#5 in my ranking of Ernst Lubitsch’s filmography.
Following up his remake of an earlier film with another original film, Ernst Lubitsch made one of the most delightful and distinctly his films in Trouble in Paradise. Balancing his trademarked touch with the battle of the sexes in a European setting, this time with the added wrinkle of criminals making up two-thirds of the main cast, Lubitsch found one of the most perfect mixes of his best narrative instincts in one package.
Lily (Miriam Hopkins) and Gaston (Herbert Marshall) are two high class crooks who find each other when they try to con each other while in Venice. It’s a delightful scene where they reveal how they’ve pilfered all of their goods from each other, handing them back, and realizing that they’re perfect for one another. They go on the run and zero in on Madame Colet (Kay Francis), the widow of a perfume magnate with expensive tastes and two suitors The Major (Charles Ruggles) and Francois (Edward Everett Horton), the latter of whom Gaston conned in Venice by posing as a doctor. Gaston’s plan is little more than to steal her expensive handbag while at the opera, but that gets scuttled when Colet puts out a reward for the bag that far outweighs what he could get from fencing it.
It’s a combination of both Lily’s and Gaston’s idea, of course, and it is what sets Gaston on a path towards being at the center of Colet’s attentions and affections. It reminds me of The Smiling Lieutenant, but it plays out differently. Instead of there being no affection from the man towards the powerful woman that the less powerful woman has to find a solution to, it’s the man finding affection towards the powerful woman, leaving the less powerful woman behind, only for everything to snap back in the most satisfying way possible. It’s also a better version of the twist he put on The Marriage Circle when he made One Hour With You.
The bulk of the film is dedicated to Gaston ingratiating himself to Colet, taking over her business interests against the objections of Adolph (C. Aubrey Smith) on her board of directors, and sorting things in a way that she will put a small fortune into her personal safe which he and Lily will abscond with one day. One day soon, that is. Gaston seems to enjoy his new life as the head secretary to the pretty widower millionaire. The quiet way Gaston and Colet get closer through thinly veiled dialogue is delightful. The attraction is palpable, and yet, there’s this undercurrent that everything about their relationship is built on a lie. It’s the kind of thing that Lily can see clearly as she continues to operate on the assumption that Gaston sees things the same way she does. When she discovers that he’s lost sight of that, it’s a break for her, and being as clear-eyed as she is, she chooses to move away as quickly as possible.
There’s a surprising amount of tension in the film’s final major plot movements, and that’s entirely because Lubitsch doesn’t waste his early comedy bits just looking for laughs. He’s building character through it all, and it’s on that basis that the later dramatics are founded. He’s spent his time building up Lily, Colet, and Gaston so that when things turn more serious, when characters are suddenly shouting at each other at their lowest points, it’s the kind of thing that makes sense, even if the tone of it is at odds with what established them. Lubitsch and his screenwriter Samson Raphaelson build their characters, establish the situation, and then mine the dramatic possibilities, and none of it feels forced.
The ending of the film is what really makes the entire package for me. There’s a mismatch between Gaston and Colet, and the trio gets sorted out appropriately followed by a revisiting of the delightful little routine that got the right two together in the first place.
Watching Trouble in Paradise, I can see why Billy Wilder would find the Lubitsch Touch so hard to do anything else other than use an example to define it, like here. What makes this film so delightful? Well, it is what it is, and it is delightful. I think I (and certainly Wilder could) can go a bit further, but this combination of a light tone, clear-eyed view of sex, sophisticated draping of the subject in dialogue, sensual performances, and very funny comedy is easy enough to lay out but much harder to replicate or even explain why it’s such a perfect mixture on screen. I can easily see why Lubitsch’s contemporaries viewed him with such reverence and awe. When he was on, he was operating on a level of comedy that’s simply hard to match. I may be questionable about his reputation when he got to America (his German films were definitely financially successful, but I never warmed to many of them), but once he was in America (and out from under Mary Pickford) he managed to consistently find the kind of work that really suited his talents, the witty comedy about men and women.
Trouble in Paradise is such a delight, and it just might be the peak of Lubitsch’s work. Funny, touching, surprisingly taut in places, and all around funny, the film is one of pre-Code Hollywood’s most enjoyable farces.
Rating: 4/4
David Vining, Author 
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