really have a mechanism for enforcing the 1930 Code. Nonetheless, the Hays Office made enough objections to cause varying degrees of difficulty with the wider distribution of the film. At the script stage the censors flagged such lines as the Major’s ‘I like to take my fun and leave it’ (meaning that he was not the marrying type) and Mariette’s ‘But I don’t want to be a lady’ as potentially offensive, along with the shot of Gaston hanging the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the hotel room door in the Venice segment. When the censors saw the actual film in October 1932, however, the only objections made were to the ‘hand-waving and jabbering’ of the Italian police and to a shot of Giron silently mouthing the words ‘son of a bitch’ in his confrontation with Gaston late in the film. In November 1932, the archives show a number of mandated cuts tailored to the morality of individual ‘territories’: in Maryland, the Major’s line had to be cut from screenings; in Chicago, Mariette’s line had to go, as well as Gaston’s sign; in Ohio, the sign was also eliminated, as well as the shots of Mariette and Gaston’s embrace

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reflected in the mirror over the bed and their shadows on the bed itself; in New York, a line was cut that is still missing: ‘And we’ll celebrate the second anniversary of the day we didn’t get married’ (an obvious reference to Lily and Gaston’s first night together in the Venice hotel – which tells us, incidentally, that the action of the film begins in 1930). Oddly, the only state where the film was ‘approved without eliminations’ was Kansas. The Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta did not fare as well as Kansas, however, because the censors insisted on cutting the Major’s and Mariette’s lines, as well as many more. In March 1933, the archives show that audiences in Australia did not get to see the garter gag, one of the best bits in the film. The censors’ concern over the sensitivities of Australians was not a good harbinger for the international distribution of Trouble in Paradise, although the film evidently did well in England, receiving good reviews in the Manchester Guardian and other papers, first in December 1932 and then in April 1933.75 According to The Hollywood Reporter, the esteemed British writer Rebecca West saw the film in London but ‘only enjoyed half’ of it – ‘it took her that long to recover from the “added attraction” that preceded it’.76 But this ‘double feature evil’ was the least of the foreign distribution problems for the film. In Germany, of course, the film was banned outright by the National Socialist government,77 and while Paramount’s chief of foreign distribution, J. H. Seidelman, had high hopes for the foreign reception of Trouble in Paradise, the combination of economic depression, political uncertainty and the increasingly restrictive policies of the MPPDA made for some formidable headwinds. How well the French-dubbed version of the film did is hard to say, but at least it was only children who were forbidden from seeing it in Belgium (where it was retitled Haute pègre – literally, ‘high underworld’, but ‘the cream of crime’ might be a passable paraphrase), based on the evidence of a period poster: the FlemishDutch line at the top, ‘Kinderen niet toegelaten’, means ‘children not admitted’. In an effort at truly international distribution, Paramount

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applied to the MPPDA for a licence to exhibit in Batavia (present-day Jakarta), but the application was rejected in April 1933. Similar applications for permission to show Trouble in Paradise in Latvia (April 1934) and Finland (May 1935) were also rejected. In 1933, Paramount International News, a company newsletter, touted Finland’s participation in something called ‘International Paramount Week’ as part of a broader publicity campaign in Scandinavia, but even then Belgian poster Trouble in Paradise could not be shown in that country.78 The problems that attached to the foreign distribution of Trouble in Paradise reflect industry developments that culminated in 1934, when the National League of Decency, a Catholic organization, pressured the MPPDA to adopt a stricter code as well as real enforcement measures. As a result, on 1 July 1934 the Production Code Administration (PCA), with Joseph I. Breen as director (he was a devout Catholic with a reputation for anti-Semitism), began to enforce a newly revised and much more extensive Production Code with some quite specific prohibitions.79 For example, where the sex guidelines of the 1930 Code cautioned in general terms against treating adultery ‘explicitly’ or presenting it ‘attractively’, the revised Code singled out ‘the triangle, that is the love of a third party for one already married’, as something that required special handling to uphold the institution of marriage. Of course, the triangulated passions in Trouble in Paradise – Gaston’s love for both Lily and Mariette – do not involve married people, but that loophole in the

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Production Code did not help in 1935 when the PCA denied an application for theatrical reissue of the film. At that time, Breen said only that Trouble in Paradise ‘was not acceptable under the provisions of the Production Code’, but in 1943, when a Paramount executive sent Breen a release dialogue script dated 15 October 1932 and requested a meeting to discuss changes with an eye to remaking the film as a musical, Breen was more explicit: The basic story is unacceptable on the following grounds: It contains definite indications of illicit sex relationships without sufficient compensating moral values whatever. Your two sympathetic leads are thieves whose crimes are made to seem acceptable, and go unpunished at the end.80

