|
Noël Coward purists can have Cavalcade, Ernst Lubitsch prefers to introduce his characters by showing how falling asleep in a moving train is one of the most cinematic things. (The Hitchcock of Suspicion seconds it.) Painter (Gary Cooper) and playwright (Fredric March) snore aboard the Paris-bound express, they're joined by the advertiser with Napoleon caricatures (Miriam Hopkins) in a handsome preamble that employs a shifting pencil sketch to illustrate the difficulty of pinning down emotion. (It proceeds in unsubtitled French for a minute or so until American slang reveals the hand of the third auteur, Ben Hecht.) "Welcome to Bohemia!" Struggling artistes and the muse who's a harsh critic, she fancies the triangle's tension and becomes the liquid mercury flowing between the boys. She's asked to choose but settles for both, why not, the gentleman's agreement has some requirements: "Let's forget sex. Saves lots of time." "And confusion." When sex will not be denied, marriage to the stuffy impresario (Edward Everett Horton) might be the only way to avoid fracturing the friendship. The dusty typewriter that still rings, the modernist canvas like "wisecracking with paint," the potted buds amid matrimonial bouquets. "It's amazing how a few insults can bring people together." The unruffled Lubitsch radicalism is a simple extension of the rights of one gender to the other, so that the heroine's seizing of the sexual entitlement reserved for men becomes the path toward balance. A matter of stylistic approach, this "joke on Nature": Burlesque or high-class comedy or cheap melodrama? The Bastille to be stormed is a posh party, the revolutionaries wear tuxedos. "Couldn't we all be more nonchalant?" The disapproval of Anglophile reviewers is rebuked by the analytical ardor of the Nouvelle Vague (Jules et Jim, Une femme est une femme). With Franklin Pangborn, Isabel Jewell, and Jane Darwell. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |