Sometimes you wonder why a movie gets made. I Was An Adventuress is an exceedingly odd Hollywood revision of a 1938 French film, J’étais une aventurière, directed by Raymond Bernard. I haven’t seen the original, but I suspect that the remake is quite faithful, because it doesn’t feel like it was made in the US. It lacks anything that one could call Hollywood star power, and none of the principals are “Americans.” With Peter Lorre, Erich von Stroheim, and Vera Zorina as the principals, Gregory Ratoff, a colorful Russian-Jewish emigre, directing, and Georges Balanchine choreographing a ballet finale, the crew could more easily have conversed in German or French than English. And it shows.
The film is one of those attempts to do the sly funny amoral Lubitsch thing long after Lubitsch himself had abandoned it. The story in a nutshell: a trio of elegant European grifters plan elaborate scams to trick filthy rich twits out of their money and their jewels. Dazzled by the faux Countess Tanya Vronsky (Zorina), whose act is supported by similarly fake aristocrats André Désormeaux (Stroheim), a haughty and small-scale sadistic would-be criminal mastermind, and Polo (Lorre), a comically abject figure whose petty kleptomania threatens to undermine their projects, old-money suckers are gulled into buying — indeed, insisting on buying — cheap facsimiles at crown jewel prices. Their plans founder when Tanya falls for one of her target suckers, rich young gentleman Paul Vernay (Richard Greene). She abandons her accomplices and secretly marries him. Polo and Désormeaux reappear to press Tanya into one last caper, which evolves into a zigzag of tricks, impostures, plots, and counterplots played out in palatial European spaces. Just when it seems Désormeaux and Polo have succeeded in absconding with a cache of jewels lifted from Vernay’s set, Polo surprisingly reforms, restores the swag, and cuts Désormeaux loose. Oh, and there’s an extended ballet performance intended to show off Zorina’s chops.
The shadow of Lubitsch — the Lubitsch of Trouble in Paradise and Ninotchka — looms large over the film. Like Jewel Robbery (1932), Desire (1936), and Café Metropole (1938), Adventuress attempts to keep alive the tradition of Budapest boulevard farces — elegant, ironic, impeccably refined, in a mis-en-scène without a trace of labor or sweat. Lubitsch had moved on — The Shop Around the Corner appeared in the same year as Adventuress — and Ratoff’s film feels anachronistic by comparison. That’s not to say that it has no touch at all — there are some bona fide Lubitschean moments. The initiation of the first con, for example, which is as good a Lubitsch imposture as one could ask for.
I first became interested in this film when I read that Stroheim and Lorre had lead roles. That seemed utterly weird to me. Lorre, who had been Brecht’s ideal actor in Berlin, had acquired cachet in Hollywood playing grotesque, stunted characters always straddling the line between the comical and the pathological. Stroheim as an actor I knew mainly from The Grand Illusion, one of the sacred films in my household. Neither struck me as screwball material. I knew absolutely nothing about Zorina until I saw Adventuress. Half-German, half-Norwegian, Zorina was groomed to be a major screen icon. She was an accomplished ballerina (married to Georges Balanchine when the film was made, an important detail we’ll get to later), and an imposing beauty, unusually statuesque for a prima ballerina. Her niche was going to be the refined, irresistibly elegant, and urbane European beauty who could also perform the middlebrow’s idea of highbrow ballet routines to raise a film to prestige level. And not a bad actor, though she remained more a ballet artist and eventually gave up the screen for dance. She does a bit of Swan Lake — I guess you could call it that — in Adventuress, pretty much like Sonja Hennie doing her Ice Follies routines in her films. She fits — if that’s the word — into the film not so much because of her dancing, but because of her looks and her accent. Because she’s so damn elegantly European.
The combo almost works, and the film has its fans. But for me the intensely grotesque atmosphere created by Lorre’s frog-like klepto nebbish Polo and Stroheim’s supercilious snob disturbs the comedy. Like many of the crime/mystery comedies of the 40s, the noir aesthetic and actresses looking marvelous are disruptive. What’s more, the dominant feel of this would-be Lubitschean mis-en-scène isn’t Viennese or Parisian, but Weimar. Ratoff was not a great director, but he was versatile , and capable of nice effects now and then. In this film, though, he seems to have gone full-on Babelsberg. Take this otherwise interesting scene. The little gang is escaping on a train with the proceeds of a particularly well-played swindle. Polo leaves the compartment, leaving Désormeaux alone with Tanya. Instead of the ironic, witty banter that one might expect (as say between Col. Harrington and Jean in The Lady Eve, released the following year), the scene devolves into a psycho-power struggle between a Teutonic control freak and his resistant “creature.”
An extra level of weirdness lies in how much this scene strikes me as a parody of Josef von Sternberg’s relationship to Marlene Dietrich — a bind that Dietrich had just broken when she played in Borzage’s Desire, an important film in the gorgeous-dame-fronting-a-gang-of-thieves genre.
It’s widely accepted (based on Ratoff’s own script notes) that Stroheim and Lorre were given great leeway to add dialogue and motivation for their characters. Most film historians consider that a good thing, but I don’t. The “motivations,” such as they are, carry Désormeaux and Polo to depths unnecessary for the comic situations. They generate some brilliant vignettes that lead nowhere. Consider Désormeaux schooling Polo on the genius of interpreting the shoes of passersby.
For my money, the detail of André elegantly cutting the frayed threads from his cuffs (probably Stroheim’s own idea) is priceless, but it gets smothered by the ensuing street pedantry. For my money, Stroheim just doesn’t know when to stop to be funny. And neither does Lorre.
This is definitely not one of Ratoff’s best films, but also far from his worst. The pacing is off, and the story has ludicrous implausibilities on its own terms. That said, it wasn’t an afterthought by the studio, or underfunded. Ratoff was one of 20th Century Fox’s head producer Daryl F. Zanuck’s close friends, and his films never look cheap. In fact, that’s a problem. I keep harping on my feeling that too much beauty and atmosphere can harm comedy if it isn’t carefully positioned to be ironic. Adventuress is one of those films that’s occasionally so impressive visually that it feels like the whole enterprise gets bogged down by it. There’s an argument to be made, I suppose, that a story that hinges on a dazzling beauty should also be dazzling. The problem is that the beauty is most disorienting when she’s not supposed to be dazzling. Two legendary cinematographers were behind the camera — Edward Cronjager and Leon Shamroy — and the results are predictable.
Even this isn’t consistent enough to watch the film with the sound off (something that might be done with Desire).
True to form, the most deliriously comic moment in the film is totally unintentional. Balanchine, Zorina’s husband and director of Ballet Russe, was hired to choreograph and direct a scene to showcase Tanya’s genius as a ballerina. Someone should write an extended analysis of this episode, with the appropriate attitude. Ratoff would later direct some fine music-and-dance comedies (most notably with Betty Grable in Footlight Serenade [1942]), but this Balanchine thing is a debacle. Not only does the main dance action seem comically fast, but when Zorina has to make a dramatic jetée, the film slips into slow motion. We all cut corners, but the conclusion of this “version” of Swan Lake is worthy of Spinal Tap.
Don’t let this get out, lest it diminish the reputation of Balanchine. But you must admit, the ballet finale foresees the “Stonehenge problem.”