The ban against theatrical distribution held until 1968, when the old Production Code gave way to the new audience rating system still in effect today. (Another movie about a pair of sympathetic criminals in love, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), was one of the films that hastened the collapse of the Code.) Astonishingly, Trouble in Paradise would not become widely available until the Criterion DVD release of 2003. It was never issued on VHS, and even the laserdisc release of 1997 did not help the film become more widely known because laserdisc technology did not really take off as a means of home viewership. In the seventy-year period from 1932 to 2003, then, Trouble in Paradise remained largely unseen by the general public, although 16mm prints circulated among film clubs on college campuses and the like. Remarkably, the New York Times obituaries for both Kay Francis (d. 1968) and Miriam Hopkins (d. 1972) make no mention of the film, while the Times notice of Herbert Marshall’s death in 1966 devotes three paragraphs to his role as the villainous Nazi sympathizer in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940) but mentions Trouble in Paradise only in passing as ‘an Ernst Lubitsch production’, the identification itself suggesting that most readers would not have been able to place the film by title alone. Occasional

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Herbert Marshall getting over a code

screenings occurred in specialized venues, of course, one of the earliest being a Lubitsch retrospective in the summer of 1953 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Trouble in Paradise was shown alongside seven silent films, together with The Love Parade, The Man I Killed (1932) and Desire (1936), the latter directed by Frank Borsage but produced by Lubitsch (although he may have directed a few retakes).81 In February 1968, the Cinémathèque française, under the direction of Henri Langlois, hosted a retrospective in Paris that helped return Lubitsch to prominence as an auteur director, at least among cinephiles. In connection with that festival, the influential French journal Cahiers du cinéma devoted a special issue to Lubitsch containing a landmark essay on the director by François Truffaut. The essay includes a close reading of the scene in Trouble in Paradise where Filiba snuffs out his cigarette in a gondola-shaped ashtray as a way of illustrating Lubitsch’s method – his avoidance of obvious outcomes

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to cinematic complications in favour of audience involvement in realizing a solution. Truffaut cleverly compares the screen magic of a Lubitsch film to a ménage à trois – ‘a game that can only be played by three parties and only while the film is being projected. And who are the three parties? Lubitsch, the film, and the public.’82 The year 1968 marked a significant watershed in the rediscovery of Lubitsch. After the February retrospective in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York screened a programme that included a number of German silents among the forty-one films on view. The festival was organized by Herman G. Weinberg in conjunction with the publication of his book The Lubitsch Touch, the first publication to take stock of Lubitsch’s overall career. The book is less a critical evaluation than a knowing hagiography by an industry insider. Weinberg played an important role in cinema history as a pioneering subtitler of foreign films and made one film himself, the avant-garde silent Autumn Fire (1931). Known as ‘the Boswell’ of the movies (after the obsessive biographer of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, who documented the great man’s life in exhaustive anecdotal detail),83 he was a friend of Lubitsch’s and so had access to a great deal of personal information. For example, Weinberg informs us that Trouble in Paradise, which he calls a ‘masterwork of sardonic humor’, was the director’s ‘own favorite among all his films’.84 The ‘masterwork’ comment is typical of the level of analysis in The Lubitsch Touch, despite the subtitle, A Critical Study (elsewhere Trouble in Paradise is called ‘the most brilliant of all his sound films’),85 but Weinberg’s book does provide a thorough overview of Lubitsch’s career and includes detailed synopses of the films, as well as a generous sampling of newspaper reviews. The pages he devotes to Trouble in Paradise include three publicity-still versions of scenes along with quotations from the screenplay of the dialogue accompanying those scenes (the garter gag, Mariette’s seduction of Gaston, and Lily robbing Mariette’s safe as Gaston looks on), plus a production photo of Lubitsch and Hopkins, both smiling broadly and sitting in camp chairs. The anecdote Weinberg uses to introduce his

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discussion of Trouble in Paradise illustrates one of the problems with the book. He quotes a story King Vidor tells in his autobiography about Miriam Hopkins receiving a script (almost certainly for Design for Living) from Lubitsch when Vidor was directing Hopkins in The Stranger’s Return (1933). Vidor and Hopkins had a dinner engagement, ‘which was known only to the two of us’, and at that dinner Hopkins read the script. At the end was a pencilled note addressed to Vidor from Lubitsch: ‘Any little changes you would like I will be happy to make them.’ This, Weinberg adds, is a ‘real-life “Lubitsch touch”’.86 The reader of Weinberg’s book is confronted with moments like this many times, where the famous phrase is used, but it is never completely clear what Weinberg means by it – the title of his book, no less. The combination of Weinberg’s study, the special issue of Cahiers du cinéma, the two retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Cinémathèque française in Paris and, crucially, the lifting of the distribution ban in 1968 that had stood since 1935 established – or re-established – Lubitsch as a major director whose films needed to be seen more often and studied more closely. In the 1970s, revival theatres screened Trouble in Paradise on a fairly regular basis, but this meant that any new audience for the film would have been limited only to a few major cities, like New York and Los Angeles, where revival houses flourished. Besides, by the late 1970s and early 1980s such venues had begun to die out after the introduction of home VHS players in 1976. Even though the film was never transferred to videotape for commercial distribution, Trouble in Paradise was shown on both network television and public broadcasting from the late 1970s through the 1980s. Turner Classic Movies (TCM), the cable channel devoted to classic Hollywood films, was launched in 1994 but did not show Trouble in Paradise until 21 January 2002. Since then, TCM has shown the film, on average, about once a year (some years more often, but licensing issues prevent any sort of regular programming rotation).87 The infrequency of screenings, at least compared to those of other classics of the

