Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime

by Richard Schickel

  Venice. A pretty canal. A gondolier’s song. We are primed for romantic enchantment at the outset of Trouble in Paradise. Until it is revealed that the gondolier is not poling a pair of embracing lovers through the languid waters. What he’s propelling is a garbage scow. And his song underscores a sequence in which a second-story man KOs a victim in a hotel room and scuttles over the balcony.

  The camera then tracks across some Venetian facades as the gondolier’s song is picked up by an underscoring orchestra. It comes to rest on another balcony, where it finds a “baron” (Herbert Marshall), who is planning a seductive dinner for a “countess” (Miriam Hopkins). It is causing him a certain distress. “Beginnings are so difficult,” he complains—ironically, considering that the sequence in which he is participating is one of the most famous and justly admired beginnings in movie history. The obliging waiter proposes cocktails as an icebreaker. The baron agrees, though why such an obviously practiced roué does not automatically think of a nice, dry martini as the ideal choice for such an occasion is not explained.

  Somehow the cocktails silently mutate into champagne—mostly, one imagines, to accommodate this inspired dialogue: “And waiter,” the baron says, “you see that moon? I want to see that moon in that champagne.”

  “Moon in champagne,” the fellow solemnly notes on his order pad.

  “As for you, waiter,” the baron adds, “I don’t want to see you at all.”

  We now settle in for what is surely the wittiest seduction scene in movie history. What with one clue and another, we’re already pretty certain the baron and his inamorata are not what they’re pretending to be. Now we learn that he’s the notorious society thief Gaston Monescu, specializing in jewels but not averse to lifting cash and, for all we know, bearer bonds and fur coats. His inamorata is just plain Lily (no last name given), and she, too, is a thief, every bit Gaston’s equal, except in the strong-arm department. For it is, in fact, Gaston we have just witnessed bonking the conk of a rich ninny—Monsieur Filibia (Edward Everett Horton)—and making off with his overstuffed wallet, an act that will have consequences further down the plotline.

  Before the pair reveal their true identities, they practice their skills on one another. She has stolen his wallet. He shakes it out of her. He then gallantly returns her pin to her. “It has one very good stone,” he observes. She asks him for the time. He gropes for his pocket watch, which she then retrieves from her purse. It was five minutes slow, she says, “but I regulated it.” He confesses to having her garter, which he has no intention of returning. She clutches at her skirt. He removes the garter from a pocket and kisses it lightly. Whereupon she hurls herself into his arms. “Darling!” she cries. A moment later we see his arm hanging the DO NOT DISTURB sign on his suite’s door. Fade out.

  Ah, the Lubitsch touch, as it was then and as it will forever be known. It was not a very complicated thing, a blend of more or less genial cynicism and tart sentimentality, executed with compulsive detail. It was Lubitsch’s habit to act out for his actors their movements and their line readings and for them simply to imitate him. There was not, to say the least, a lot of improvisation on his sets. He had, after all, been an actor in Germany before he turned to directing, and he had made some thirty pictures there before Mary Pickford brought him to America in 1923. That relationship did not work out, but he made something like ten more films in the late silent era, among them, rather amazingly, a silent version of Lady Windermere’s Fan that was quite delightful, given that Oscar Wilde’s epigrams were, perforce, confined to the intertitles.

  His early sound films were largely musicals, set in Europe and marked by rather more sweep than was common in the genre at the time. He had, of course, done dialogue pictures before Trouble in Paradise, for instance, but I think it’s fair to say that this is the film in which he found his main line, from which he would deviate only occasionally for the rest of his career.

  At the time Trouble in Paradise was released (1932), some earnest souls thought of its opening as a sort of Depression-era comment on the movie that was to follow—wasn’t romance among the well-heeled and well-spoken “garbage” when millions were out of work? Some considered it more narrowly, as a very extended example of the Lubitsch touch, in this case virtually a full-body massage—all grace, lightness and ingratiation.

  But however you analyzed the opening of Trouble in Paradise, you could see that the director and the screenwriter, Samson Raphaelson, continually grounded its deftness in a harsher reality. Besides that garbage scow, there was the fairly brutal robbery and a phone call to the baron’s suite, in which a friend or relative of Lily is shown to be distinctly déclassé. You also had to admire the fact that they extended its deliciously ambiguous tone for a breathtaking fifteen minutes.

  Lubitsch and Raphaelson could not, of course, sustain that tone for the movie’s entire running time (which was just under an hour and a half). This is not to be taken as criticism. It is more sensible to be grateful for what we have received, especially since the rest of the movie is very good indeed.

  They make the transition to Paris, where the movie will settle down, jarringly—a shot of the Eiffel Tower, with animated radio waves emanating from it, introduces a slightly lame satire on radio commercials and advertising signage. The tone of this brief passage signals a general shift in the movie’s mood—it becomes just slightly nervous, a trifle too busy and somewhat digressively developed. It seems to have too much on its mind.

  Lubitsch would have disagreed with this judgment. In his marvelously detailed study of Lubitsch’s American movies, William Paul quotes him thus: “As for pure style I think I have done nothing better or as good as Trouble in Paradise.” Paul buttresses this comment with a rich sampling of critical writing that echoes the notion that this is a near-to-perfect comedy.

  To see why it doesn’t quite fit that description, it’s necessary to undertake that most boring of critical tasks, a plot summary. I’ll try to be brief. The advertising sequence takes us to Mariette Colet (Kay Francis), heiress to the Colet perfume empire, whose products the ads are satirically promoting. We meet her as her board of directors proposes wage cuts. She is more interested in her luncheon engagement and rejects their idea. But on her way to lunch she pauses to buy a purse, which is her most interesting moment in the movie. The clerk shows her something undistinguished for 3,000 francs. No, she says, it’s too expensive. She spots something exquisite. Its price is 125,000 francs, but she snaps it up. This is possibly one of the clearest statements of value Lubitsch ever made. Junk is always overpriced; something beautiful is always a bargain.

  In any event, the purse moves the plot. Gaston, now in Paris with Lily (and not doing terribly well), steals it at the opera and brings it to the living room of Mariette’s very elegant deco house, which is crawling with poor people, among them a left-wing radical who keeps crying “phooey” to Mariette’s wealth. Gaston dismisses the radical (with some blunt comments in his native—possibly Romanian—tongue), returns the purse and is rewarded with a job as Mariette’s private secretary.

  He proves adept at straightening out her tangled affairs, all the while supervising what seems to be a superfluous diet-and-exercise program for Mariette. He even brings Lily on as his assistant and they begin planning what could be their best score. But Gaston has fallen in love with Mariette. Lily finds out and, driven by jealousy, attempts to go through with the robbery by herself. Mariette discovers her, but forgives her. In the movie’s last scene, they reprise their earlier pickpocket competition and we see that they have made off with 100,000 francs, a pearl necklace and, yes, the purloined purse that caused all the trouble in paradise.

  And, you ask, what’s wrong with that? To which I reply: nothing. But in parsing the movie’s main line, I have left out a few details. Mostly these involve Monsieur Filibia and a character known only as “the Major” (Charles Ruggles). They are Mariette’s suitors, but the former is silly and the latter is rather stiffly British. Both are highly conv
entionalized comic figures of their day, and both are unfunny. Indeed, they are straw men. One can’t imagine Mariette having the slightest interest in either of them, and indeed, she is dismissive, almost rude to them, throughout the movie. Filibia at least has a function—he has eventually to remember who it was that knocked him out and stole his money in Venice, which, with many a furrowed brow, he finally does.

  The relationship between Gaston and Adolphe J. Giron (C. Aubrey Smith) has a little more bite. He’s the chairman of the company’s board, whose claim to competence is based largely on his forty-year relationship with the Colet family. Each instinctively understands the other to be a crook (Giron is an embezzler), and a nice tense scene of recognition and accusation is played out between them. Recounting the encounter to Mariette, Gaston allows a certain class resentment to show. He has worked his way up from nothing, he’s “a self-made crook,” but that cuts no ice with the upper classes. As he observes, membership in the social register allows you to escape jail. It is what the movie has in the way of social commentary, but the observation is scarcely original, and it is, perhaps sensibly, rather thrown away by Marshall.

