Trouble in Paradise (Paramount, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The second movie my husband Charles and I watched last night (Wednesday, May 1) was Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 film Trouble in Paradise, which Turner Classic Movies had shown last Saturday just before Jewel Robbery. TCM showed Trouble in Paradise along with Jewel Robbery as part of a double-feature salute to Kay Francis, who’s featured in both films (as the second female lead in Trouble in Paradise and the star of Jewel Robbery), and it seemed to me that Warner Bros., who did a talent raid on Paramount in 1932 and grabbed Kay Francis, William Powell and Ruth Chatterton, threw together Jewel Robbery as a conscious attempt to duplicate the commercial success of Trouble in Paradise. Both films are based on Hungarian plays (Trouble in Paradise on The Honest Finder [A Becsületes Megtaláló, which literally translates as The Honorable Finder] by Aládar László and Jewel Robbery on Jewelry Robbery in Váci Street [Ékszerrablás a Váci-utcában] by Ladislaus Fodor) and both feature Kay Francis as a well-to-do woman who falls in love with a master criminal (Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise, William Powell in Jewel Robbery). Both were also directed by German expatriates: Ernst Lubitsch in Trouble in Paradise and William [nè Wilhelm] Dieterle in Jewel Robbery. I’d heard about Trouble in Paradise for years before I actually saw it, and when I finally did it struck me as a masterpiece: dazzling in its sheer inventiveness and tough and cynical in its plotting while still managing to keep a light tone (one of Lubitsch’s greatest strengths as a director). I didn’t like it quite as much on this go-round but it’s still a very entertaining movie.

It begins in Venice, with one of the most audacious opening gags of film history. After a brief prologue in which the man working a Venetian garbage scow belts out “O sole mio” like a romantic gondolier, we see Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) and Lily (Miriam Hopkins, top-billed) together in the back of a taxicab. They seem to know each other but aren’t a couple – at least, not yet. They pickpocket various items off each other and that’s supposed to show both them and us that they belong together and are right for each other. They run into trouble in Venice when Gaston steals a wallet containing a large sum of money from François Filiba (Edward Everett Horton – when he turned up in Smart Woman Charles joked that we were having an Edward Everett Horton film festival after we’d seen him as Colline in the 1926 King Vidor silent La Bohème, and now here he was again, less restrained and considerably foofier for Lubitsch than he was for La Cava!) and then have to skedaddle out of town in a hurry. Gaston and Lily end up in Paris, where they decide to con Madame Mariette Colet (Kay Francis), one of the richest women in France due to having inherited the Colet perfume company (there’s one of the marvelous montage sequences Lubitsch loved showing the sheer reach of Colet’s brand). First Gaston steals a 125,000-franc handbag from Mariette while she’s at the opera with two suitors essentially tag-teaming her, Filiba and “The Major” (Charles Ruggles). Then, noticing that Mariette has advertised a 20,000-franc reward for the return of the bag and figuring that’s more than he can get from a fence, Gaston returns it to her and bluffs his way into a job as her private secretary, using the last name “Lavalle.” While working as such Gaston discovers that the chair of Colet’s board, Adolph J. Giron (C. Aubrey Smith), is really an embezzler skimming millions of francs off the top of the company’s earnings.

As part of their con, Gaston and Lily (who is now essentially the secretary’s secretary) talk Mariette into taking half her earnings from the company’s dividends in cash and storing it in her home safe (to which they’ve learned the combination). Their plan is to wait until she’s accumulated 850,000 francs and then steal it from her and flee heaven knows where. Only their plans get changed when, after a series of near-misses, Filiba finally recognizes Gaston as the man who ripped him off in Venice, posing as a doctor examining his tonsils. He gave Filiba a dose of ether or something equally incapacitating as Filiba opened his mouth and said, “Ah!” When Filiba came to, Gaston was gone and so was his wallet containing a large sum of money he’d got by cashing in traveler’s checks. Lubitsch signals Filiba’s dawning realization that Gaston is the man who robbed him by blasting out “O sole mio” on the soundtrack and showing him lighting a match on an elaborate ashtray made to look like a model of a gondola. So Gaston and Lily decide to content themselves with the 100,000 francs Mariette has on hand at the moment – only Mariette has meanwhile fallen in love with Gaston and the two have had sex (which Lubitsch, true to form, shows by a shot with the two of them casting their shadows on her bed). For a while it’s unclear just how Lubitsch and his writers – the credits are Grover Jones for “adaptation” and Samson Raphaelson for “screenplay,” but Lubitsch insisted that he and Raphaelson actually wrote the script and Jones got his name on it just for contractual reasons with Paramount – are going to have it turn out, but eventually Gaston and Lily end up in a taxi together, with Lily boosting the pearl necklace Gaston had stolen from Mariette and Gaston grabbing the 100,000-franc bankroll Lily had got from Mariette’s safe.

Trouble in Paradise is a marvelous example of the relative sexual and romantic freedom of American movies in the so-called “pre-Code” era of loose Production Code enforcement between 1930 (when the Production Code was first promulgated) and 1934 (when it was strictly enforced under the lash of the Legion of Decency, a Roman Catholic organization formed to push for strict censorship of U.S. movies). When Paramount sought permission to re-release it in 1935, at the height of Hollywood’s reactionary period, the Production Code Administration denied them. When Paramount asked to remake Trouble in Paradise as a musical in 1947, the Code Administration again said no, and the film sat in the vaults until 1958, when MCA-TV, which had bought the rights to Paramount’s pre-1949 catalog, quietly made it available to TV stations. There was no theatrical re-release until 1968. Critic Dwight Macdonald named it as the best film of 1932 and particularly liked the use of background music throughout the film – when talkies first came in the studios thought dialogue would take the place of music, but starting in 1931 with Max Steiner’s score for the elaborate RKO Western Cimarron background music returned as one of the tools in the cinematic armamentarium to heighten the emotions of scenes. There’s a claim on the film’s Wikipedia page that it was also Lubitsch’s favorite of his own films – which I’d respectfully disagree with; if I had to pick only one Lubitsch movie it would be the marvelously audacious 1942 wartime comedy To Be or Not to Be (and if I were allowed a second one it would be The Shop Around the Corner, also from 1942 and a marvelous romantic film that’s been remade twice). One thing I like about Trouble in Paradise is it is not a film that totally ignores the Depression: the people in it make occasional references to the dark economic times and there’s even a parody of Herbert Hoover’s famous boast, “Prosperity is just around the corner.”