Trouble in Paradise

Trouble in Paradise – This 1932 romantic comedy was, apparently, Ernst Lubitsch’s favorite picture. It is very slight, unpretentious, and perfectly paced. Lubitsch films are hard to evaluate. They don’t aspire to be art, but rather sophisticated entertainments. Films like these were their superficiality as a badge of honor. Everything is weightless, slightly giddy, the effervescence of champagne bubbles that burst and vanish the moment they appear. Trouble in Paradise is very short and telegraphic; it moves with lightning rapidity between studio-Venice (a dark canal, some prostitutes lurking in a shadowy hotel corridor, a man supine on the floor) to Paris (the Eiffel tower). A petite, beautiful blonde played by Miriam Hopkins supports herself as a grifter. She runs into another thief, a handsome con-man. Their encounter involves farcical attempts at reciprocal larceny. The two criminals fall in love and travel to Paris where they conspire to bilk a rich widow. The widow is herself something of gold-digger; her fortune is based upon a perfume factory owned by her deceased husband who was, apparently, at least, forty years her senior. The con-man falls for the seductive widow and, ultimately, is faced with a choice between the two glamorous female protagonists. Sex is very much in the foreground in Lubitsch’s movies and, unlike more censorious directors, he suggests that you can have your cake and eat it too. The con-man, a silky seducer with puppy-dog eyes, played by Herbert Marshall, has an affair with the luscious widow while remaining involved with his co-conspirator. Women in Lubitsch films are overtly lustful – they drape themselves seductively over furniture or throw themselves, have swooning, with desire across chaise lounges. The men wear tuxedos and the women slinky, form-fitting lingerie that exposes them more or less completely to the viewer’s delectation. The writing is efficient, but not always as witty as one might expect – relying heavily on double entendre. Edward Everett Horton, always a great pleasure to see in a film, plays a perpetually disappointed suitor for the merry widows affections – he displays and indescribable combination of suavity and fecklessness, something like an inept F. Scott Fitzgerald. The film features glamorous Arte Moderne sets, sleek and well-lit with fantastically cantilevered grand stairways and Bauhaus-style sculptures as knick-knacks. These rooms are airy and spacious with windows that open onto painted vistas of Champs Elysee or the Grand Canal. In the Grand Canal, a gondolier with a beautiful tenor voice sings arias while propelling his gondola, filled with rotting garbage through the dark, shadowy and romantic night. At one point, someone says “Prosperity is just around the corner” and a Russian with wild hair quotes Trotsky while abusing the wealthy widow for the crime of owning public property – only the slightest traces of the world-wide Depression just beyond the door of the lissome leading lady and her pale, elegant boudoir.