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"Well, the first thing you must learn is balance." Up and down snowy slopes, later elaborated by Edwards (The Pink Panther), a sketch of a workaholic's grudging holiday blooming before the Alpine doyenne. New York magazine publisher (Melvyn Douglas) and ski instructor (Greta Garbo), "the desert and the rose" in a whirlwind romance leading to marriage before the ten-minute mark. The honeymoon is curtailed, he leaves her for business so she invents a masquerade to bring him back, a twin sister who's as frivolous as she is demure. (The persona is appropriately fabricated in the half-light of a theater closed for rehearsals.) "Very well. I will smolder. I will siren. I will vamp him to a crisp." Toast of the nightclub, center of attention, a ticklish improvisation on the dance floor. "I just met you. I can't dine with you tonight." "What about tomorrow night?" "Tomorrow night I will have forgotten you." A companion piece to Camille for Garbo's farewell, a pendant to Sylvia Scarlett for George Cukor's portrait of emotional-creative refraction, in both cases the sublime nervousness of a melancholy swan in a screwball scenario. (The studio's puritanical interference in order to clue in the smug husband cannot erase the heroine's delight in her newly discovered coquettish side.) Talk of the town, "a humdinger" to some and to others "a female Jekyll and Hyde." The rival (Constance Bennett) is a playwright known to punctuate direction with the occasional shriek. "You made me lose my poise. For that I shall never forgive you." Sturges has the parallel (The Lady Eve) and Buñuel the revision (Cet Obscur Objet du Désir), Ruth Gordon as the quizzical secretary anticipates the critical response, "I'm going slowly but quietly insane." With Roland Young, Robert Sterling, and Frances Carson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |