Trouble in Paradise (1932)

Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise is one of the films on Classic Hollywood’s Mount Rushmore. It’s the most concentrated example of Lubitsch’s famous style, so distilled that it’s almost abstract. Lubitsch himself considered it his greatest stylistic achievement. But there’s trouble in paradise in more ways than one. For me, this dazzling artifact lacks both heart and gaiety, two things most Lubitsch comedies have in abundance. It’s so famous and highly praised that I imagine many viewers of Lubitsch came to it first. I think that’s a mistake. Paradoxically, while it’s possibly the purest of his films formally, it’s also the least typical.

Lubitsch was one of the most important innovators as the medium transitioned from the silents to sound film. Without missing a step, he synthesized the sophisticated visual effects perfected by the silents with new sonic techniques, like syncing action, dialogue, and music in rhythm with each other. Above all, he synchronized visual wit with verbal wit. A few years later, the anarcho-screwball genre would pair verbal and physical slapstick. With Lubitsch, there’s no slapstick; his worlds are built on sly, genial irony, the arts of seduction, and the skills of social gaming. The audience was invited to join the game of making unstated connections, completing unfinished sentences, and admiring the skill of the players — who included not only the characters and actors but the whole giddy dreamlike cinematic edifice: The Play.

Silent comedy emphasized preternatural physical flexibility, dexterity, and direct expressiveness. Sound film could never match that but it could emphasize something that the silents could not: intelligence. The best non-musical comedies of the 1930s and early 40s are memorable for the dialogues and diatribes of fast-talking characters who think at warp speed. They are masters of comebacks, wisecracks, and misprisions (some deliberate, some not). They’re smart! Not usually book-smart, but certainly word-smart. Jeanette Macdonald and Maurice Chevalier in Lubitsch’s classic films made before Trouble in Paradise are not particularly smart, it’s true; in fact, almost no one in their fantasy worlds has a lot of brains. But the films expect the audience to be smart. Lubitsch builds on the expectation that the audience knows its theater, which of course was not silent and so had maintained its hegemony in verbal art — one of the characteristically European things about Lubitsch’s approach to comedy. With Trouble in Paradise, Lubitsch decided to abandon the comic operetta model of his earlier comedies and to adopt the more laconic, restrained, and elegant British style established by Noel Coward.

Even though Design for Living, Lubitsch’s next film, was actually based on a Coward play, I feel Trouble in Paradise is more Cowardy. Witty repartee, knowingly ironic manners, fine clothes, and fine taste thrive in the sleek Art Deco + Bauhaus sets — and in fact that’s all that can even survive, let alone thrive. Despite the famous opening scene of the aria-singing garbage-man gondolier, there’s no outside to this world. The main characters — the arch-suave jewel thief Gaston (Herbert Marshall) and the aristocratically haute-bourgeoise Mariette Colet (Kay Francis) — never deviate from their elegant postures. Lily, Gaston’s combustible partner (Miriam Hopkins), keeps ruffling the surface but neither Gaston nor Marie are knocked out of their style. The funniest characters — The Major (Charlie Ruggles) and Filiba (Edward Everett Horton) — are class-appropriate suitors for Marie but only Filiba actually breaks out of the frame, in one of the best uses to which Horton’s twitchy double-takes were ever put, the “Tonsils Recognition Scene.”

For me, there’s not much chemistry among the actors (except for the black-tie clowns Ruggles and Horton) but I think that’s part of the point. Marshall is the main retardant. His Gaston is so rigidly, smugly proper that it’s hard to imagine him climbing drainpipes and leaping from balcony to balcony in his heists. Marshall in fact had a prosthetic leg as a result of a war injury, so his range of movement was already limited (requiring a body double for his running up the staircase scene). The film exaggerates his inflexibility so that he seems nearly robotic. He is seen constantly in profile in two-shot frames, always leaning slightly forward like a proud maître d’hôtel dealing with a potentially troublesome Olympian guest, while wearing the mask of a pitiful Pierrot.

He maintains the posture even in more frontal shots.

