Review of Trouble in Paradise (1932) by Bradley H — 06 Sep 2009

One of the earliest and best examples of the romantic screw-ball comedy from one of the all-time great filmmakers, Ernst Lubitsch.

High class European thief Gaston Montescu (Herbert Marshall) and his partner-in-crime and lover, Lilly (Miriam Hopkins) set out to swindle the head of a posh Parisian perfume company, the beautiful Mariette Colet (Kay Francis). Of course things become complicated when Gaston falls for Madame Colet, while one of her other suitors (the great Edward Everett Horton) recognizes Montescu as the thief that had previously robbed him while on holiday.

What has been dubbed "The Lubitsch Touch" (a description given to the filmmaker in an early press-kit, and probably the earliest example of a directorial style being recognized; what the French would, some 25 years later, come to call the "Auteur" theory) is at full play here - sophistication, wittiness, and overt sexual innuendos. Right off the bat we are shown half of the film's title "Trouble in..." superimposed over a lavish bed. What German-born Lubitsch managed to do was take silly sexual foibles out of the bedroom and put them up onscreen for all to see - not in a graphic manner obviously, but in an overtly sly representation that made the intricacies of writer Samson Rafelson's brilliant plot all the more urgent and hilarious (writer/director Billy Wilder and his frequent writing collaborators like I.A.L. Diamond and Charles Brackett would also take this approach to their films - the results being just as satisfying. In fact, Wilder had a sign hung over his office door that read, "How would Lubitsch do it?"). The result is one of the breeziest, funniest, and most sublime comedies to come out of Hollywood that year or any other.