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Hollywood Golden Age, has prompted complaints from viewers on TCM message boards and the like. Despite the 2003 Criterion DVD release, even today a number of online fan sites describe the film as ‘obscure’, a ‘hidden treasure’ that deserves to be more widely known. Almost certainly, the limited availability of the film has affected its critical reception. For the most part, Trouble in Paradise was hard to see during the latter half of the twentieth century when any number of different approaches to cinema studies came and went. One would be hard pressed, for example, to find a sustained semiotic analysis of Trouble in Paradise of the sort practised by Christian Metz. Even auteur theory does not seem fully relevant to Lubitsch, despite his recognition by that same Cahiers du cinéma crowd who originated the theory. In one sense, Lubitsch was an auteur avant la lettre in Germany, where he had complete artistic control over his films, writing, directing and even starring in many of his early comedies, and where the idea of the director as Autorenfilm (film author) existed as early as 1913.88 But the theory of the director as the sole author of a film as it developed in France after World War II also includes two ideas that do not seem terribly germane to Lubitsch’s oeuvre: first, that the auteur has a distinctive artistic vision which is manifested from one film to the next, and, second, that the artistic vision of the auteur is so powerful it emerges in spite of the conformist constraints imposed by the commercial necessities of the studio system. While it is true that Lubitsch maintained a certain consistency of style within certain genres (the several German Lustspielen are not that dissimilar one from the other, the Kostümfilme likewise have their own inherent commonalities, as do the silent Warner comedies and the Paramount musicals), it is hard to point to identifiable, auteur-like similarities over the whole of his career (as, for example, all those shots of insects in the films of Luis Buñuel). Likewise, the sense of Lubitsch as a film artist struggling against the production demands of the studio system, like Orson Welles, say, is hard to square with the sense that Lubitsch, for the most part, fairly embodied the studio system. In the case of

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Paramount, one could argue that Lubitsch was Paramount, that he more than any other director helped to establish that studio’s reputation for sophisticated style, and never more so than with Trouble in Paradise (besides, Lubitsch actually served as Paramount’s production head for a year, from February 1935 to February 1936). One partial exception to the general exclusion of Lubitsch’s work from post-World War II film theory is the feminist approach, thanks to Molly Haskell, one of the pioneers of that methodology. Though Haskell has been criticized by some for being insufficiently polemical, her landmark study of 1974, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, offers Lubitsch as a kind of counterexample to what she calls ‘the big lie’ of western society – namely, ‘the idea of women’s inferiority, a lie so deeply ingrained in our social behavior that merely to recognize it is to risk unraveling the entire fabric of civilization’. With Lubitsch, by contrast, ‘women are as often in the driver’s seat as men’, Haskell says, adding that the triangular relationships in both Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living are ‘rooted in the Lubitschian faith that […] women may – indeed must – have the same moral (or immoral) disposition as men’. Haskell points to the ‘easy rapport’ Hopkins’s Lily and Marshall’s Gaston demonstrate in Trouble in Paradise as proof of their essential equality, ‘based on a similarity of interests and the unspoken understanding that a woman is every bit the “gentleman” – or nongentleman – a man is and can match him in wits and guts and maybe even surpass him’.89 Possibly, the larger enterprise of feminist film theory might have been different had Lubitsch’s work, Trouble in Paradise especially, been more widely known during the era of second wave feminism (roughly late 1960s– early 1980s). Would Laura Mulvey, for example, have adjusted or qualified her well-known argument about Hollywood cinema as the embodiment of the ‘male gaze’ that objectifies the image of woman for the sake of the male viewer’s visual pleasure had Lubitsch’s films been more readily available?90 In her study of Lubitsch’s early films (published in 1992), Sabine Hake says, ‘To this day, the critical reception of Lubitsch films lacks

