Ernst Lubitsch (1932)
The first double bill that I saw in BFI’s ‘Hollywood Babylon: Early Talkies Before the Censor’ series comprised films which had little more than Barbara Stanwyck in common and the two characters she played were very different. Although I didn’t care for Night Nurse, Stanwyck made it, as well as the much superior Baby Face, well worth watching. The combination of Jewel Robbery and Trouble in Paradise was linked by plot as well as by having Kay Francis in a leading role. Francis is a famous name but I don’t recall having seen her before. She has an effortless, relaxed elegance and a distinctive speech impediment (which led to her being known as ‘Wavishing Kay Fwancis’). It’s not hard to see why she became, for a few years, a huge star. Her dégagé manner was appropriate in both the parts she played here but I think that’s a reason why I found her quickly tedious – nothing she did was surprising. It may be unfair to Kay Francis, however, to conclude from this double bill that she wasn’t much of an actress, and I doubt that I properly appreciated Lubitsch’s film, regarded as a classic American comedy. This was simply because I disliked Jewel Robbery and had had enough of irresistible swindlers before Trouble in Paradise was even underway.
The picture is highly sophisticated and often amusing. A piece by Charles Taylor in Salon, which the BFI used for their programme note, contrasts the emotionlessness of the criminal activity with what it means, to the international master thief Gaston Monescu and his sparky pickpocket sidekick Lily, to be cheated in affairs of the heart. That this element works so well is thanks greatly to Miriam Hopkins as Lily: she’s not a subtle actress but her crude zest brings a welcome pungency to the proceedings. One of my favourite bits in the film came early on, when Lily and Monescu first meet and dine together in Venice. Gaston is no more the baron he’s impersonating than Lily’s the countess she claims to be; but Herbert Marshall’s silken manner makes him plausibly posh whereas Hopkins is undisguisably coarse. You spend a couple of minutes uneasily wondering whether Lily’s meant to be classy then she takes a telephone call and Lubitsch shows the audience her amusingly slatternly flatmate on the other end of the line. Herbert Marshall is very accomplished as Gaston but he’s oddly asexual and so precisely suave that he always comes across as a little artificial. This is fine while Gaston is gulling people. It doesn’t work so well when, in Paris, the great thief falls in love with Mme Colet, a wealthy widow whose late husband made a fortune as a perfume manufacturer. Marshall’s Gaston still seems to be pretending and, although Lubitsch orchestrates the farce action beautifully, there’s never much emotionally at stake between him and Kay Francis’s Mme Colet. As two of her other suitors, Edward Everett Horton and Charles Ruggles are a great double act: Horton’s mannerisms are entirely familiar but no less entertaining for that; Ruggles’s more quiet comic style is a fine complement to them. C Aubrey Smith blusters enjoyably as Mme Colet’s business manager, Robert Greig is lugubriously droll as her butler, and Leonid Kinskey has startling manic energy as an angry Russian communist. The screenplay by Samson Raphaelson and Grover Jones is adapted from a play by Aladar Laszlo.
23 May 2014