Gaston’s expressions also vary little — to the degree that one must doubt that he truly does develop deep feelings for Marie. And that is probably okay with Francis’s Marie, who seems to delight in enticing Gaston to break the rules. We learn early on that Marie’s class, wealth, and customs are essentially above rules anyway. Whatever is supposed to be going on between Gaston and Marie other than dalliance and mutual manipulation, Marie has no skin in the game — she can afford to be robbed, and she can afford to lose a lover. (Compare Francis’s performance in Trouble with her Princess Teri von Hohrenfels in Jewel Robbery, made in the same year with William Powell as a rather more lively debonair jewel thief; in that film the robber fills her with joy enough for her to follow him to Nice.) Contrasting with the pair’s smooth affectations is Miriam Hopkins’s hypervolatile Lily — the only one of the three with any vitality, but so rowdy it’s hard to see her as a seductive faux countess in posh Venetian hotels. In any case, she’s kept on the periphery for most of the film.

Lily is the only counter-force to all the stifling socially legitimate game-playing. Or rather she should be, but I don’t think she is. We’re introduced to her in her very funny high-spirited thieving duel with Gaston at the beginning of the film, the romance of two advanced magicians.

But after that she’s moved to the side. Subsequently, whenever she enters a scene she’s a broadly drawn outsider. Lily doesn’t have the natural gift for silky feminine posing that Marie seems to have been born with, or Gaston’s tense self-concealing discipline. She’s so undisciplined (the implication is that she’s not actually “domesticated” to the high-end codes that dominate the society she’s supposedly fooling — is that supposed to be “American?”) that she can blow her stack and carry the action into high-strung melodrama.

Comedy doesn’t like complicated psychology and the lead characters in Trouble seem to lack histories altogether — they’re just readouts of their types. The point is made in front of our noses when Lily, posing as Gaston’s secretary, provides the only backstory, the fake one about her “little brother” and dead mother. Marie’s famous response — “that’s the trouble with mothers; first you get to like them, and then they die” — shows how little backstories matter in her world.

This near-Kubrickian glassiness makes Trouble seem like the performance of the moves of a famous game, with the characters acting as life-sized chess-pieces. Samson Raphaelson, who wrote this and many other Lubitsch screenplays in collaboration with him, was not a big fan of the film. He considered it cold, and opined that “the people in Trouble in Paradise are just puppets.” I take that to mean not that they are being manipulated by invisible masters (though that’s certainly true in the lack of improvisatory energy in the film, extreme even for the famously controlling Lubitsch) but that the film is as abstract as a puppet show — or better yet, a shadow play, where music and lighting and heady words bring two-dimensional cut-outs to life. And Lubitsch lets us know he intended it that way:

None of these characters cross the boundary of the screen into rich, mysterious unpredictability. And part of the problem is that, in marked contrast to the Macdonald-Chevalier films, they aren’t just smart, they’re smarter than the audience. That’s maybe too smart. James Harvey, in his wonderful Romantic Comedy: From Lubitsch to Sturges, believes that the mystique of Trouble comes from how knowing it is. It’s not just the protagonists who always seem to be one step ahead of the next move but the movie itself. The film doesn’t wink at the audience like the lumpen bon vivant Chevalier, it’s fully embedded in a modern version of a royal court. It’s such a solid edifice that Lily never really perforates it. But then, if she had, where would she get her swag? Fittingly, only an insider like Filiba can disrupt the smooth mechanism — and only an insider fool, at that, who identifies Gaston not via manners, connections, or genealogy but consummately comical tonsils.

Despite, and because of, all these reservations, I agree that Trouble in Paradise is a cinematic masterpiece. Once we take a step back from the fun, it has a dazzling formal and technical unity (which was considered a good thing in those days). The thematic linking of money, food, and erotic desire runs throughout on two tracks — as a sincere natural drive and the source of every insincerity in a hypocritical world. It’s not clear that anyone can be happy in that world, but the thieves at least are sincere in their deceptions. And quick. The film’s phallus game is impeccably elegant. All the fetishes remain concealed, except when they are needed strategically — some of them controlled by Gaston and Lily like stage magicians (the stolen wallets of Venice, Lily’s garter, the jewel-encrusted purse, the bundle of bills from Mariette’s safe), some hidden by corrupt handlers (the company’s account books). These moveable power-objects are precisely what the master thieves generally control. What they can’t quite control is bodies — which comes back to haunt them when Filiba recovers the hidden tonsils from the vault of his memory. In its version of a happy ending, comedy’s principle of freedom is affirmed, after all. The stiff Gaston chooses risk and a rowdy mate who adores him as a crook over being “Monsieur Colet” among the good bourgeois who rob without risk.