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the diversity of theoretical perspectives that have made the writings on Hitchcock (to name the most obvious example) so challenging and productive.’ She offers a number of explanations for the phenomenon (including Weinberg’s anecdote-driven book of 1968), and one of the most interesting is, paradoxically, the critical sense that Trouble in Paradise was the pinnacle of the director’s career, ‘the turning point in relation to which all earlier and later films are assigned their place’. Hake does not subscribe to this reductive reading and, in fact, means to correct it. She also offers one of the more incisive analyses of Trouble in Paradise to date as ‘[a]n exploration of the affinities between late capitalism and cinematic representation’.91 But the notion of 1932 as the ‘pinnacle’ of Lubitsch’s career, combined with the relative unavailability of Trouble in Paradise, helps explain the odd state of Lubitsch criticism, at least until recently. If everything after Trouble in Paradise is inferior to that film, and that film is not widely available for viewing, then what is there to say that is worth saying? A lot, it turns out, now that Trouble in Paradise is readily available on DVD and streaming platforms. As a result, the film has become much more widely known than it was in the last century. A basic search for ‘Lubitsch’ on WorldCat, the online catalogue that aggregates the holdings of almost 18,000 libraries worldwide, returns about 750 items (all formats, all languages) for the last fifty years of the twentieth century; the same type of search over the past twenty years yields more than 1,750 items. Even accounting for duplications and odd items like the 1950 sale catalogue for paintings in Lubitsch’s collection, that twenty-first-century increase of 233 per cent in library holdings related to Lubitsch is impressive. A more specific WorldCat search for Trouble in Paradise (all formats, all languages) gets only ten hits from 1950 to 2000, but twenty-eight from 2001 to 2020, almost three times the number of items. But the recent rise of general interest in Lubitsch and a more particular appreciation for Trouble in Paradise should not be measured using quantitative methods alone. The quality of several recent Lubitsch studies is indeed remarkable, including Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American

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Film after World War I (2005), a careful analysis of the director’s silent work in both Germany and the US by the film scholar Kristin Thompson; Lubitsch Can’t Wait: A Theoretical Examination (2014), a collection of essays edited by Ivana Novak, Jela Krecˇicˇ and Mladen Dolar, a group of Slovenian intellectuals who, once and for all, show that Lubitsch’s films can indeed be regarded through the optic of high theory; and Sex, Politics, and Comedy: The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch (2020), a critical study of numerous works from the director’s German and American periods by Rick McCormick that, as the subtitle suggests, understands the films as a transnational hybrid of two cultures, both reflecting to varying degrees Lubitsch’s marginal, outsider status. Although the only monograph on Trouble in Paradise to date is the one you’re reading now, just about every recent book on Lubitsch gives pride of place to the film as one of the director’s best – if not the best. In The Best Film You’ve Never Seen, a recent book of interviews in which famous directors discuss movies they believe are underappreciated, Peter Bogdanovich chooses Trouble in Paradise as the one film that deserves wider recognition. When the interviewer asks, ‘Why do you think Lubitsch and his work aren’t better remembered? Why isn’t he among the big ones like Howard Hawks and John Ford?’, he replies, ‘He sure is for me.’ Bogdanovich surmises that Lubitsch is not among ‘the big ones’ only because Americans lack a sense of history and cultural heritage.92 This problem is one that Joseph McBride, author of books on the aforementioned Hawks and Ford, aimed to rectify with How Did Lubitsch Do It? (2018). McBride admitted that the effort was somewhat ‘quixotic’, but his magisterial study of the entirety of the director’s career – with Trouble in Paradise as his signature film – makes a strong case for a Lubitsch revival: ‘Much of what passes for American film entertainment today would benefit greatly from the sparkling Lubitsch tradition of cinematic wit and intelligence.’93 Ironically, How Did Lubitsch Do It? and other recent studies suggest that the revival McBride believes is the director’s due may, in fact, have already begun.

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Conclusion: The Lubitsch Touch The comment Lubitsch made in 1923 – that he wanted his films ‘to touch the emotions of the people’ who see them – might serve as the starting point for considering the meaning of ‘the Lubitsch touch’. There is clearly something about the best of Lubitsch’s films – and Trouble in Paradise is certainly one of those – that touches those who see them in ways that are hard to describe. ‘The Lubitsch touch’ has unfortunately become something of a cliché that, like all clichés, combines meanings that are simultaneously hackneyed and vague. After World War I, the phrase appears to have developed partly as a result of anti-German sentiment that persisted in the US well beyond the end of the war in 1918. This prejudice accounts for the cover story asserting that Lubitsch had been born in Poland, as the trade magazine Moving Picture World claimed in a January 1922 profile of the director.94 Lubitsch’s ‘Polish’ identity was evidently concocted as a way to deal with lingering post-war bias against all things German. In a 1921 notice for the costume drama Madame DuBarry, also known as Passion, a reviewer for the New York Times expresses no small measure of disbelief that the film could have been directed by ‘the apparently Teutonic Ernst Lubitsch’. How could ‘a heavy-handed German director, of the kind that seems indigenous to Germany,’ possibly have made such a film? Surely, the critic continues, this Lubitsch fellow must have ‘worked in Paris’, or at least ‘come under French influence’. How else to explain ‘the restraint, the lightness of touch, the good taste, revealed in “Passion”’?95 This sense of the director as an uncharacteristic ‘Teuton’ who somehow overcame the ‘typical’ German liking for bombast appears to lie behind the origins of ‘the Lubitsch touch’. It’s not German, but Continental – as another 1921 review, this one of Anna Boleyn (aka Deception), puts it: ‘There is nothing to suggest the quality of

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heaviness about Mr. Lubitsch, however. He has a Continental touch. Did he ever work in Paris or Vienna?’96 As the director’s career progressed and his work became more widely known, the meaning of Lubitsch’s light, Continental touch became more specific. ‘Spangles Attached to Ordinary Goods’ is the none-too-flattering headline of a March 1924 review of Wild Oranges (1924), directed by King Vidor, who is said to have ‘adopted the Lubitsch “touch” system’ and so ‘turned out an attractive movie’. What this so-called system involves is the use of small visual details to suggest some larger emotional point or narrative detail, such as ‘picturing a solitary shingle flapping on a roof to indicate a wind storm and solitude’. Such ‘touches’ make Vidor’s film a ‘better-than-usual’ effort, the critic says, because of ‘the application’ of Lubitsch’s ‘inventions’.97 This review suggests that circa 1924 a certain sense of the phrase was beginning to catch on, even if the exact words ‘the Lubitsch touch’ were not always used. By the end of the year, both the precise phrase and the specific meaning, combining a sense of Continental sophistication and subtle suggestiveness, began to appear in newspaper reports. In November, Mordaunt Hall headlined his New York Times review of Forbidden Paradise ‘Appealing Touches in Film Directed by Mr. Lubitsch’, singling out one sequence in particular as a demonstration of ‘the true Lubitsch touch’. In December, the Baltimore Sun asserted that other ‘ambitious directors’ might try ‘to emulate the Lubitsch touch’, now identified as ‘that originality of method so peculiarly his – that knack of making his actors move about, do little things or register facial expressions as to portray certain details of the drama with refreshing subtlety’.98 Henceforth, the term became a virtual brand, sometimes exploited to sell other products. For example, in June 1927 the ad copy of a two-page spread for Chanel gowns in Photoplay insisted that ‘Chanel is the Lubitsch of dress-designers. She believes in “touches”’, which in this case evidently refers to decorative details, such as ‘the lavish use of long silk fringe as trimming’ or ‘the shoulder flower as a contrasting color mode’.99 This type of usage shows that, regardless of the precise meaning, ‘the Lubitsch touch’ had

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commercial value, and not only for the purpose of selling movies to a mass audience in search of sophistication. There can be no touch without technique, as the critic’s remark about the ‘“touch” system’ suggests, but it is very hard to locate a specific cinematic technique – a particular camera movement or type of shot – that is common to all of Lubitsch’s films. Ellipsis and innuendo perhaps come closest to capturing the meaning of the famous touch, but ellipsis and innuendo are not techniques in themselves but the elusive effects of technique, or rather, of techniques, since Lubitsch was such an endlessly innovative master of cinema that he could get the ineffable effects he wanted in more than one way. Those effects, in turn, add up to style, the fugitive sum of the director’s devices. In this regard, Lubitsch is not unlike Max Reinhardt, who employed different techniques from one production to the next, seeking to suit the theatrical treatment to the dramatic material at hand, whatever it happened to be. Before there was a ‘Lubitsch touch’ there was a ‘Reinhardt touch’, its distinguishing feature being ‘the unfailing rightness of his choice’.100 This notion is almost identical to François Truffaut’s celebrated assessment in Cahiers du cinéma: If you said to me, ‘I have just seen a Lubitsch in which there was one needless shot,’ I’d call you a liar. His cinema is the opposite of the vague, the imprecise, the unformulated, the incommunicable. There’s not a single shot just for decoration; nothing is included just because it looks good. From beginning to end, we are involved only in what’s essential.101

Truffaut also says that ‘[t]he prodigious ellipses in his plots work only because our laughter bridges the scenes. In the Lubitsch Swiss cheese, each hole winks.’102 This statement may be as close as anyone has come to capturing the meaning of the touch, and, yes, Truffaut does suggest a specific technique common to the whole of Lubitsch, but, critically, that technique depends for its effect – namely, the ‘touch’ – on what we do not see.

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For this reason, Trouble in Paradise has to be the best example of the Lubitsch touch in the whole of the director’s oeuvre. In July 1947, near the end of his career – and his life – Lubitsch himself said, ‘As to pure style, I think I have done nothing better or as good as Trouble in Paradise.’103 It is, after all, a film about a pair of thieves so expert at their craft that we never once see how they do it. This does not mean that there is something mysterious about the film-making. If it’s mystery you want, spend some time with Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), where we are shown how pickpocketing works in exhaustive visual detail. There, even though we clearly see how the thieves do it, something like religious mystery inheres in the dedication and devotion the pickpockets have for their profession, which makes it seem like a spiritual vocation. But that’s Bresson: the difference between his art and Lubitsch’s is the difference between mystery and magic. There’s nothing inscrutable about Lubitsch, but like all good magicians, we just don’t quite know how he does it. When Gaston says to Madame Colet at the end of the film, ‘Do you know what you’re missing?’, she closes her eyes and imagines a scene of romantic bliss. But no: that’s not what she’s missing. Then he shows her: she’s missing the strand of seed pearls that will go so well with Lily’s neck. In this case we may see what Madame Colet is missing, but we never see how Gaston manages the trick of pilfering the pearls in the first place. That’s what we’re missing, but we would miss even more if we had actually seen the trick: we would miss the feeling that comes with succumbing to the magic and relishing the ruse. What we don’t see gives what we do see that much more emotional resonance. Unlike Madame Colet, we know what we’re missing, not because Lubitsch has shown us, but because he has not. Like his pair of elegant thieves, in the end Lubitsch gets away with it – by making each and every member of the audience his accomplice in the cinematic art of knowing illusion and stylish deception.

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Notes 1 Samson Raphaelson, Three Screen Comedies: ‘Trouble in Paradise’, ‘The Shop around the Corner’, ‘Heaven Can Wait’ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), p. 57. All references to the screenplay are to this edition. 2 Caruso (1873–1921) recorded ‘O sole mio’ in Camden, New Jersey, for the Victor Talking Machine Company on 2 May 1916. This is the only recording of the song by Caruso and it sounds nothing like the voice of the gondolier in Trouble in Paradise. For a complete discography of Caruso recordings, see John R. Bolig, Caruso Records: A History and Discography (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2002). 3 Ernst Lubitsch to Herman G. Weinberg, 10 July 1947, in Herman G. Weinberg, The Lubitsch Touch: A Critical Study, 3rd edn (New York: Dover, 1977), p. 285. 4 Franz Marc, ‘How Does a Horse See the World?’, in Herschel B. Chipp (ed.), Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 178. 5 Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. Roger Greaves (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), p. 79. 6 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, rev. edn (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 67, 72–3. 7 Ibid., p. 49. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., p. 53.

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10 Ibid., p. 24. 11 Gerd Gemünden, ‘Performing Resistance, Resisting Performance’, in Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema, 1933–1951 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), p. 81. 12 Quoted in Scott Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), p. 106. 13 Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 68. 14 Samson Raphaelson, ‘Freundschaft: How It Was with Lubitsch and Me’, in Three Screen Comedies: ‘Trouble in Paradise’, ‘The Shop around the Corner’, ‘Heaven Can Wait’ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), p. 24. 15 Joel E. Kanoff, ‘The Raphaelson Touch’, Biography 3, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 148, 156. 16 Raphaelson, ‘Freundschaft’, p. 44. 17 Tibor Frank, Double Exile: Migrations of Jewish-Hungarian Professionals through Germany to the United States (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 445. 18 Raphaelson, Three Screen Comedies, p. 158. 19 Raphaelson, ‘Freundschaft’, p. 24. 20 Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 315. 21 Michael Minden, ‘Mann’s Literary Techniques’, in Ritchie Robertson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 58. 22 Rebecca P. Scales, Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 26.

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23 James S. Olson, Historical Dictionary of the Great Depression, 1929–1940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), p. 124. 24 Basil B. Manly, ‘Facts about the Big Business Boom’, Machinists’ Monthly Journal 25, no. 7 (July 1923): 325. 25 H. L. Mencken, The American Language, 4th edn (New York: Knopf, 2006), p. 220. 26 Anthony Slide, The New Historical Dictionary of the American Film Industry (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 197. 27 Quoted in Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), p. 134. 28 George Cukor receives a screen credit for assisting in the direction of One Hour with You, but his involvement with the actual direction was minimal. Originally only the producer of the film, Lubitsch became dissatisfied with Cukor’s approach very early on and took over the direction. He did not want Cukor to receive any screen credit whatsoever, whereupon Cukor sued Paramount to get out of his contract so he could move to RKO. Part of the deal was that his minimal contribution be acknowledged, as reflected in the opening titles: ‘Directed by Ernst Lubitsch / Assisted by George Cukor’. See Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch, pp. 185–7, for a detailed account of the unsavoury affair. 29 Arthur Page, ‘He Wields the Scissors’, Photoplay 43, no. 5 (April 1933): 99. 30 Kevin Starr, The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s (New York:

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Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 281–2. 31 ‘Humbert to Put Melody in the Play’, Los Angeles Evening Express, 7 April 1931, p. 15. 32 Yuri Tsivian, ‘Leonid Kinskey, the Hollywood Foreigner’, Film History 11, no. 2 (1999): 176. 33 Roger L. Gordon, Supporting Actors in Motion Pictures (Pittsburgh, PA: Dorrance, 2018), p. 25. 34 Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch, p. 191. 35 Laura Benham, ‘More about Herbert Marshall’, Screenland 27, no. 1 (May 1933): 84. 36 ‘The Screen Parade’, Tampa Sunday Tribune, 30 October 1932, section 3, p. 6. 37 Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch, p. 190. 38 Lynn Kear and John Rossman, Kay Francis: A Passionate Life and Career (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2006), p. 72. 39 Quoted by Scott O’Brien, Herbert Marshall: A Biography (Albany, GA: BearManor Media, 2018), p. xi. 40 Quoted by Kear and Rossman, Kay Francis, p. 72. 41 Eisner, The Haunted Screen, pp. 47, 76, 44. 42 Edda Fuhrich and Gisela Prossnitz, Reinhardt: The Magician’s Dreams, trans. Sophie Kidd and Peter Waugh (Salzburg and Vienna: Residenz Verlag, 1993), p. 175. 43 Ibid., p. 64. 44 J. L. Styan, Max Reinhardt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 16. 45 Fuhrich and Prossnitz, Reinhardt, p. 62. 46 ‘Lubitsch on Directing’, New York Times, 16 December 1923, section 9, p. 5.

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47 Ernst Lubitsch, ‘The Motion Picture Art Is the Youngest of All the Muses’, in Laurence A. Hughes (ed.), The Truth about the Movies: By the Stars (Hollywood: Hollywood Publishers, 1924), pp. 349, 351. 48 Fuhrich and Prossnitz, Reinhardt, p. 62. 49 Quoted in Mary Corliss and Carlos Clarens, ‘Designed for Film: The Hollywood Art Director’, Film Comment 14, no. 3 (May/June 1978): 31. 50 Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch, p. 194. 51 Brenda Polan and Roger Tredre, The Great Fashion Designers: From Chanel to McQueen, the Names that Made Fashion History, 2nd edn (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 57–60. 52 Quoted in Juan Antonio Ramírez, Architecture for the Screen: A Critical Study of Set Design in Hollywood’s Golden Age, trans. John F. Moffitt (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2004), p. 197. 53 ‘Patents Protect Sets of “Design for Living”’, Detroit Free Press, 15 October 1933, section 3, p. 15. See also, ‘Lubitsch Patents Furniture’, Indianapolis Times, 7 October 1933, p. 7. 54 Stanley Libergott, ‘Technical Note: Labor Force, Employment, and Unemployment, 1929–39: Estimating Methods’ (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1948), p. 51. 55 Olson, Historical Dictionary of the Great Depression, p. 93. 56 Chaplin Hall, ‘In Hollywood’s Bustling Studios’, New York Times, 4 September 1932, section 9, p. 3. 57 ‘Cut Taxes, Aid Trade, Says Eugene R. Grace’, New York Times, 7 October 1932, p. 33.

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58 Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 15. 59 Mordaunt Hall, ‘Ernst Lubitsch’s Charming Thieves’, New York Times, 13 November 1932, section 9, p. 5. 60 Norbert Lusk, ‘Ernst Lubitsch Triumphs Again’, Los Angeles Times, 13 November 1932, p. 41. 61 ‘The Shadow Stage’, Photoplay 43, no. 1 (December 1932): 57. 62 ‘Metropolitan Theatre’, Boston Globe, 29 October 1932, p. 6. 63 ‘Theatre Receipts’, Motion Picture Herald 109, no. 7 (12 November 1932): 42; ‘Theatre Receipts’, Motion Picture Herald 109, no. 8 (19 November 1932): 34. 64 ‘Theatre Receipts’, Motion Picture Herald 109, no. 8 (19 November 1932): 36; ‘Theatre Receipts’, Motion Picture Herald 109, no. 9 (26 November 1932): 34. 65 ‘Theatre Receipts’, Motion Picture Herald 109, no. 10 (3 December 1932): 38. 66 ‘Theatre Receipts’, Motion Picture Herald 109, no. 9 (26 November 1932): 38; ‘Theatre Receipts’, Motion Picture Herald 109, no. 10 (3 December 1932): 40. 67 ‘What the Picture Did for Me’, Motion Picture Herald 109, no. 11 (10 December 1932): 38. 68 ‘What the Picture Did for Me’, Motion Picture Herald 110, no. 3 (14 January 1933): 44. 69 ‘What the Picture Did for Me’, Motion Picture Herald 110, no. 7 (11 February 1933): 42. 70 ‘What the Picture Did for Me’, Motion Picture Herald 110, no. 10 (4 March 1933): 60.

