Trouble in Paradise
Elegant thieves fall in love, steal from rich doofi, it's good naughty fun.
Trouble in Paradise (1932). Grade: B
It was funny to see this around the same time I praised Holly Hunter’s performance in The Incredibles, since the main plot here’s sort of a mirror-image of that one. In that movie, the steadfast, dependable wife becames worried her husband is falling for a exotic, more exciting flame. In this, the exciting girlfriend is worried her lover might want to marry someone dependable.
Fortunately, you can check the date; 1932. That means before the censorship of the 1934 Hays code; it means the ending isn’t resolved in advance. And not knowing what’s going to happen is half the fun here.
It’s another one by Ernst Lubitsch (Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner), but even more fantastical and utterly escapist than those other films. In those, you had people worry about unemployment or political repression; in this, the only money trouble is gonna be that stolen diamonds are harder to cash in than cash.
Our happy couple are Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall, con artists and pickpockets extraordinaire. (They fall in love via stealing each other’s wallets, watches, underwear.) They’re not the bad kind of thieves, though, they only steal from the very wealthy and very dull. (Like Robin Hood, minus the “give to the poor” part.)
After some months together, though, the honeymoon is kinda over. A little bit of a rut has set in. (In terms of the stealing being less exciting than it was… but, 1932, don’t assume the other meaning isn’t intended as well.) So, time to spice things up with a threeway. Where Hopkins and Marshall invite Kay Francis into their relationship. They’re both gonna rip her off for millions.
But Marshall is kinda drawn to Francis’s kind, trusting nature. So, is he gonna give up his life of risky fun to settlt down with the nice lady? Or rediscover the thrill of being with the one gal who’ll swipe his stuff as much as he swipes hers? Tune in, find out. (As is often the case with older films, if your library doesn’t have DVDs, there’s a decent Internet Archive copy.)
Unlike some of the other German filmmakers we’ve been looking at, Ernst Lubitsch didn’t come to America because of 1930s politics. He came because in the 1920s, American films just had bigger budgets. He liked doing movies that had elegant people in elegant settings. And that, with few exceptions, were light comedies. No M or Threepenny Opera for him. Sadly, he died in 1947, at age 55. At the funeral, a friend, director William Wyler, turned to Ninotchka writer Billy Wilder and said “no more Lubitsch.” Wilder replied, “worse than that. No more Lubitsch films.”
This fine review by Jay’s Classic Movie Blog has some great biographical details about the actors, so I’m gonna steal some of it. Miriam Hopkins was known for her wit and her scene-stealing; at one point, to stop her from moving a chair around to upstage another actress, Lubitsch had her chair nailed to the floor. Kay Francis was known for her dramatic skills and her penchant for seducing the most gorgeous people in Hollywood of either sex; sadly, she struggled with addiction issues that eventually left her very injured.
Herbert Marshall had been shot during battle in WWI and had a leg amputated. I would not have guessed it from this movie. Per Wiki, when Marshall met King George, the king was asked to guess which leg had the prosthesis on it. The king guessed wrong.
All three are good, but it’s Marsahll who really shines for me. He has such an elegant romantic side. He really does love Hopkins, and he really is drawn to Francis, those aren’t acts he plays as part of his con. (Well, not ENTIRELY acts.) When he finally ends it with one of them, they place their faces cheek-to-cheek and moan, “it could have been marvelous… divine… wonderful,” and they’re NOT talking about dinner plans. But Marshall shows a great sense of humor, too. When he made The Fly with Vincent Price, the two of them were cracking up so much during the famous “help meeee” scene, it took 20 takes to get a straight face outta the guys.
You’ve also got some fun smaller characters; there’s two old bores vying for Davis’s hand (Charles Ruggles, Edward Everett Horton); venerable C. Aubrey Smith as an accountant; enjoyably weird Leonid Kinsky as some kind of howling Trotskyist. And some good musical jokes. There’s a singing radio ad that’s a hoot, a Venetian garbage boat where the trashman sings “O Solo mio,” and a mention of harems while the “place in france where the nekkid ladies dance” music is heard. (That tune goes back to at least 1893, and maybe much further!)
Mostly, what you’ve got here is a lot of fun romantic tension and sweet-natured sexual innuendo. Charlie Chaplin once said Lubitsch “could do more to show the grace and humor of sex in a non-lustful way than any other director I’ve ever heard of.” Take this credits image:
Only after a few seconds does the word “Paradise” appear. (Per IMDb, censors didn’t even notice this until the film’s rerelease in 1935.)
Although, animal lovers take note! This WAS the era of Peak Fur. At one point, Francis wears the most ri-DONK-ulous fur you’ve ever seen. It’s actually two foxes’ heads touching noses as a broach!
I realize fashions change, and some things we wear today will seem pretty ridiculous in 100 years (if humanity’s still around, big if)… still, when you see some of the furs in these old movies, it does boggle the mind that people ever thought they were elegant. Or still do (which can cause some problems when animals raised for fur get COVID…)
I’m sure at some point I’ll run across an Ernst Lubitsch movie I don’t enjoy, and that’ll be a sad day. But I haven’t hit that point yet! So he’s been an awfully enjoyable filmmaker to discover. One last fun thing, per TCM: Lubitsch adapted this (from a Hungarian play) “with his frequent collaborator Samson Raphaelson. (A third writer, Grover Jones, was credited, but by most accounts, all he did was sit in the same room, drink, and tell personal anecdotes.)” Man, I woulda LOVED being a writer back in them days. I can sit around, do no work, and tell personal anecdotes with the best of ‘em!