Angel (Ernst Lubitsch, 1937)

Melvyn Douglas, Herbert Marshall, and Marlene Dietrich in Angel

Lady Maria Barker: Marlene Dietrich

Sir Frederick Barker: Herbert Marshall 

Anthony Halton: Melvyn Douglas 

Graham: Edward Everett Horton 

Wilton: Ernest Cossart 

Grand Duchess Anna Dimitrievna: Laura Hope Crews 

Mr. Greenwood: Herbert Mundin 

Emma: Dennie Moore 

Director: Ernst Lubitsch 

Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Guy Bolton, Russell G. Medcraft 

Based on a play by Melchior Lengyel 

Cinematography: Charles Lang 

Art direction: Hans Dreier, Robert Usher 

Film editing: William Shea 

Costume design: Travis Banton

Music: Friedrich Hollaender

In Ernst Lubitsch's Angel, you can almost feel the Production Code censors breathing hotly down the director's neck, driving some of the oxygen out of the room. What's meant to be a light and airy sophisticated comedy, like for example Lubitsch's pre-Code masterpiece Trouble in Paradise (1932), often feels starchy and coy. The emigrée grand duchess played by Laura Hope Crews is clearly a high-class procuress and her "salon" a very upscale brothel that enables a "fling" by Lady Maria Barker with a curiously naïve Anthony Halton. Their affair never seems to get consummated, although there are the usual narrative jumps when the relationship seems to come to the boiling point. And of course the Code's aversion to divorce and abhorrence of any sign that adulterers might get away with it unpunished means that the film must end with Lady Maria and Sir Frederick happily reconciled. We're used to such evasions in Hollywood movies of the 1930s through the 1950s, but it's a little depressing to see them stifle Lubitsch's usually sublime naughtiness. Sometimes it feels as if Marlene Dietrich is to blame: She never really strikes sparks with either Melvyn Douglas or Herbert Marshall -- certainly not the way Greta Garbo does with Douglas in Ninotchka (1939) or Miriam Hopkins with Marshall in Trouble in Paradise. But lovers of Lubitsch have plenty to enjoy in Angel, chiefly the way the director subverts expectations. When Sir Frederick invites Halton, an old war buddy, to dine with him and his wife, who neither man knows is the "Angel" Halton met in Paris and has been rhapsodizing about ever since, we expect a big explosion, especially when the husband points out his wife's picture to her lover. But just as Halton is about to look at the photograph, Lubitsch cuts. We don't see the awkward encounter between wife and lover we expect when she comes downstairs to meet the guest. Instead, we pick up with them later and realize that both have exerted exceptional self-control at the meeting. And we don't see the three of them at the dinner table; instead, Lubitsch takes us into the kitchen, where the servants are wondering why neither Lady Maria nor Mr. Halton has touched their food. Lubitsch leaves to our imagination scenes that other directors would have milked shamelessly. In another example, at their first encounter Maria and Halton are in a Parisian park at night, and after he proclaims his love for her he spots an old woman selling violets. He goes to buy the flowers, but Lubitsch holds the camera on the old woman, whose expressions tell us what's going on: Maria has chosen the moment to disappear and we hear Halton calling out "Angel!" in his pursuit of her. The flower seller sighs and picks up the dropped bouquet, dusts it off, and puts it back with the other flowers, then turns and walks away. Similarly, Lubitsch doesn't linger on the reconciliation scene between Maria and Frederick: They simply walk out the door, headed for Vienna and what we hope is a revived marriage. In the end, these "Lubitsch touches" aren't quite enough to lift Angel out of the middle tier of the director's films, but they constitute its saving grace notes.  

Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise

Lily: Miriam Hopkins
Mariette Colet: Kay Francis
Gaston Monescu: Herbert Marshall
The Major: Charles Ruggles
François Filiba: Edward Everett Horton
Adolph J. Giron: C. Aubrey Smith
Jacques: Robert Greig

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones
Based on a play by Aladar Laszlo
Cinematography: Victor Milner
Art direction: Hans Dreier
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: W. Franke Harling

It's a measure of the stupidity of American censorship that this gemlike sophisticated comedy could not have been made in Hollywood two years later, after the Production Code was implemented, but was also withheld from re-release for years afterward, all because it dared to indicate that its adult characters were having sex with one another without benefit of clergy and because the blithely larcenous Lily and Gaston were allowed to get off without apparent punishment -- indeed, with considerable reward -- for their crimes. It's essential for anyone who wants to know why Ernst Lubitsch and his so-called "touch" were so highly prized for so long.

Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941)

Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine in Suspicion

Lina McLaidlaw Aysgarth: Joan Fontaine
Johnnie Aysgarth: Cary Grant
General McLaidlaw: Cedric Hardwicke
Mrs. McLaidlaw: May Whitty
Beaky Thwaite: Nigel Bruce
Mrs. Newsham: Isabel Jeans
Ethel: Heather Angel
Captain Melbeck: Leo G. Carroll

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison, Alma Reville
Based on a novel by Anthony Berkeley as Francis Iles
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr.
Music: Franz Waxman

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you," as Joseph Heller put it in Catch-22. Considering how many plots of Alfred Hitchcock's films are variations on that theme, he might well have had the phrase posted on his office wall. Suspicion is one of the purest explorations of that premise: A woman thinks her handsome rotter of a husband is out to murder her, and the evidence keeps piling up up that she's right. Of course, she isn't, but it takes an hour and 39 minutes to reach that rather anticlimactic conclusion. Suspicion was Hitchcock's fourth American film, and it shows that he was still getting used to working in a rather different studio system than the one he had in England. After the micromanaging of David O. Selznick on his first, Rebecca (1940), he had a comparatively easier time with producer Walter Wanger on Foreign Correspondent (1940) except for the difficulty of making a film about impending war in Europe while the United States was still officially neutral -- so the bad guys could never be explicitly identified as Nazis, for example. But his third film, Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941), his first set in the United States, was a dud, in large part because Hitchcock had yet to master American idiom: The prissy character played by Gene Raymond, for example, was supposed to have been the best fullback at the University of Alabama. I doubt that Hitchcock knew what a fullback was, let alone one from Alabama. So for Suspicion he retreated to familiar territory, England at a time when there wasn't a war going on, and some actors he had worked with before: Joan Fontaine, Nigel Bruce, and Leo G. Carroll from Rebecca, as well as May Whitty, who had starred in The Lady Vanishes (1938). The chief newcomer was Cary Grant, who would become, along with James Stewart, one of Hitchcock's most reliable leading men. But Grant's presence in the film presented its own problems: He was known as a charming actor in romantic comedy. Would an audience accept Grant as a potential murderer? One story, reportedly verified by Hitchcock himself, holds that the studio, RKO, didn't want to mar Grant's image and insisted on a change from the novel's original ending, in which Johnnie Aysgarth really is guilty. Biographers, however, have disputed that story, claiming that Hitchcock really wanted to focus on Lina's paranoia and not on Johnnie's villainy. In any case, the film's ending feels wrong, mostly because it resolves nothing: Is Johnnie's fecklessness really curable? The chief problem is that Lina herself is an unfocused character, improbably wavering between shyness and passion, between common sense and paranoia, between tough determination and a tendency to faint. Fontaine did what she could with the part, and won an Oscar for her pains, but the film really belongs to Grant. Hitchcock was the one director who could really bring out Grant's dark side.* He did it more brilliantly in Notorious (1946), but in Suspicion Hitchcock effectively exploits Grant's ability to turn on a subtle, cold-eyed menace.

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*A possible exception to this statement is George Cukor, who first explored the "other" Cary Grant as the Cockney con-man in Sylvia Scarlett (1935).