Trouble in Paradise: Pure Style

Mariette Colet is extravagant, spending a mint on a single jeweled evening bag, but she surely wins some hearts by cheerfully telling her gray-bearded board of directors that no, she won’t be cutting her workers’ salaries. This marks her as a good egg, especially in the bleakest part of the Depression. But at first her good nature can’t protect her from Gaston, who steals the bag, of course. Then, with fantastic chutzpah, he arrives at Mariette’s digs to claim the twenty-thousand-franc reward she has offered for its return.

Still, isn’t there more to be had from such a pigeon, especially one as lovely as Mariette? (Kay Francis was never more beautiful than in this movie, her majestic looks set off by Travis Banton’s costumes.) Another flirtation ensues, even naughtier than the earlier one with Lily. Gaston rebukes Mme Colet for poor business decisions (she isn’t storing enough cash in the safe he already plans to rob). Gaston tells her that if he were in charge, “I would give you a good spanking. In a business way, of course.” Mariette, entranced, asks slyly, “What would you do if you were my secretary?” “The same thing,” he replies. With a feline smile, she leans back and says, “You’re hired.”

What can Gaston do but fall in love with Mariette as well? It’s all played with gossamer lightness, yet there is real feeling in the farce, as when Mariette tries to leave for a party, and Gaston tries to let her go, and they open and close their bedroom doors as their attraction wars with their other motives. Meanwhile, a suspicious and forlorn Lily must wait and worry and scheme. If Trouble in Paradise has a flaw, it’s the sidelining of Lily for too long in the second half.

By way of compensating for less Lily, there’s Horton’s Filiba, racking his soft little brain trying to remember where he saw Gaston; and Charles Ruggles, the best throat-clearer in the business, as the major. Both are unpromising suitors for the hand of Mme Colet, and they deeply resent each other’s company: “You’re looking fine, Major,” says Filiba. “Now see here, my good man, I’ve had just about enough of your insulting remarks,” retorts the major. Skulking around elsewhere, determined to keep control of Mme Colet and her company, is the extremely British C. Aubrey Smith as Giron.

Smith, of course, was not the only Englishman in the cast. London-born Herbert Marshall had gone from British stage and screen to Broadway success and then to Los Angeles, where he stayed and worked for the rest of his life. Tall and stylish, with a voice of resonant beauty, Marshall was known for his manners and grace under pressure. Years after Trouble in Paradise, Bette Davis would be awestruck at Marshall’s unflappable cool through dozens of William Wyler’s takes on the unhappy set of The Little Foxes. What colleagues knew, though most of the public did not, was that Marshall’s composure had been tested by far worse. He took a bullet directly in the knee in World War I. Multiple operations couldn’t save the leg, which was eventually removed below the hip. Both his prosthesis and the phantom pain that can affect amputees gave Marshall difficulty for the rest of his life.

But 1932 was early in his American film career, and he had trained himself to move on camera with a near-glide. Trouble in Paradise, and the urbane Gaston Monescu, helped make Marshall a star as well as a matinee idol—it was “the film which first made the fans passionately Marshall-conscious,” as one magazine put it. Marshall, for his part, deeply admired Lubitsch: “There is not one thing—not one detail—about acting that Lubitsch does not know.”

As Gaston, Marshall offers both hand-kissing Continental sex appeal and a streak of daring that would not be out of place in a swashbuckler. Witness the moment when, at Mariette’s garden party, Gaston spots Filiba, whom he robbed in Venice. Only a slight tightening of the jaw betrays Gaston’s worry. Then, with perfect sangfroid, Gaston sails across the room to ask Filiba if “we’ve met somewhere before,” thus turning his problem into Filiba’s. Marshall even adds the faintest suggestion of a bow, increasing Filiba’s discomfort.

Miriam Hopkins shared Marshall’s high opinion of their director; her second feature film had been Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant in 1931. Famous for her meddling on sets (“Helpful Hopkins” was one nickname), she nevertheless worked well with Lubitsch, who spoke fondly of the volatile actress to the end of his life. Film Lovers Annual called her work as Lily “the highlight of her Hollywood career.” Hopkins would be the apex of another love triangle in Lubitsch’s next film, Design for Living.

Alas for Kay Francis, however, this was the only Lubitsch movie she would make. It wasn’t for lack of admiration. Francis was already getting a star buildup, being cast in film after film in the early 1930s, including hits like Raffles and Girls About Town—and 1932 would, incredibly, also include the releases of Jewel Robbery and One Way Passage. She was offered Mariette Colet as she packed for a delayed honeymoon in Europe with husband number three. She chose Lubitsch, and a good thing, too—Francis, whose “women’s pictures” were often dismissed by the mass of largely male critics, got stellar reviews for her work in Trouble in Paradise, one writer calling her “the perfect Lubitsch heroine.” It’s a shame that she never worked with him again, or indeed at Paramount. One reason was reportedly that she was displeased with her billing, below that of Hopkins.

Trouble in Paradise itself got good reviews but not all the raves its later reputation would suggest. All too soon, its admirers also had to contend with a major obstacle: the Production Code Administration, which in mid-1934 began enforcing the stringent rules that Lubitsch so enjoyed treating as suggestions. Trouble, with its double entendres, its unrepentant thieves, and its intimations of sex, never had a chance with PCA head Joseph Breen. For many years, it was kept off commercial screens and shown only occasionally by film societies and festivals. In the spring of 1947, the year he died, Lubitsch himself attended a screening at the invitation of the film club at Rexford, a prep school in Beverly Hills. He was said to be in good spirits afterward. Lubitsch knew Trouble in Paradise’s place among his films—among all Hollywood films—was secure.

“As for pure style,” wrote Lubitsch that same year, “I think I have done nothing better or as good as Trouble in Paradise.”