The Swell Life

The Criterion Collection announced their July titles yesterday, and the selection is glorious: New 4K editions of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Cruel Story of Youth, The Crying Game and Hud, a UHD upgrade of The Elephant Man (which also brings the Blu-ray back into print) and a Mike Mills boxed set. All great stuff. But this week, they're rolling out a long-overdue restoration of a picture decades older than any of them – and despite its age, it feels downright fresh. Saucy, even.

Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise was produced nearly a century ago, with technology that would be seen today as hopelessly antiquated. I’m not saying this to be dismissive or disdainful, but to express a certain sense of wonder: How many other films of such vintage are as charming, as funny, as immediately accessible, as effervescent as this one?

That is, of course, evidence of “the Lubitsch touch” – a term that may have originated with studio publicists back in the 1930s, but which is now fully integrated into the lexicon of movie culture. You know how everybody refers to Michael Jackson as the King of Pop now? We laughed at that proclamation. But as Noah Baumbach once said, affectations become habits and here we are, and also we’re only two graphs in and I’ve already strayed a long way from my original point, which is that “the Lubitsch touch” really was a thing.

In his booklet essay for the 2003 Criterion DVD, Armond White boiled the director’s aesthetic down to “sophistication.” He wasn’t wrong. At a time when movies were still figuring out what they could be, Lubitsch created an entire genre about funny, smart, ethically flexible people doing funny, smart, ethically flexible things, and occasionally flexing on each other. And Trouble in Paradise – about two European con artists who are unapologetically horny for both each other and the Paris heiress who is their latest mark – was the proof of concept.

Sadly, the arrival of the Hays code almost immediately after the release of Trouble in Paradise meant the disappearance of sex from American movies, as well as the imposition of a moral order on unethical characters – which meant this particular Lubitsch picture didn’t circulate as much as his subsequent films in the decades to come. Peter Bogdanovich, in a video introduction on that aforementioned Criterion DVD, speaks of Trouble in Paradise almost as a lost picture, one that requires a lengthy explanation for contemporary viewers.

I’ll save you some time: It does not. Barely five minutes into Lubitsch’s fleet, delightful caper comedy, you’re settled right in with its bright-eyed schemers, gentleman thief Gaston (Herbert Marshall) and spunky pickpocket Lily (Miriam Hopkins), and their plan to fleece wealthy marks to finance their happily ever after. Bad luck, then, that they should embed themselves within the affairs of poor little rich girl Mariette Collet (Kay Francis), who winds up taking a shine to Gaston – and he to her – and when Lily eventually meets Mariette, she gets it too.

Now, this picture was made in 1932, so don’t get too excited: Nobody’s forming a throuple or anything. But these three characters clearly enjoy being around each other, and there are sizzles of attraction arcing along every plane of that triangle, giving every interaction – even the most basic dialogue exchange – a zip of innuendo and desire. Lubitsch understood desire as a driver of both character and story, and his comedies celebrate it: It feels good to want someone, and to know you’re wanted in return. You’ll take on any challenge, overcome any obstacle, to realize that connection … and whaddaya know, that’s a romantic comedy.

As implied above, Criterion’s DVD of Trouble in Paradise brought that picture back into circulation after decades of obscurity. And while the label has rolled out a number of his other pictures in excellent special editions – Cluny Brown, Design for Living (which also stars Hopkins), Heaven Can Wait and To Be or Not to Be are all available on Blu-ray, and the Eclipse collection of his musicals was recently upgraded to BD as well – Trouble in Paradise wasn’t given a high-definition upgrade until now. But the wait was more than worth it: As the first Lubitsch title to be released in 4K as well as Blu-ray, Trouble in Paradise is brought fully back to life, arriving with all its vibrancy and vivacity intact.

Every detail of this restoration, produced by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and The Film Foundation, is crystal-clear – from the twinkle in Hopkins’ eyes to the sparkle of Francis’ handbag. Some of this is likely the result of scanning the nitrate source so closely, but it’s a major improvement on the vaguely muddy DVD, where those elements (and plenty of others) were obscured. The sharp visual contrast between Marshall’s casual elan as Gaston and Mariette’s declared suitors, the magnificently craggy Major (Charles Ruggles) and the slightly too polished veneer François (Edward Everett Horton), really pops in UHD.

Like most of Criterion’s black-and-white restorations, Trouble in Paradise is presented in SDR rather than HDR, but don’t consider that a deal-breaker: This is, undoubtedly, the best the picture has looked in at least ninety years.

An audio commentary by Lubitsch biographer Scott Eyman is ported over from the earlier DVD, as is Bogdanovich’s extended video introduction – though that supplement is only on the Blu-ray, along with “10 Touches in Trouble,” a new video essay by David Cairns that takes a cineaste’s pleasure in examining the components of Lubitsch’s cinema. Not included on the DVD are Lubitsch’s 1917 German silent The Merry Jail and a 1940 Screen Guild Theater radio program featuring the director and his pals Jack Benny, Claudette Colbert and Basil Rathbone, and White’s booklet essay has been swapped out for a new text by Farran Smith Nehme.

I don’t know that I’d say any of the deletions is criminal, but there’s no law that says you have to get rid of your DVD when you bring the new disc home … and if you never got around to getting the older disc in the first place, I’m sure you can find a used one somewhere. Or maybe you can romance someone for theirs. Who knows where that might lead?

Trouble in Paradise is now available as a 4K/Blu-ray combo in the Criterion Collection. A Blu-ray edition is also available.

Up next: Plenty of new releases coming next week – and tomorrow, susbcribers to the paid tier will get another exclusive What’s Worth Watching column! Don’t want to miss out? You don’t have to! Isn't that great?