Why Lubitsch? It’s
been a hot, sticky summer, marred in my home state by actual fires, rather than
the flames of passion. So I decided to chill out with two pre-Code Ernst
Lubitsch confections. Lubitsch people, it seems, live in places like Paris, sip
cocktails at all hours, wear tuxedos (men) and slinky satin gowns (women), and
make amorality into a fine art. They don’t all have money, but they know how to
get it, or how to live beautifully without much at all. In these films from the
early 1930s, made several years before the Hays Code imposed rigid moralistic
restrictions) the outside world (of politics, of economics, of conventional
behavior) rarely intrudes at all.
Lubitsch, a German Jew who began as an actor, came to
Hollywood in the silent era, imported by Mary Pickford to direct her in a film
called Rosita. Their collaboration
didn’t go well, but he was soon snapped up by the major studios. His first
outing as a director of talkies, 1932’s Trouble
in Paradise, is considered his very best by many film historians, including
my buddy Joseph McBride, whose new book is titled How Did Lubitsch Do It? This spritely comedy—which features the
sexy and well-dressed triangle of Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, and Kay
Francis—is the story of two grifters determined to pilfer the expensive jewels
and accoutrements of a naïve but beautiful widow, heiress to a cosmetics
fortune. When Marshall and Hopkins first meet over a romantic dinner in Venice,
they are both posing as aristocrats. The scene in which they discover their
mutual talent for pickpocketry is priceless. Suffice it to say, they steal each
other’s hearts (along with a wallet, a gold watch, and a garter), but Kay
Francis’s more soignée charms become for Marshall a serious distraction.
The witty screenwriter for Trouble in Paradise was a Lubitsch regular who became a Hollywood
favorite: Samson Raphaelson. (Among
other things, he wrote the play that ultimately became The Jazz Singer.) A different kind of writing talent was on display
in Lubitsch’s next feature, 1933’s Design
for Living. Though it was based on a hit Noel Coward stage comedy, the
Lubitsch version had entirely different characters and structure. Coward had
written the roles of two men and a woman engaged in a jolly ménage à trois to accommodate himself
and good friends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Apparently he’d dabbled in
giving them exotic backgrounds (with himself cast as a Chinese gentleman), but
settled for making them posh, artistic Britishers, one male a successful playwright, one a much-admired
painter. Since the men’s longtime friendship much pre-dates the entrance of the
charming Gilda into their lives, their intense attachment to one another is
another aspect of the triangle, and suggests glimpses of Coward’s own
not-so-covert homosexuality.
The Lubitsch version (script by the great Ben Hecht) turns
all three characters into Americans abroad, first seen on a train in their
down-and-out days. In a tour-de-force opening sequence, Gilda (Miriam Hopkins)
first encounters the two men (Frederic March and Gary Cooper) in a third-class
compartment, snoring away. Nothing daunted, she proceeds to sketch them. When
they awaken to discover this vivacious young blonde and her sketchpad, all
three launch into fluent traveler’s French, as they hotly discuss the merits of
her work. The legendarily laconic Gary Cooper speaking French? And engaging in sparkling repartee? All part of the Lubitsch touch.
Director/screenwriter Billy Wilder, himself famous for such
charming films as The Apartment and Some Like It Hot, posted a sign in his
office: How Would Lubitsch Do It? We’d still like to know.
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