  He and Mariette also rather throw away their romantic possibilities. This occurs in another famous sequence, one that is the movie’s emotional center. Their rooms in Mariette’s palatial home are adjoining. There is, as far as we know, no internal door connecting them. There comes a moment when she has to go out for a boring dinner party at the Major’s. She would rather stay home and, at last, go to bed with Gaston. He thinks, however, that she should go to the party and return early. Their positions, however, shift in the course of a discussion to which we are not privy. What happens is that one or the other of them emerges from time to time to instruct the befuddled butler to either let her car go or let it stay. What’s funny—and never explained—is that sometimes he speaks to this functionary from her room, while sometimes she speaks to him from his room. And vice versa. Romantic confusion has rarely been so wittily emblematized as it is in this sequence.

  The sequence concludes yearningly—with shots of his chaste bed, first seen in a mirror, then with their embracing silhouettes projected onto it. She says there’s no need to hurry their consummation—they have days, weeks, months to enjoy themselves. But Gaston—and we in the audience—are beginning to suspect otherwise. Lily is on to them. Monsieur Giron awaits below, prepared to unmask Gaston. And at the party, Filibia will finally make the connection between Madame Colet’s secretary and the man who robbed him in Venice.

  But it is a beautifully designed and perfectly paced bit of moviemaking, dryly witty yet touched by romantic loss. Despite our fondness for Lily, we really want Gaston to attain his heiress—at least for a night. And we want Mariette, at last, to have a man worthy of her. Much as we like Lily, we can’t help suspecting that Gaston and Mariette are in some ways better-matched souls. Let me put that another way: They hint at the possibility of transcendence, of a respectable life for him, of a life less sunk in boredom and social irrelevance for her. Gaston and Lily are bound only for the criminal margin, for lives lived perpetually on the run.

  That, naturally, is a subject for debate. So is Gilbert Adair’s contention (in Flickers) that Trouble in Paradise is “a masterpiece of delivery, the most mellifluous, the most perfectly spoken film in the history of the American cinema.” I think it does not quite achieve that status. Mariette is supposed to be a somewhat careless, even ditzy rich lady who is brought to common sense by Gaston, rather as Claudette Colbert would be by Clark Gable in It Happened One Night. But that kind of lightness was not in Kay Francis’s range. She’s rather a sober presence in the movie, better at yearning than she is at brittle exchanges.

  Something similar could be said of Marshall. Bright, brisk Miriam Hopkins draws the incisiveness out of him. So do the minor characters who suspect his bona fides. But when he’s around Francis, he tends to moo his lines, suggesting a weltschmerz to which his character is not, perhaps, entirely entitled. I prefer the smart, edgy knowingness of Hopkins’s performance, and I feel, putting it simply, that the movie’s Francis-Marshall nexus is just a bit softer, creamier, than I’d prefer.

  One could, however, as easily argue the opposite, namely that the Gaston-Mariette romance is from the start foredoomed, and that they know it. Seen in that light, their relationship gains a certain poignancy from their implicit acknowledgment that the social distance between them is too great to bridge more than temporarily.

  But if Lubitsch was, in this, his first talking picture comedy, just a little more jittery, a little less sure of himself than he soon would be, it is unimportant. Indeed, the movie I—by no means alone—consider Lubitsch’s masterpiece, The Shop Around the Corner (1940), is actually more sentimental. That film is really quite a simple romantic comedy, with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as employees of a small shop, bickering in love in a movie that seems perfectly written, perfectly paced. It has heart, too, principally located in a character played by Frank Morgan. But the thing I like best about it is the calmness of its formalism—it’s a movie of impeccably edited medium shots, and also one that observes the unity of place rigorously, which somehow dries out its potential for sogginess.

  You eagerly forgive the occasional insecurities of Lubitsch’s work, particularly when you realize that the main line of American moviemaking was already veering away from him. This was 1932, the year of The Public Enemy and Scarface, of I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Red Dust. The movies were embracing a grittier realism, a more wisecracking, more “American” style of dialogue.

