Desire (Paramount, 1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (June 11) I watched another movie in Turner Classic Movies’ month-long salute to “Star of the Month” Gary Cooper: Desire, a 1936 romantic comedy starring Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper (billed in that order! In their one previous film, Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco from 1930, he had been top-billed) in a rather strange tale that casts her as a jewel thief and him as her unwitting “mule.” Desire began as a Hungarian play called Die Schönen Tage von Aranjuez (The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez) by Hans Székely and Robert A. Stemmle, which got adapted by no fewer than five writers: Edwin Justus Mayer, Waldemar Young, Samuel Hoffenstein, Virginia Lawrence, and Benn W. Levy (the last two uncredited). Gary Cooper plays Tom Bradley, a mechanical engineer for the Brunson car company, who is pleading with his boss, Mr. Gibson (William Frawley – so, even though he and Dietrich never appear in the same scene, that still puts Dietrich one degree of separation from Lucille Ball!), to be allowed a two-week vacation to visit France and Spain. The film actually opens in Paris, where Madeleine de Beaupre (Marlene Dietrich) – who’s referred to throughout the film as “Countess,” even though she isn’t one – hatches an elaborate plot to steal a two-million franc pearl necklace from jeweler Aristide Duvalle (Ernest Cossart). Then she slips the swag into the jacket pocket of Tom Bradley and follows him across the France-Spain border, at one point stealing his car and then crashing it. Bradley doesn’t discover what happened to his car until he sees its spare tire, emblazoned with the slogan “You’ll Be Happy Driving a Brunson 8,” on the back of a horse-drawn cart.

Madeleine has to meet up with her partner in crime, Carlos Margoli (John Halliday), and give him and Aunt Olga (a marvelous crotchety-old-lady performance by Zeffie Tilbury) the necklace, which means she has to get close enough to Tom Bradley to pick his pocket and get the necklace back. Desire was directed by Frank Borzage, though Ernst Lubitsch is listed as the producer, and the film is full of the famous “Lubitsch touches” like the argument Bradley and Gibson get into over what the advertising slogan on the tire should be (Gibson proposed “You’ll Be Delighted” and “You’ll Be Glad,” and they compromised on “You’ll Be Happy”) and the process by which Madeleine actually steals the necklace. She poses as the wife of prominent psychiatrist Dr. Maurice Pouquet (Alan Mowbray) and asks Duvalle to present Dr. Pouquet with the bill, then tells Dr. Pouquet that Duvalle is her husband and has a mania for presenting people with bills for items they didn’t order. But once the intrigue settles down it’s an oddly dull film, not bad but also not sparkling the way Lubitsch’s best films were. In that respect it reminded me of another film Lubitsch produced and someone else (George Cukor) directed, One Hour with You (1932). Through the later stages of the film I was wondering how the writing committee was going to allow the Cooper and Dietrich characters to get together while fulfilling the iron dictates of the Production Code that criminals must always be punished, somehow, for their crimes. They did it by having Bradley hit on the idea of returning to Paris and presenting Duvalle with the stolen necklace, saying they were “returning” it and managing to get him to drop the charges against her. I couldn’t help but compare this film to one of Lubitsch’s masterpieces, Trouble in Paradise (1932), also a rom-com about jewel thieves but one which took advantage of the relative freedom of the so-called “pre-Code” period of loose Code enforcement.

Desire had more than its share of behind-the-scenes perils. While they were making Morocco together Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper had had an affair – no surprise there since Dietrich was notorious for seducing virtually all her leading men – only when she wanted Cooper as the leading man for her next film, Dishonored (1931), he flatly turned it down. Dietrich wondered what she’d done to offend him so much he didn’t want to work with her again, but Cooper’s problem wasn’t with Dietrich. It was with her director, Josef von Sternberg, whom Cooper had first worked with on the 1928 film Children of Divorce. It was Clara Bow’s next film after It, and, impressed by Cooper’s bit part as a reporter on that film, she’d requested him for her male lead. Alas, the film went so far behind schedule that when the Paramount executives assigned Sternberg to take it over and complete it in a few days, he executed that order by having the soundstage doors locked and cots moved in so the actors couldn’t leave the set. He had food and drink brought in so they could eat, and allowed them to sleep between takes when they weren’t actually needed on camera, but Cooper found the whole experience appalling (understandably) and blamed Sternberg for it. He agreed – reluctantly – to make Morocco for him, but he was once again appalled, this time by Sternberg’s insistence on directing Dietrich in German even though the film was in English. Adolphe Menjou, the film’s second male lead, had grown up in France and had learned German as a second language, but the rest of the cast and crew were not happy about Sternberg giving Dietrich directions in a language they couldn’t understand. But Cooper liked working with Dietrich and as soon as he was offered a film with her that didn’t involve Sternberg, he took it.

Dietrich had also started an affair with faded silent-film star John Gilbert and had even let him move into her home. She used her clout to get him cast in the second male lead, but in the meantime Gilbert went to see his ex, Greta Garbo, and Dietrich had a hissy-fit and threw him out. Then Gilbert died suddenly of the long-term ill effects of his chronic alcoholism, and so Paramount had to recast the part. It’s a pity they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) get John Barrymore for it – the part cried out for Barrymore’s intensity and got Halliday’s querulousness. Also for some unearthly reason, in 1935 Paramount’s executives had hired Lubitsch as their studio head, which worked out about as well as it did for Columbia 50 years later when they gave the job of running the studio to British producer David Puttnam on the strength of his mega-hit Chariots of Fire. One wonders why Paramount thought a European known for his sophisticated films could run an entire studio and greenlight the sorts of bread-and-butter American movies that were the major companies’ stock in trade, and three years later they not only relieved Lubitsch of the job of running the studio but fired him as a director as well. (Lubitsch went to MGM, where he made two of his finest films, Ninotchka and The Shop Around the Corner, before ending his career at 20th Century-Fox.) It also doesn’t help that Dietrich sings just one song in Desire, “Awake in a Dream,” by Friedrich Holländer (who’d become her favorite songwriter after his songs for The Blue Angel and whom she insisted on bringing to America, though Paramount “Americanized” his name as “Frederick Hollander”), in John Halliday’s living room, supposedly accompanying herself on piano but with Borzage and cinematographers Charles Lang and (uncredited) Victor Milner shooting from one of those damnable angles that interposes the bulk of the piano between us and her and therefore makes it all too obvious that she isn’t really playing it. I wouldn’t call Desire a bad movie; it’s reasonably entertaining, but it could have been a lot better, and it doesn’t help that Lubitsch had made a much funnier and more charming film about international jewel thieves in Trouble in Paradise four years earlier.