Pre-Code Comedy Bliss in Madison
Since last year, the UCLA Film & Television Archive has been on the road with highlights from its most recent Festival of Preservation, and tomorrow the North American tour pulls into the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Cinematheque for a monthlong engagement. Among the eclectic selection of newly restored gems—eleven features and five shorts running the gamut from charming silent comedy to rediscovered film noir to eye-opening American independents—is Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 masterpiece Trouble in Paradise, which will screen this Saturday evening at 7, on a bill with the seven-minute musical Dinah, also from 1932. Following a playboy thief and his beloved partner in crime as they find themselves suddenly caught in a love triangle with their latest Continental quarry, Lubitsch’s pre-Code comedy abounds in sly innuendo, clever visual gags, and laws-of-attraction insight—an irreverently effervescent combination that has made the film one of the great director’s most enduring models of wit and sophistication.
