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"Beginnings are always difficult." Heaven needs garbagemen, too, the celebrated opening dumps a pail of slop on a Venetian gondola and glides over to the aftermath of a burglary. (On opposite sides of the palazzo, unconscious victim and resplendent culprit are connected by an impossibly mellifluous camera movement.) The Baron (Herbert Marshall) and the Countess (Miriam Hopkins) meet for dinner and drop their masks following a brisk bout of pickpocketing, larcenous swells made for each other. "My little shoplifter," he coos, and a dissolve from the couple in embrace to a vacant divan states the rest of the night. The Parisian heiress (Kay Francis, posed like a Klimt model) figures in their big score, a three-way valse on deco floors. Seduction and role-playing are the integral ingredients of relationships in Ernst Lubitsch's matchless comedy, one abstraction of suavity after another. Marshall's yen for moonlight and champagne, Hopkins' filched garter, Francis' half-lidded air of sex. A diamond-encrusted purse occasions foreplay, safecracking evokes consummation, opera binoculars supply voyeuristic irises. (Amid all this luxury, a Trotskyite has a few words: "Phooey, phooey and phooey!") A minute mustache twitch unsettles Charles Ruggles' absolute poker face, Edward Everett Horton at the garden party straining for a memory just out of reach is a master class in eunuch double-takes. Europe as purring studio reverie, all aplomb and one-upmanship until emotion intrudes: "You wanted a hundred thousand francs, and I thought you wanted me." The distillate of Lubitsch's cinema of insinuation and evanescence, façades and objects (a ringing phone unanswered before a locked door, intertwined shadows thrown on a silk mattress) in crystalline fusions of style and significance. The Earrings of Madame de... and To Catch a Thief flow from here, then the characters become phantoms in Last Year at Marienbad. Cinematography by Victor Milner. With C. Aubrey Smith, Robert Greig, and Leonid Kinskey. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |