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Paris, Hollywood rather than Paris, France, just the setting for Ernst Lubitsch's comedy of pretense. An Arabian Nights melodrama appears to be afoot (cf. Melford's The Sheik, also the director's own Sumurun), the camera pans left to reveal a Jazz Age boudoir decorated for a rehearsal of "The Dance of the Forbidden Fruit," piano accompaniment and all. The costumed performers (George Beranger, Lilyan Tashman) are a married couple, sweeping her off her feet is a bit of effort so she brings him a glass of milk to build up strength. The artist bare-chested with turban is a glad sight for the housewife across the street (Patsy Ruth Miller), the doctor husband (Monte Blue) notices her arousal and promptly sticks a thermometer in her mouth. Reunited flames, switched partners. "I am amused to meet you." Hitchcock's screen-windows from three decades later figure in the splendid equation, his use of recurring objects is also already here in the cane left in the neighbor's house—not just the embodiment of a fib and an excuse for an indiscreet visit, but a phallic tell-tale emblem tapping its dreaming owner on the nose before getting swallowed whole. Served a three-day sentence for speeding, the doctor instead dons top hat and tuxedo and heads off to the ball, "one meets the very best of people in jail nowadays." (With its writhing bodies and prismatic dissolves, this monumental Charleston bash outdoes even Gance in kaleidoscopic abandon.) The plastered sneak's déjà vu in his own abode ("I've been here before"), his shock at the wife unmasked ("What do you mean, coming in at this hour?"), Lubitsch brings this all to a great breakfast scene for the bourgeois couple that surely had Chabrol rolling in the aisles. "Moral: When you appear at your window, wear a shirt." In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |