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Keen galoot and sly valkyrie, lyrical director and teasing producer. He (Gary Cooper) is a Detroit auto engineer eager to luxuriate in a European drive, she (Marlene Dietrich) is a sham countess who specializes in sparkling larceny. Her latest caper is a doozy—posing as the wife of a jeweler (Ernest Cossart) and a psychiatrist (Alan Mowbray) at the same time, she lets the bachelors sort things out as she zips away with a priceless necklace, the definition of insouciant with flowing scarf and dangling cigarette. Paths cross in San Sebastián by way of Paris, her pearls in his pocket. "First you throw mud in my face, and now you want me to kiss your hand. Continental!" Retrieving the jewelry is the priority of her accomplices, one (John Halliday) is a bogus nobleman with a nasty streak and the other (Zeffie Tilbury) is a tippling dowager with memories of lost romance. For the competing auteurs, the seduction's the thing: Ernst Lubitsch sets up the elegant mischief, Frank Borzage deepens the "emotional entanglements" the heroine's collaborator warns against. A chanson under the Spanish moon, Cooper ardently pledging his love while Dietrich feigns sleepiness in plumed gown on a divan, "you know, all you need is a frame now and you'd be a masterpiece." (Nothing like a reluctant awakening the next morning to give the essence of sex.) A matter of Yanks meddling in foreign affairs, as it turns out in a marvelously suggestive dinner scene where hollandaise sauce is tensely passed around and a pistol lands in the fricassee plate. "You can't underestimate America." "That would be a foolish thing to do. It's a big country." "Six feet three." Borzage retains control of the mise en scène, Lubitsch has the last word by deconstructing the leads in Angel and Bluebeard's Eighth Wife. With William Frawley and Akim Tamiroff. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |