I’m on the fence about Desire. I’m not sure whether I dislike it or I’ll think of it as really good sometime down the road. A lot of talent was involved in it. Frank Borzage, a romantic darling of the French cinéastes, directed it. Lubitsch, newly named as producer at Paramount Studios, produced it, chose the story, did reshoots, and took an active role in the writing. Marlene Dietrich had just left the stifling embrace of Josef von Sternberg, who had made her a Weimar icon of the femme fatale, and was striving for a more flexible, Hollywood-friendly image. (Desire was her first comedy.) Gary Cooper was already the cowboy-demigod, but had also done a Lubitsch comedy (Design for Living). The cinematographer — who is the only unquestionable star of the film, imo — was Charles Lang, one of the greatest of the period.
The story is only the second film of the Lubitsch circle that introduces an American into an otherwise glamorous European boulevard setting. (Design for Living was the first.) That supposedly adds some realism for the American audiences — Hollywood realism — but it doesn’t dim the dazzle of the exaggeratedly elegant costumes and sets. And lights. The film begins with a painfully funny Lubitschean idea — the camera pans across the romantic rooftops of the Opera district of Paris, a reliably elegant comedy location, only to tilt down on a Hausmann-era building that displays identical signs outside every floor, advertising a car, the Bronson 8, a car that will be identified with Cooper’s character, Tom Bradley, through much of the film. You can fly above the romantic rooftops of Paris for only so long before you have to descend into the world of Anglo-Saxon commerce.
Tom — an automobile man from Detroit about to embark to Spain on his first vacation ever — appears at first to be the unsophisticated American out of his league in Paris, but proves he has the Lubitschean requirements: excellent suits and the right kind of savoir faire. He has just the right touch to guide his boss toward just the right advertising slogan.
Meanwhile, Dietrich’s Madeleine is busy stealing a 2 million francs + pearl necklace from a high-end boulevard jeweler. (The original play, in German in the Viennese vein, was titled The Pearl Necklace. And the main boulevard for high-end jewelers was in fact the Avenue de l’Opéra, and may be still.) Her con is so steep and takes so long to unfold that the audience doesn’t even suspect it until the critical moment. Dietrich shows she’s a superb comic exploiter of her own image. Got to be one of the funniest Lubitschean routines.
Madeleine skeedaddles in her top of the line 1935 Auburn 851 SC Speedster (so I’m told) as Tom is lazily ambling along in his Bronson 8 (a 1935 Pontiac 8), singing nonsense Bronson 8 ad jingles. As each arrives at the Spanish border, Madeleine makes use of the handsome rube to be her unwitting mule, slipping the purloined pearls into his coat jacket pocket. Later on down the road, with the French cops in hot pursuit she waylays Tom as a gorgeous damsel in distress, stuck on the highway with a broken down roadster, which she has of course broken herself just for the purpose of regaining possession of the swag. Here’s where things start to get iffy for me. Tom is enchanted by her, and she starts to put the moves on him. Audience is unsure of whether this is just another of her cynico-beautiful cons or whether she also has eyes for him. She needs to get access to his pocket, and gets verbally frisky enough that you wonder how the Decency League missed it.
MADELEINE: You know, it’s getting colder as it gets later… …and I might have to move a little closer if I get chilly. I may even put my hands in your pocket.
After stealing and fleeing with Tom’s Bronson (which she later also wrecks), Madeleine escapes to her little gang of upper-echelon con artists. It turns out that she is part of a ring of elegant jewel thieves, and she’s torn between her loyalty (and vulnerability) to them and her burgeoning love for Tom, which is tending toward adoration. (The situation is not dissimilar to Ball of Fire which also starred Cooper — Wilder and Brackett, who wrote the later movie, would soon be writing for Lubitsch.) Madeleine has lost track of the necklace. She doesn’t even know Tom’s name. But the American finds her in a posh Spanish hotel with her handler, Carlos (John Halliday), who pretends to be a prince, as Madeleine pretends to be a countess. The wrangling begins.
Naturally, the unsophisticated American seems easy to work around.
But Tom eventually solves the problem with his manly American strength of character and musculature, and together he and Madeleine return the pearl necklace to the jeweler. After explaining themselves to psychiatrist and jeweler, and asking for their forbearance, they are married, with the two former gulls as their willing witnesses.
This is promising stuff. But a few things trouble me. First, the pacing is often quite slow for a sophisticated verbal comedy. I think the lagging is at least partly because of Borzage’s direction. Borzage is a very serious emotional, even sentimental, director; his best work was in sacrificial adventure romance. (More than one critic notes that at least one central character usually has to die in a Borzage film.) The few comedies he made are stiff and moody. He’s not quite moody here, but the bubbles in the champagne are getting flat. I also don’t care for Cooper’s performance. He’s mugging a lot. I don’t think he’s that great a comic actor. His best film for me is Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and that’s borderline melodrama, so his smoldering and his sudden changes make sense. Dietrich surprised me, to be honest. At first I didn’t like her mannered acting, but it got better and better as the film itself became less interesting. (Go figure.)
But the biggest problem I think is that the film has too many periods of contemplative beauty to work as a comedy. Cooper and Dietrich actually stop the flow of action simply by appearing on the screen — thanks to Lang’s camera.
These aren’t publicity shots. They’re my screen shots. I think the problem demonstrates that too much beauty can mess up comedy. There were some stunningly movie-poster-gorgeous and also brilliant comic actresses: Lombard, Jean Arthur, Ginger Rogers, Harlow, Rosalind Russell, Jeanette MacDonald. But some of the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood were weak at comedy — Garbo and Loretta Young, for example. I think the difference may lie in how active the great comediennes are — they move too fast and well to be gazed at for long. Maybe it’s the camera. Maybe it’s the lighting. Maybe Borzage and Lubitsch just adored too much. Maybe it’s the inescapable requirement to look marvelous on screen. Whatever it is, it may have prevented Desire from being the champagne comedy it could have been. Cooper and Dietrich are too beautiful to be snappy.
Dietrich claimed that Desire reproduced shot-for-shot its French model, Adieu les beaux jours (1933), which starred Brigitte Helm and Jean Gabin, and was itself a version of the German film Die schönen Tage von Aranjuez (1933). I haven’t been able to get hold of either of the European versions. Though it seems a dubious claim to me, it would be worth someone’s while to definitively verify or disprove it, given the originality of both Lubitsch and Borzage as film-makers.