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Thin Girl and Pepsi Tycoon, Vienna by way of Paris. "Married love... and illicit love," the latter is the métier of the bedroom detective (Maurice Chevalier) who separates work from family, his daughter (Audrey Hepburn) nevertheless sees the romance in "sordid matters." The latest case occasions a little symphony of groans from John McGiver as Monsieur X the cuckold, whose wife is but one conquest of the globe-trotting roué (Gary Cooper). Dalliance at the Ritz, revolver waiting outside the room, gamine to the rescue. "I mean, if people loved each other more, they'd shoot each other less." "Are you a religious fanatic or something?" Innocence scarcely interests the serial seducer, the young musician seizes his attention with a counterfeit worldliness pieced together from scandalous files out of her father's cabinet. A tuxedoed quartet tags along as melodic Greek chorus, "Fascination" is the motif. Like Preminger in The Moon Is Blue, Billy Wilder wonders if Lubitsch can be revived in the Fifties and shares the melancholy realization that he can't. Don Juan has a distinctly American face, "like a cowboy or Abraham Lincoln," to live as though "between planes" is his philosophy. The heroine is a virginal Conservatory student who lingers in his mind as the mistress of dukes and bullfighters, the old private eye has the wisdom to show paternal care with "a detailed dossier." The carnation in the icebox, the ermine coat in the cello case, the sweaty violin in the sauna. Double Indemnity's peekaboo anklet has a telling cameo, so does the flower behind Cooper's ear from Sternberg's Morocco. "You French girls have the right idea. It's bonjour and adieu, and in between a little amour." The finale at the train station posits Ophüls was Wilder's true alliance all along. Cinematography by William C. Mellor. With Van Doude, Lise Bourdin, and Olga Valéry. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |