As directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Trouble in Paradise raises an important question: if the entire milieu in which he finds himself is one steeped in suavity, refinement, the old-world elegance of the jet-setting crowd, what are the limits of a man’s suavity? Surely you can only become so refined and smooth-talking before you simply refine yourself out of reality, like a pencil sharpened to a nub.
To this grand and maybe irrelevant question Ernst Lubitsch’s black-and-white comedy directs itself with a classic command of the medium, sporting that so-called touch—the Lubitsch touch—for which the German-born director has retained his renown into our own distant century. Trouble in Paradise is a light and ticklish movie that is in essence a drawing-room comedy with a touch of the ill-considered love triangle. In the verve and energy of the performances of its professional and full-blooded actors, it brings style, wit, and grace, eliciting smiles and wry, delicately restrained laughter. And what’s not to like about pickpockets and thieves?
The story begins in a hushed and moonlit Venice, where a man posing as a baron invites to his upscale residence looking on the canals a woman who is posing as a countess. They hit it off after each discovers the other’s vocation, and during the candlelight dinner they flirt by revealing what they’ve stolen from each other. This is the criminal’s arousal and sex play, brought to life by the somewhat stumpy and square-faced Miriam Hopkins as the pickpocket and the slouched but suave Herbert Marshall as the thief.
After the dynamic of this spotlighted couple takes off, the two return to Paris and there continue plying their trades as predators, cooperating to steal the diamond-encrusted purse of the high-society heiress of a perfume company, played by Kay Francis with an arch and sensual flirtation. Ingratiating himself with the woman by returning her purse, Marshall’s character wins her over to the point that she hires him as her personal secretary and he has the chance to establish himself in her majestic mansion where the principal events of the story unfold, initiating what is to be something of a slow dance to the death.
Coursing through so much well-mannered activity in these so-called higher echelons of society—which to these characters is an unadorned and expected life—the lush style is that of frivolous, bubbling suavity and the restricted finesse of a hand motion, an arched brow, and the sexual innuendo played out with misdirection and gestures that don’t manage to break the surface tension. It is an amusing spectacle and a great entertainment. And this behavior is of course so long-gone that it delivers in gusts its brisk tonic of splattering rain, threatening clouds, and the first streaks of attenuated sunshine.
For all that, Trouble in Paradise is not as tempestuous as the more recent successes of romantic comedy. It is subtler, more restrained, and drier than what would follow it, light and fluffy but always cool-headed—like the shadows of a storm rising into a warm and reddish sky.
