It's Paradise

Ernst Lubitsch's heavenly Trouble

by Steve Vineberg

TROUBLE IN PARADISE, Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Written by Samson Raphaelson. With Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Edward Everett Horton, Charlie Ruggles, C. Aubrey Smith, Robert Greig, and Leonid Kinsky. At the Brattle Theatre, January 21 and 22.

The émigré German director Ernst Lubitsch and the playwright-turned-screenwriter Samson Raphaelson collaborated on a number of projects. Three times their encounters were pure magic: Trouble in Paradise in 1932, The Shop Around the Corner in 1940, and Heaven Can Wait in 1943. But for some reason Trouble in Paradise, an example of American high comedy at its most ineffable, has slipped through the cracks over the years. It isn't available on video, it almost never shows up on television, and the pristine new print the Brattle is screening this Friday and Saturday is the first decent 35mm copy available in ages. If you want a sniff of stylish perfection, you must go -- this tiny bauble of a movie is the equal of anything produced by Lubitsch's great Parisian contemporary, René Clair.

Trouble in Paradise, which Raphaelson based on a Hungarian play by Aladar László called The Honest Finder, takes place where the faux aristocracy of thieves and the ancient aristocracy of the very rich intersect. This is the kind of link that feels particularly funny and right in a comedy from the Depression, when the moneyed classes are so distant they might as well be the figment of a screenwriter's imagination, and there's no appreciable difference between the paradise old money creates and the paradise that mock aristocrats build in the air with stolen loot. Gaston (Herbert Marshall), whom we first meet as "the Baron," and Lily (Miriam Hopkins), "the Countess," are drawn to each other on Venice's Grand Canal when they identify each other as belonging to the highest echelon of crooks. They move in together (this is a pre-Hays Code comedy, thank Heaven) and in tandem descend upon the wealthiest woman in Paris, Mariette Colet (Kay Francis), a widow who owns a fantastically successful perfume company. When Gaston returns her missing diamond-studded handbag -- after having lifted it himself, bien sûr -- she hires him as her secretary, and he hires Lily as his secretary. But before they can make off with as many of Mariette's assets as possible, the unexpected happens: Gaston falls for his mark.

In romantic comedy, the chief quality that bonds the two protagonists is their capacity for having a grand time together; in high comedy, which is more brittle (and sometimes verges on exquisite heartlessness), that magnetic element is style. Herbert Marshall shares a seduction scene with each of his two leading ladies -- the scenes are mirror images of each other -- in which the verbal playfulness and the shimmering self-consciousness of the dialogue are aphrodisiacs, along with the pull of the exotic and the dangerous that Gaston's and Lily's profession represents. The two actresses are opposite numbers: Hopkins, with her marcelled hair and speed-of-light line delivery, is the modern Yankee equivalent of a Restoration heroine, a peerless chatterer, whereas Kay Francis exists for the camera -- she's as much an objet d'art as Mariette's collection of art deco clocks. (What they have in common is that they're both magnificent clotheshorses, and I can't think of half a dozen movies with gowns as stunning as the ones Travis Banton designed for them.) Marshall partners them both with distinctly British panache, as if the script were by Noël Coward. Surrounding this trio are Charlie Ruggles and the sublimely preposterous Edward Everett Horton as rivals for Madame Colet's hand (she doesn't care a fig for either one); C. Aubrey Smith as the chairman of the board of her company; Robert Greig as her butler, who shakes his head and mutters to himself dejectedly when he sees her making free with her secretary; and Leonid Kinsky in a quintessentially '30s bit as a Russian who disapproves of her fortune on political principle.

The Shop Around the Corner is a more profound piece of entertainment. (It's probably the greatest romantic comedy ever made in this country.) Trouble in Paradise is pure, glittery surface -- that's the point. Lubitsch's camera swirls around Raphaelson's delirious dialogue; and, coming off a series of operettas (several of which Raphaelson worked on), he uses music in a lightly parodic way, as a transition between sequences. The best example is the ridiculous radio ad for Mariette's company's scents (it's sung by a mustachio'd crooner), but we also get a few bars of opera in one scene that quietly deflates the pomposity of the setting and the clientele while moving us toward the moment when Gaston makes his appearance in Mariette's life. And the visual effects Lubitsch pulls off are sometimes amazing. When Gaston and Mariette finally embrace, he cuts from their reflection in the mirror to their merged silhouettes on the as-yet-undisturbed bed to the couple themselves, and there you have the substance of the sequence: image, possibility, and reality. Trouble in Paradise is Lubitsch at his most dazzling; it's a silvery crescent moon of a movie.