So This Is Paris (Warner Brothers, 1926)

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

Yesterday I watched a fascinating silent film on Turner Classic Movies – they’ve torn up their usual schedule because they’re doing their latest film festival on the channel as part of the “virtualization” of virtually everything under the viral lash of SARS-CoV-2 but they put on a silent with their usual host, Jacqueline Stewart, albeit at 5 p.m. instead of their usual 9 p.m It was called So This Is Paris and was made at Warner Brothers (back when they were still spelling out the word “Brothers” instead of abbreviating it “Bros.”) in 1926. It’s a film of interest today mainly because of the director, Ernst Lubitsch, and the writer, Hans Kräly. A number of directors with huge reputations in film history set their styles in long-term collaborations with particular writers, and sometimes the writers have got credit for this – like Dudley Nichols with John Ford and Robert Riskin with Frank Capra – and sometimes they haven’t. Virtually no one who writes about Alfred Hitchcock today gives more than a passing mention to Charles Bennett, even though Bennett wrote six of Hitchcock’s films (five in Britain and one, Foreign Correspondent, in the U.S.) and more than any other collaborator was instrumental in setting what came to be the “Hitchcock style.” For Lubitsch that writer was Hans Kräly, whom he brought with him when he won a Hollywood contract offer on the strength of his German-made international hit Passion, a story of Madame Du Barry which also made a worldwide star of the actress who played her, Pola Negri.

Lubitsch’s first American film was the Mary Pickford vehicle Rosita, one of Pickford’s efforts to shed her “America’s Sweetheart” stereotype and play a part of real dramatic depth. Alas, it was a flop both commercially and critically (and Pickford, who usually was fanatical about storing copies of her own films, let that one go – the extant print, which I’ve seen on a previous TCM showing, had to be pieced together from various partial sources, mostly a print from Russia), and Lubitsch found himself without a studio home and desperate for work. He got a contract from Warner Bros. when they were still a struggling studio – before they hit major status with the success of The Jazz Singer and their purchase of the First National studio with the profits from it and Al Jolson’s even more successful second film, The Singing Fool – and he and Kräly started putting together the kinds of sophisticated romantic comedies that eventually became the Lubitsch trademark. Alas, at least according to what I’ve read, the Lubitsch-Kräly collaboration ended when Kräly started an affair with Mrs. Lubitsch, and rather than react in the oh-well, what-the-hell men-will-be-men-and-women-will-be-women fashion of a Lubitsch character, the real Lubitsch had a jealous hissy-fit and banned Kräly from his future projects.

So This Is Paris was based on an old French play by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Hálevy (writers better known today for their opera libretti, including Gounod’s Faust, Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann and Thomas’s Hamlet, which they weirdly rewrote to provide a happy ending and then had to re-rewrite when the opera was produced in London and someone realized that in Shakespeare’s home country a Hamlet with a happy ending would be laughed off the stage) and concerns two couples who live across the street from each other, Dr. Paul Giraud (Monte Blue) and his wife Suzanne (Patsy Ruth Miller), and Maurice (André Beranger) and Georgette (Lilyan Tashman) Lalle. When the film opens the Lalles are in full Arab costume, with him as a Valentino-esque sheik with full headdress, billowing pants and almost nothing on in between, and her in princess drag laying on a couch. He’s about to stab her when he presses a little button on the dagger’s handle so the blade will fold away, and we assume that these are actors and the main characters are watching a play. In fact we’re in the Lalles’ home and they’re rehearsing a ballet, with an old guy at the piano who composed the music and is not particularly happy with their performance. One person who is happy about it is Suzanne Giraud, who gets a glimpse of Maurice’s bare chest and immediately gets the hots for him. Meanwhile Maurice is not particularly happy with Georgette, complaining that she’s put on too much weight for him to lift her at the end of their dance.

The two couples carry on a flirtation with each other’s spouses that lasts through much of the movie and includes a spectacular sequence set in a huge nightclub – it’s supposed to represent the “Artists’ Ball” one of the would-be adulterers has invited his would-be partner to but it’s essentially a musical sequence even in a silent film. It features a Black band (though I suspect a lot of the “Black” musicians were really white actors in blackface) doing a hot version of the Charleston (remember that the song “Charleston” was written by Black pianist and composer James P. Johnson) with the entire crowd seemingly joining in. In the early sound period Lubitsch would make some of the most stylish musicals ever – usually with Maurice Chevalier as the lead and Jeanette MacDonald as the heroine – but oddly none of them featured the sort of elaborate production number he was going for here in a silent film. Midway through the action Maurice Lalle has a run-in with a police officer (Sidney D’Allbrook) and ends up with a three-day jail sentence hanging over his head; he’s so unconcerned about it that he puts on full evening dress, telling his wife he’s going to jail when he’s really going to that artists’ ball – though in the end he’s apprehended and has to serve his time, which pulls him away from Suzanne and Paul away from Georgette. The final scene is introduced with a typical Kräly title – “When two liars get together … ” – and it’s Paul and Suzanne at home together, the normal marital order restored at last (as was inevitable in a Hollywood film even in the genuinely “pre-Code” era of 1926) as they prepare for a night of hot snuggling while the newspaper reports Maurice’s incarceration. (It must have been a slow news year.)

TCM host Jacqueline Stewart (an African-American woman who – unlike some of TCM’s other hosts of color – is also genuinely knowledgeable and personable) lamented that this wasn’t a sound film and therefore didn’t contain the marvelous comic dialogue of Lubitsch’s later films, but that’s being unfair to Kräly (no separate title writer is credited so I’m assuming the intertitles are his as well as the overall script), who comes up with some genuinely witty lines, including one early on: “If that person were a weekend, there would never be any parties!” What So This Is Paris lacks is a truly great cast: the people in this movie are adequate enough for their roles, but one wonders what this film could have become in an early-talkie remake with Chevalier, MacDonald, Cary Grant and Myrna Loy – who’s actually in this movie in the nothing role of a maid. Jacqueline Stewart lamented that both Lubitsch and Loy became known for sophisticated romantic comedies but they never worked together again. Still, So This Is Paris is a workmanlike film and helped to re-establish Lubitsch’s reputation and get him a more prestigious berth at Paramount, followed by stints at MGM and 20th Century-Fox (where he was working until he died in 1948 in the middle of shooting a film called That Lady in Ermine – the studio hired Otto Preminger to replace him, apparently because both were German, but going from the easygoing Lubitsch to the tyrannical Preminger so unnerved the film’s star, Betty Grable, it traumatized her for the rest of her life).