trouble in paradise

"Trouble in Paradise," directed by Ernst Lubitsch and written by Samson Raphaelson (based on a play by Aladar Laszlo), is not the funniest or deepest American romantic comedy. Both those honors go to Preston Sturges' "The Lady Eve." Nor is it the wildest -- that would be Sturges again, with "The Palm Beach Story." And for the sweetest and most graceful, you'd have to look to another Lubitsch-Raphaelson collaboration, "The Shop Around the Corner." But in both attitude and execution it remains the perfect distillation of bemused, offhand elegance. It would be 43 years before American movies produced another comedy as sophisticated, with "Shampoo." (The other leading candidates -- Ingmar Bergman's "Smiles of a Summer Night" and Clare Peploe's "Triumph of Love" -- are European.)

t's a movie that feels both of its time and ahead of all the times that have followed. You can imagine '30s audiences experiencing it as another of the delights that Hollywood routinely delivered in that decade -- a decade, as far as movies are concerned, far more sophisticated than our own. But today, this film's blithe attitude toward love and sex and infidelity is strikingly, gloriously out of tune with the moralism of contemporary American movies.

..Much of the pleasure of Gaston's dedication to Madame Colet comes from seeing the elegant Marshall allow himself to be turned into that most seducible of creatures -- the man in thrall to a woman's erotic presence…

The way he look, he behave, he touch, he speak. U feel this light wonderful tension between these 2 heroes even sitting ur room here through the time. They are witty and self-considered, elegant and flirty, they re so much different from ur life u can watch this film again and again, wishing every second lost in this time…cut ur hairs, put on long thin dress, small bag in hands, shawl over shoulders and meet there Marshall himself to start ur perfect graceful love intrigue.

- It could've been marvellous.
– Wonderful.
– Divine.