  Lubitsch, though, stuck to his path. He would never make a full-length movie set in contemporary America. (He did, however, make a great, brief contribution to the anthology film If I Had a Million.) He would also cling very largely to the Mittel-European playwrights he loved to adapt, to the French settings—or rather the backlot versions of them—that he loved to explore. Interestingly, he would be fired by Paramount because, as William Paul tells us, only two of the pictures he made in his eleven years on the lot made money.

  It was probably the critics, adoring his elegance, who kept him alive, and bless them for that. Without their efforts—Lubitsch is one of the few directors who seem never to have suffered a “reconsideration”—we would not have such other timeless delights as Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, Ninotchka, Heaven Can Wait, and Cluny Brown to light our weary way. Indeed, it is only lately that one has begun to fear for his posthumous reputation. The anonymous (and historically ignorant) studio lords of the DVD have ignored him. We desperately need his films—for their own delicious sakes, but also for the reminder they offer of a witty and romantic imaginary world that never was but surely should have been.

  10

  Two Cheers for Mr. Muckle

  Mr. Muckle may be the crankiest man in the history of the movies. He is a customer of a near-moribund grocery store presided over by W. C. Fields in It’s a Gift (1934). He has purchased a package of gum. He wishes to have it delivered to his home. Fields does not wish to do so. In addition to his congenitally foul temper, Mr. Muckle (the superb, virtually unknown Charles Sellon) is deaf and blind. Naturally, he and Harold Bissonette (Fields) fall to squabbling. It is, I think, possibly the greatest quarrel in screen history.

  There is a plot, of sorts, to the film. Fields wants to relocate. No one else in the family wants to. But that’s purely nominal. Mostly the movie is an excuse for Fields to reflect and riff on topics that occur to him as he makes his way through the days of his life. For example, he is trying to get some shut-eye on a porch in the early-morning hours. But there are noisy neighbors, a nagging wife, Baby LeRoy and an insanely cheerful insurance salesman in search of someone called Carl LaFong—a name he insists on endlessly spelling out (“capital L, small a,” etc.). All of them, naturally, conspire to rob Fields of sleep. To say that herein Fields is harassed almost beyond human endurance radically understates the case.

  In his desperation, he at one point cries out
in the grocery store, “Mr. Muckle, honey,” trying, in his way, to break through the man’s intransigence. It is a cry of the heart at once poignant and hilarious, and, of course, unavailing. Yet somehow he fumes his way through.

  In some ways It’s a Gift is a careless movie. There are some sequences that would have been much better had they been more thoughtfully worked out. But the film is not about elegance. Its slapdash qualities are what it is most essentially about. If you want elegance, see Lubitsch, to take a convenient example. Sometimes—rarely, I must admit—movies need to be loose and shaggy, just out for a good time. That’s what’s happening here. Though I think it’s fair to say that It’s a Gift also holds true to its dim view of human nature in general. Fields would go on to appear in movies a little more carefully plotted and directed, but not, I think, funnier. In its way, it is a perfect package.

  11

  Shrieks, Freaks, Geeks

  Horror films always exist on the fringes of the movies. This is not to say they are unpopular. It could be argued, for example, that Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera (1925) is one of the true glories of the silent screen, the most elegantly realized of the several screen versions of Gaston Leroux’s sort of trashy, sort of wonderful tale of the romantically macabre—at once touching, rueful and, if nothing else, beautifully designed. We must also mention Nosferatu of 1922, a Dracula story, and a masterful one at that, also beautifully designed.

  These films have, however, two salient defects: They cannot speak, and they cannot offer sound effects, those chilling offstage noises that, at their best, hollow at the marrow of your bones. It’s often the sound of one hand clapping.

  Dracula, in 1931, was something else again. Bela Lugosi had played the title role on Broadway and was recruited to the role after the death of Lon Chaney. He was a weird little guy, basically a lifelong recruit to horror, which turned out to be an extended and tortured path. He had an occasionally incomprehensible accent and—possibly—a somewhat ironic attitude toward his roles (it’s hard to tell). For instance, offstage, the wolves howl, and he pauses to reflect on the commotion: “Children of the night,” he muses. “What music they make,” the stresses falling oddly in the two lines, the rhythms uniquely his own—and unduplicable.