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The justly famous opening in the Riviera department store follows "a revolutionary request" up and down the management ladder, nightwear divided in two for a relationship's impossibility of wholeness, "that is communism!" (It also gives the mental image of Claudette Colbert sleeping only in pajama bottoms, so much for Beckett's "filthy censors" and "filthy synecdoche.") The moneyed Yank (Gary Cooper) has insomnia and a harem of ex-wives, his latest target is the daughter of the penniless Marquis (Edward Everett Horton). The courtship is rushed ("I hate overtures! Lovemaking is the red tape of marriage"), the matrimony is worked out with prenuptial agreements, "a deal," "a bargain," "a scandal." The key rests in the heroine's slide from smile to grimace as the wedding portrait is taken—brilliant in its sourness, the film is a procession of pose-imbalancing scrims in which Ernst Lubitsch's suavity is continuously cracked by the unruliness of the screwball genre and the vinegar of the Billy Wilder-Charles Brackett screenplay. Separate gondolas at the honeymoon, the tipsy kiss halted by the plate of onions. "You bought me!" "Then fulfill your contract!" The Louis XIV bathtub that cannot accommodate the strapping husband, "Czechoslovakia" spelled backwards as an unreliable sedative, the wrong lessons of The Taming of the Shrew, all elements in a perfectly analytical comic whirl. Colbert's own scheme involves a pugilist in a tuxedo (Warren Hymer) waxing lyrical about knockouts, the amorous clerk (David Niven) receives the wallop by mistake and Lubitsch cuts to Cooper facing the camera in the middle of a laughing theater audience. "I always put iodine on people after I bite them." Surely a bedrock for That Obscure Object of Desire, Brooks in High Anxiety remembers the barking nobleman in the sanitarium. With Elizabeth Patterson, Herman Bing, Franklin Pangborn, and Charles Halton. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |