“What would Lubitsch do?” This was the famous phrase Billy Wilder had emblazoned on his office wall, a testament to the German director’s impeccable taste. Where one director would be cynical, Lubitsch would be sweet. Where another would be zany, he would be sincere. And where most would be sexually blunt and awkward, he could be deceptively delicate and no less racy.
“Trouble in Paradise” is his finest film, a pre-code movie that embodies the best of his sophisticated, classy approach to farce as well as his gift with suggestive innuendos, romance and goofy, quick witted characters who would later define an entire genre of screwball comedy.
That “Trouble in Paradise” is so decidedly not a “screwball” but a satire in which the characters talk swiftly, their intentions are in the wrong place and their situations are absurd and exaggerated is exactly what makes it so perfect and indicative of the “Lubitsch touch.” His signature is also, as Andrew Sarris put it, “a poignant sadness infiltrates the director’s gayest moments,” and its these genuine moments of pathos and niceties in his characters that sets it apart from the screwballs that tend to be all one-sided.
The barely 90 minute film follows two thieves who meet in Venice and fall in love, only to enter into a love triangle with one of their future marks. Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) is a world-renowned thief wooing a presumed wealthy socialite named Lily (Miriam Hopkins). The two are each putting on a ruse, and when they reveal each other as crooks, their suggestive exchange is delightful and hilarious. Each nonchalantly pulls out an object they’ve pickpocketed from the other, until Gaston wins the day by revealing he has Lily’s garter.
One would expect Lubitsch to make such a film seem hurried and frantic to earn all its laughter, but “Trouble in Paradise,” like all of his films, is perfectly paced and politely mannered. He mocks the exasperation and urgency (and some loud Italians) one would expect in one scene and quietly continues to play with tones and expressions that even in 1932 had started to define genre filmmaking. For a film so modest, it’s actually quite rebellious.
The film is peppered with beautiful wipes and framing in the briefest of moments, a fact often overlooked in praise of Lubitsch. Some shots provide the comic simplicity of some of the film’s cutest moments, like one in which two doors are visible and the characters enter from the wrong one, while others, like one from binoculars in an opera house, even serve as a throwback to Lubitsch’s silent cinema days.
But only sound allows for the suave, lovable nerve in Herbert Marshall’s personality. When he meets and plots to steal from the wealthy Madame Colet (Kay Francis), he mocks her makeup color (“It’s disgraceful”) and demands a check made out to cash all with absolute charm. Francis and Hopkins have no trouble putting on these delightful airs either. They share a scene in which a playful laugh that only women can share says the world about how much they loathe one another. Francis delivers lines with such disarming sweetness that you forget how many of them sound notoriously flirty or even morbid. “That’s the trouble with mothers,” she says. “First you get to like them, then they die.”
Just two years after “Trouble in Paradise” was made, the film code would be put into place and would begin to censor some of the more suggestive images and sexual innuendos of these early Hollywood movies. Lubitsch however was never hampered at all. There’s a shot of a clock with playful, flirty sounds in the background that tells us all we need to know that’s going on under the covers. That’s the Lubitsch touch, and it’s what makes him one of the early greats.