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71 ‘What the Picture Did for Me’, Motion Picture Herald 110, no. 13 (25 March 1933): 38–9. 72 ‘What the Picture Did for Me’, Motion Picture Herald 110, no. 8 (20 May 1933): 47. 73 Slide, The New Historical Dictionary of the American Film Industry, p. 140. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 31. 74 Jason S. Joy to Harold Hurley, 21 July 1932, Trouble in Paradise Motion Picture Production Code file, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA. 75 ‘A Lubitsch Film: Herbert Marshall in “Crook” Part’, Manchester Guardian, 16 December 1932, p. 8; ‘Trouble in Paradise’, Manchester Guardian, 25 April 1933, p. 13. 76 Helen Gwynne, ‘Yesterday in New York’, Hollywood Reporter 13, no. 26 (17 February 1933): 3. 77 ‘German Censor Bans on Wholesale Scale’, Variety 110, no. 11 (23 May 1933): 13. 78 ‘Finland Celebrated Paramount Week’, and ‘En Paramountfilm ar alltid en garanti for den basta föreställningen i stan!’ [A Paramount film is always a guarantee of the best performance!], Paramount International News 1, no. 5 (1 November 1933): 7. 79 Geoffrey Shurlock, ‘The Motion Picture Production Code’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 254 (1947): 140–1. 80 Joseph I. Breen to Luigi Luraschi, 27 July 1943, Trouble in Paradise Motion Picture Production Code file.

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81 Howard Thompson, ‘The Local Screen Scene’, New York Times, 17 August 1952, section 2, p. 5. 82 François Truffaut, The Films in My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), p. 51. 83 Fritz Lang, preface to Herman G. Weinberg, Saint Cinema: Writings on the Film, 1929–1970, 2nd edn (New York: Dover, 1973), p. xiii. 84 Weinberg, The Lubitsch Touch, p. 144. 85 Ibid., p. 141. 86 Ibid., p. 140. 87 Taryn Jacobs, Public Relations Manager of Turner Classics Movies, email communication of 27 March 2020. 88 Eisner, The Haunted Screen, p. 39. 89 Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, 3rd edn (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), pp. 1, 97, 100, 130. 90 Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ was written in 1973 and first published in 1975. It has been reprinted many times, as in, for example, Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (New York: Palgrave, 1989), pp. 14–27. 91 Sabine Hake, Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 3, 5, 175. 92 Robert K. Elder, The Best Film You’ve Never Seen: 35 Directors Champion the Forgotten or Critically Savaged Movies They Love (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013), p. 213. 93 McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It?, p. 33.

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94 Sumner Smith, ‘Ernst Lubitsch Describes Novel Method of Preparing a Picture for Production’, Moving Picture World 54, no. 1 (7 January 1922): 53–4. 95 ‘Brought into Focus’, New York Times, 30 January 1921, section 6, p. 2. 96 ‘The Screen’, New York Times, 18 April 1921, p. 17. 97 ‘Spangles Attached to Ordinary Goods’, Oakland Tribune, 16 March 1924, p. 59. 98 ‘Pictures Made by Lubitsch Highly Praised’, Baltimore Sun, 7 December 1924, p. 89.

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99 Photoplay 33, no. 1 (June 1927): 74. 100 W. Bridges-Adams, ‘The Reinhardt Touch’, The Listener, 10 June 1954, p. 1002. The earliest use of the phrase ‘the Reinhardt touch’ I have found is in a 1921 review of Reinhardt’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream from The Observer (London), 1 May 1921, p. 6. 101 Truffaut, The Films in My Life, p. 52. 102 Ibid., p. 51. 103 Ernst Lubitsch to Herman G. Weinberg, 10 July 1947, in Weinberg, The Lubitsch Touch, p. 286.

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Credits Trouble in Paradise USA 1932 Directed by Ernst Lubitsch Produced by Ernst Lubitsch Screenplay Samson Raphaelson Adaptation Grover Jones based on the play by Aladár László (as Laszlo Aladar) Photographer Victor Milner Gowns Travis Banton Music W. Franke Harling Lyrics Leo Robin Songs ‘Trouble in Paradise’, music by W. Franke Harling and lyrics by Leo Robin © 1932 Paramount Publix Corporation Paramount presents a Paramount Picture, an Ernst Lubitsch production Production Company Paramount Publix Corporation

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uncredited Camera Operator William J. Miller Assistant Camera Guy Roe Stills Earl Crowley Eugene Richee Art Director Hans Dreier Sound M. M. Paggi Costume Jeweller Eugene Joseff CAST Miriam Hopkins Lily Kay Francis Madame Mariette Colet Herbert Marshall Gaston Monescu/Laval Charlie Ruggles The Major Edward Everett Horton François Filiba C. Aubrey Smith Adolph J. Giron Robert Greig Jacques, the butler uncredited Louis Alberni annoyed opera fan Hooper Atchley insurance agent Tyler Brooke jingle singer Marion Byron maid

Louise Carter woman with wrong handbag Gino Corrado Venetian George Humbert waiter Perry Ivins radio commentator/Paris police reporter Leonid Kinskey Bolshevik Gus Leonard servant Carl M. Leviness party guest Fred Malatesta hotel manager Eva McKenzie Duchess of Chambro Hector V. Sarno Prefect of Police Rolfe Sedan purse salesman Larry Steers party guest Frederick Sullivan operagoer Nella Walker Madame Bouchet Stanhope Wheatcroft party guest Florence Wix party guest US theatrical release 30 October 1932 Running time: 81–3 mins UK theatrical release 29 November 1932 Running time: 80–3 mins

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