By Candlelight (Universal, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I continued with our tour through the complete oeuvre of 1930’s film director James Whale, who’s best known for his horror classics – Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Bride of Frankenstein and, at least since its blessed rediscovery in 1970, The Old Dark House – but actually made films in a wide variety of genres (about the only popular genre of the 1930’s he didn’t attempt was the gangster movie), including grim war dramas, screwball comedies, Lubitschesque bedroom farces, soap operas, swashbucklers and at least one classic musical, the 1936 version of Show Boat. We watched the next two films in sequence in the Whale canon and in between we watched a modern Lifetime movie that turned out to be unusually interesting and an opportunity to compare how a story about a woman desperate to leave a physically and psychologically abusive husband was handled in 1934 and 2021.

Our first dip into the Whale filmography was the one that started me on this quest in the first place: By Candlelight, a 1933 bedroom farce that began life in 1929 as a play by Austrian author Siegfried Geyer (a name with double Wagnerian associations; Wagner’s stepfather was Ludwig Geyer and until he demanded at age 14 that he use the name Wagner he was listed in his school records as “Richard Geyer,” which incensed him not only because “Geyer” sounded Jewish but it’s the German word for “vulture”). It was translated and adapted by British writer P. G. Wodehouse for the Broadway stage and produced in late 1929 with an all-star cast including Gertrude Lawrence and Leslie Howard. MGM originally bought the film rights but later sold them to Universal, which originally slated the project for William Wyler to direct until Wyler went over budget and schedule on his 1933 film Counsellor-at-Law, starring John Barrymore). Then they assigned the project to Wyler’s brother Robert, who was trying to make his U.S. directorial debut (on his way out of Germany, fleeing the Nazis, he had stopped at Paramount’s studio in Joinville, France and made a film there) and shot a week’s worth of so-called “directorial touches” without doing anything that was actually in the script (by Hans Kräly, former Lubitsch collaborator, and Karl Parker, “adaptation,” and F. Hugh Herbert and Ruth Cummings, screenplay). Universal studio head Carl Laemmle, Jr. (whose father had pushed the project through and green-lighted it over Laemmle Sohn’s objections) fired Wyler Bruder and had Whale replace him even though Whale had finished shooting his immediately previous film, The Invisible Man, just days before.

By Candlelight proved to be a pure delight, one of the better faux-Lubitsch films I’ve seen (though, come to think of it, Lubitsch’s style has proved surprisingly easy to imitate; among the surprisingly good Lubitsch-style films by other directors are Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight – still to my mind the best musical film ever made – William Wyler’s The Good Fairy and The Gay Deception, and – surprise – This Is the Night, Cary Grant’s first feature, made by the usually hacky and nondescript Frank Tuttle; certainly there are a lot more good ersatz Lubitsches than ersatz Hitchcocks!). The story begins with Josef (Paul Lukas), sitting at a table in a fancy house reading the Memoirs of Casanova (a book which becomes a running theme throughout the film as an indication that the character reading it is open to the possibility of extra-marital or extra-relational affairs). We soon learn that he’s the butler to Prince Alfred von Rommer (Nils Asther), and that Prince Alfred has developed a seemingly foolproof means of seducing married women that involves luring them to his home, offering them cigarettes from a silver case he says was a personal gift to him from the Shah of Persia, and at a key moment having Josef throw the circuit breaker for the whole house and pretend that a fuse has blown and therefore he and his would-be girlfriend de jour will have to spend the rest of the evening by candlelight (hence the title).

On that cue Josef brings in two elaborate candelabra and places them strategically, one on an end table and one on top of the piano (15 years before Liberace!), where this particular trick happens to be singing and playing a hit song from her latest operetta (she’s a singer) when her husband, having returned from a business trip one day early and tracked her down there, comes in, recognizes his wife’s voice and demands to see her. Prince Alfred denies that she’s there and he and Josef work out an elaborate deception – obviously they’ve dealt with this sort of situation before – to convince the husband that his wife is at home. The husband demands that he be allowed to call her, and the prince insists on dialing the call but actually calls the house number and puts her on. He also “explains” the sound of her voice by showing the husband a phonograph playing one of her records. Then he delays the husband long enough so his erring wife has a chance to get home before he does. This close call convinces the prince to get out of town and book an immediate train to Monte Carlo (represented by the elaborate front of the Monte Carlo casino Erich von Stroheim had built for his film Foolish Wives in 1921, while the train is the same model shot used in The Invisible Man just before the invisible one sent the train off the rails by strangling the switchman, and later in the film Maria flees Josef on the bridge set built for Whale’s 1931 film Waterloo Bridge), on which Josef, traveling ahead of his master, meets a mysterious woman named Marie (Elissa Landi).

Josef sees a tag on her luggage identifying it as belonging to the Countess von Rischenheim, but – as we begin to suspect well before the script tells us – she’s really just the Countess’s maid and so Josef, unbeknownst to him, is cruising someone of his own social standing. At one point they get off the train while it’s switching locomotives and miss it when it leaves again so they can take in a country carnival – so many of whose attendees are wearing grotesque masks that for a moment By Candlelight looks like the sort of film we’re used to from Whale. They get a ride on the merry-go-round – as do a bunch of kids, thanks to Josef buying them all tickets with the Prince’s money – and when they finally get to Monte Carlo Josef pulls his boss’s well-honed seduction routine on Marie, only when he gallantly offers to give her the silver cigarette case she, unlike any of the Prince’s own paramours, keeps it. For a moment I thought the gag was going to be that the Prince, like the seducer in the 1934 film Wonder Bar, had multiple identical copies of the cigarette case he handed out to all his would-be girlfriends, but instead the Prince is upset and adamantly demands that Josef retrieve the cigarette case. As it happens, it fell from Marie’s hands to those of the real Countess (Dorothy Revier), whose husband (Lawrence Grant) finds it and immediately concludes that his wife and the Prince are having an affair … which of course they are. Eventually the mistaken identities get sorted out and, while the Countess fires Marie as her maid, the Prince hires her and so she and Josef are reunited, albeit both aware of just where they fit in the class structure.

Though it has no overtly Gay content (not even the hints of same that fill Whale’s two Frankenstein films), my husband Charles thought this was one of Whale’s Gayest films (in both senses of the word) because so much of it is built on the idea of imposture, on people pretending to be what they aren’t. This was a personal theme for Whale not only because of his sexuality but because he’d come from a working-class background – he was born in a Midland iron-mining town called Dudley in what was referred to as the “Black Country” because the smelting furnaces generated so much pollution the air was almost literally black during the day. As an aspiring actor and then as a theatre and film director, Whale had painstakingly listened to the accents of upper-class English people and determined to learn to talk like that – essentially doing to himself what Henry Higgins did to Eliza Doolittle, and for the same reason: to make his way into the upper reaches of British society by disguising his working-class origins. Though Whale came to direct By Candlelight almost by accident, one report on it in an online article by David Cairns (https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-forgotten-james-whale-s-by-candlelight-1933-and-the-road-back-1937) promoting a showing of it and another largely forgotten Whale film, The Road Back, claims this was Whale’s favorite of his own films.

The cast is interesting even though one can readily imagine more appropriate actors for some of these roles (like the Broadway pair of Lesile Howard and Gertrude Lawrence, or, even better, Cary Grant as the male lead; Grant, after all, was another lower-class Englishman who re-invented himself as a wealthy and mysterious romantic figure), but though David Cairns argues that Paul Lukas seemed “somehow too heavy and ponderous for light comedy,” I think his rather stuck-up performance reflects the impression a person who’d lived among the rich without ever being one of them, either financially or socially, would have of how they’d behave. And to me there’s something else about this movie that seems to reflect the world-view of a Gay man: a sort of breezy cynicism towards the whole idea of monogamy. The women in this film who are having affairs are depicted as being married to much older and utterly sexually unappealing men, presumably ones they had to marry for reasons of family position or status, and the whole attitude of this movie (though it’s also true of a lot of movies directed by straight guys like Lubitsch) is that if people want happiness or just plain physical pleasure from people other than the ones they’re married to, why shouldn’t they seek it? It’s also interesting – though it reflects the classism that also runs through a lot of these stories – that at the end it’s the servants, Josef and Marie, who pair off in a presumably monogamous relationship while Prince Alfred remains gloriously unattached. It’s a staple of these stories that being sexually free-wheeling is one of the luxuries you get from being rich and titled – which may reflect the Old Testament view of marriage that it was between one man and as many women as he could support financially, which of course in practice made polygamy a luxury of the rich. The idea of servants playing at being their masters is an old comic trope, but it’s done here stylishly and to a turn (though two years later William Wyler would even more audaciously and subversively flip the central premise of this film in The Gay Deception, in which a rich young woman poses as a poor one because she’s tired of attracting male gold-diggers, and falls in love with a prince who’s posing as his own servant to get out of the routine of being a prince).

Though I wouldn’t call it a major film, By Candlelight is a quite lovely romantic comedy and an interesting antidote for Paul Lukas from his very different role in Whale’s The Kiss Before the Mirror, in which he’s the super-jealous husband who kills his young trophy wife for cheating on him. Another aspect of By Candlelight that’s worth noting is its use of music; whereas previous Whale films (with the occasional exception of The Kiss Before the Mirror and the final scene of The Invisible Man) had been quite reticent in their use of music, By Candlelight has virtually continuous underscoring, much of it so closely synched to the on-screen action it’s the sort of thing film music buffs call “Mickey-Mousing.” (The term comes from Walt Disney’s conviction when he started making sound cartoons in the late 1920’s that audiences would except an animated talkie only if the soundtrack and the picture were very closely synchronized, with every on-screen action matched to sound. Though other filmmakers gradually started using sounds to suggest off-screen action and showing things on-screen while the actors were talking about something else, Disney thought the suspension of disbelief in watching cartoon characters speak and make noises was too delicate to risk that particular kind of creative use of sound.) The music in By Candlelight is credited to W. Franke Harling, though I’m not sure whether he composed it personally or he was just the head of Universal’s music department taking a collective credit on all the studio’s films the way Leo F. Forbstein did at Warner Bros. It works well for the film, though sometimes it’s a little too Mickey-Mousey, and adds to the sprightly, irreverent mood (especially towards marital morality) that gives the film its charm.