I haven't done one of these in a while.

Three obsessions. Here's some recent ones…

1. Heat Lightning (1934)

Just rewatched Mervyn LeRoy’s Heat Lightning. A 1934 Pre-code desert drama and sweaty, in the-middle-of-nowhere lust and intrigue with Aline MacMahon and Ann Dvorak as sisters working in the Cal desert. The auto garage, diner and road side motel are a literal hot spot for all sorts of dubious, mysterious and amusing characters/situations… Preston Foster and Lyle Talbot show up, on the lam. Also Glenda Farrell as “Feathers” and Ruth Donnelly as “Tinkle,” rich divorcees road tripping with their jewels and chauffeur, of course. The camerawork is exceptional — beautiful and interesting.

I especially love the tracking shot at the beginning when we’re introduced to the sisters — tough minded McMahon and pretty, frustrated Dvorak — while McMahon is walking to the car she’s working on. Dvorak storms away, angry, and LeRoy shoots from McMahon’s POV under the car. MacMahon  and Dvorak are wonderful here — really appealing and touching. 

2. The Big House (1930)

An uncompromising prison picture with powerful performances by Wallace Beery, Chester Morris and Robert Montgomery (while making the movie, director George W. Hill reportedly stated he’d fire the first person he saw "acting"). Beautifully shot — both claustrophobic and vast, endlessly institutional — I love how the story turns as well. You’re expecting Montgomery to be the hero but, nope, he’s a coward, a rat, and yet, not simply villainous. He’s acting like a lot of terrified newbies when first incarcerated.

This has to be the best Chester Morris performance too. I've always liked him, but he was never so tough and likable as he is here. I always saw something like a cross between Franchot Tone and future Ralph Meeker in Morris, hoping for the meatier Meeker to surface. Here, the Meeker comes forward, toughening up and de-blanding the Tone out of him. Interesting casting note: Lon Chaney, Sr. was originally going to play the Beery role but he tragically died.

That would have been something to see. I wonder how he would have transformed himself for that part? Chaney was brilliant, but Beery is exceptional here and probably didn't need much transforming as a big, loud, violent thug. And, as stated ealier, the picture is wonderfully framed  – that we start with Robert Montgomery, thinking we'll be following this poor guy through the hell of his inmates or teaming up with them and we will, perhaps, identify with him. Not really. I never stopped feeling sorry for him but did get to the point where I was like, "F you, Robert Montgomery, you creepy coward."  And yet, the movie never makes you simply turn on him. Or any of the three leads for that matter. When Montgomery loses it at the end, it's just sad. Prison is sad, the movie reminds you. It's rare and more complicated than most modern prison movies.

While doing screen grabs (there are so many fantastic shots in the movie), I remembered George Hurrell took some great publicity stills of the picture, posted here. In between shooting a glammed up Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford, Hurrell snapped Chester Morris as an emaciated jailbird. The dungeon walk is a gorgeous Hurrell here but the scene itself is as gritty and as stylish and a standout in the movie. 

3. Looking forward to Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice

Inherent Vice. Incredibly excited for this one, more than any other upcoming film. Also, I love this photo and how it looks like a much more artful picture my Dad snapped in the 70s of his cop friend Carl — a guy who ate blocks of cheese like candy bars.

More about Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson’s take on Thomas Pynchon and more at Cigarettes and Red Vines.

“A sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing. But if I’m going to be a symbol of something I’d rather have it sex than some other things they’ve got symbols of.”  — Marilyn Monroe

Jack Garfein vividly remembers first seeing Marilyn Monroe in person. She was almost overwhelming to him. It wasn't just that she was gorgeous, there was something more — something expressed in her flesh that was both magical and moving. He remembered how she glowed, how she laughed and lived. When Jack talked about her, this intelligent, mischievous spirit, I thought of how Montgomery Clift recalled Marilyn.

“She listens, wants, cares. I catch her laughing across a room and I bust up. Every pore of that lovely translucent skin is alive, open every moment-even though this world could make her vulnerable to being hurt. I would rather work with her than any other actress. I adore her.”  

Jack met Marilyn when she was in New York City during the time she was  studying with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. He saw her walk into a party. Everyone saw her walk into that party. Elia Kazan introduced them. (Jack would later work with Marilyn's ex husband, Arthur Miller, producing two of his plays, The Price and The American Clock.)  Deeply attracted, he also deeply respected her — her acting talent and potential, her power in front of the camera and just her beguiling way. A friendship developed.

I became friends with Jack after I was honored to present his two brilliant pictures, Something Wild and The Strange One, at Telluride in 2012. He'll be turning 84 in July and he's still one of the most liberal-minded men I've ever met. So full of life and so free-thinking, Jack is warm, wise, bracing, funny and incredibly empathetic. I understand why Marilyn liked him so much. He got her. Or, at least, he tried to. 

Nothing happened between them (Jack was married to actress Carroll Baker at the time) but he was clearly smitten and still is. To him, Marilyn was a good person, a woman who took her craft seriously and a woman who thought her sexuality was often funny, and certainly nothing to be ashamed of. After Telluride, Jack spent some time in Los Angeles and we discussed many things — his career, his life, his art (and art and life), people… And then he told me this story about Marilyn. I love this story. Happy Birthday, Marilyn. 

Jack Garfein on Marilyn Monroe from Kim Morgan on Vimeo.

“Starting to see pictures, ain’t ya?” — Major Marquis Warren

Without seeing a shot of it, not one spectacular sweeping frame, not one lovely snow-covered panorama, not one majestic vision of horses, “rip snorting through the bottom of the landscape,” I got it. I got it on stage with chairs and actors and pantomimed guns and imagined stagecoaches and blue coffee pots laced with poison. Quentin Tarantino is (hopefully) gonna shoot the hell out of his newest script, The Hateful Eight, and, importantly, in “big super CINEMASCOPE 70MM filmed gloriousness.” Those are Tarantino’s words, spoken directly from his script; words he repeats with a giddy exultation of cine-love that becomes both exciting and funnier the more you hear him say it. We see it in our mind’s eye and we truly understand it: super CINEMASCOPE 70 mm is fucking glorious.

But will he direct it? That was the lingering question after the script was leaked, Gawker media was sued for copyright infringement (the suit has since been dismissed, with Tarantino allowed to re-file by May 1st) and Tarantino decided to do something unprecedented – perform a live read of the script, on stage with actors, and for just one night. Those of us who watched Saturday witnessed something special, once-in-a-lifetime, but something we’ll hopefully view in… “big super CINEMASCOPE 70MM filmed gloriousness.” Tarantino said before that, after the script leak, he wouldn’t shoot it, that he would publish the work instead. And now we've heard he will shoot, this winter, and then… this one-night-only event. Oh, he better make this movie.

Taking the stage at the beautifully renovated downtown Los Angeles United Artists Theatre, a movie palace at the Ace Hotel on Broadway, Tarantino, clad in black cowboy shirt and black hat, announced to the eager audience how singular this event was. “This is the first draft,” he said. There will be changes, second and third drafts. One major change will be the script’s final chapter, titled “Black Night, White Hell.” He’s re-writing that. “This is the only time you’ll see this version,” he declared. Suddenly this all seems so intimate.

Sure, a person could have read the leaked first draft online, but sitting here on a Saturday night after walking from your downtown parking spot, leaving your cell phone in the trunk of your car and working your way through the throng of attendees who are keeping to themselves, searching for their seats or ogling others (people were so loud returning from the intermission, Tarantino had to tell them to keep it down), it’s an entirely different experience. Tarantino is in control of this read – and it’s so physical and direct. You are inside of his process. They’ve only rehearsed a few days, but they got it.

The writer-director himself read from his pages, passionately imparting to us his intended camera moves, coolly raising a coffee pot for occasionally mimed pouring. And then the actors: Kurt Russell, James Parks, Amber Tamblyn, Walton Goggins, Denis Ménochet, Tim Roth, Bruce Dern, Michael Madsen, Dana Gourrier, Zoë Bell, James Remar and Sameul L. Jackson. This is exciting.

The story, briefly: Set sometime after the Civil War, we’ve got bounty hunter John Ruth (Russell), his “N” word-spewing prisoner Daisy Domergue (Tamblyn — ode to Howard Hughes' Howard Huges' protégé, actress Faith Domergue?), bounty hunter, former Union Cavalry officer Major Marquis Warren (Jackson — ode to western writer, producer, director Charles Marquis Warren?), and Red Rock sheriff Chris Mannix (Goggins).

They stop off at Minnie’s Haberdashery (with their stagecoach driver, played by James Parks) and are faced with a gallery of mixed nuts, of mysterious intent and geographically diverse origins (Roth, Ménochet, Madsen and Dern). Words are exchanged, ambiguities presented, revelations unveiled and, again, that goddamn blue coffee pot. (I grew to love that coffee pot and how QT would raise the thing – it became its own character).

Everyone’s blizzard-bound, and, as such, stage-bound, which is interesting given the “big super CINEMASCOPE 70MM filmed gloriousness.” But who says 70 mm should be strictly David Lean or Cleopatra? And clearly the script, as read by Tarantino, utilizes wide-open spaces, flashbacks set outside the haberdashery and a stagecoach traveling through snow. And a face in 70 mm close-up can be a thing of magnificence – think Joaquin Phoenix’s injured, feral mug in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master.

And voices are cinematic too. Kurt Russell was intoning John Wayne here, which carried well from the stage, Amber Tamblyn delivered her lines with a hard-ass intensity, spitting out insults and assertions that put the viewer on edge (I kept thinking of the aptly named actress Quentin Dean, roughly announcing, “I’m PREGNANT!” in In the Heat of the Night) and then Tim Roth, who did “foppish” with an amused mellifluousness.

The standout, for me, was listening to the cantankerous, slow-talking voice of a hateful, racist Confederate General Bruce Dern scowling at that sonic powerhouse Samuel L. Jackson. When Jackson relays one of the script’s most provocative high points – that he not only killed Dern’s son, but had the young man perform fellatio on him – with pleasure — my mind lingered on the visual force of watching those two faces on the big screen. And then the subject at hand: Cocksucking, in “big super CINEMASCOPE 70MM filmed gloriousness.”

The script’s fittingly been compared to The Petrified Forest and Key Largo, and even Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians.

I see other works in there, like Tarantino's own, Reservoir Dogs, but also confined, pressure cooker pictures like Felix Feist’s The Threat (1949), Mervyn LeRoy’s Heat Lightening (1934) and Howard Higgins' High Voltage (1929), a movie recommended to me by a friend after I described the reading to him. (QT influence by proxy). The tense High Voltage features a group of also snow-bound bus passengers stranded in a church with their driver, a female prisoner (Carole Lombard) with her lawman keeper (Owen Moore) and a mysterious man (William Boyd) already hiding out, on the lam.

High Voltage isn't  a perfect movie, and it’s not no where near exactly like The Hateful Eight, but the snowy spirit contains some similarities, even if Lombard never, ever drops an N bomb (a word used frequently in The Hateful Eight, which QT amusedly warned the audience of the first time it's uttered). Samuel L. Jackson would have livened up High Voltage movie enormously.Thank god he exists in cinema in general, and to be the stirring Lee Van Cleef-looking centerpiece of The Hateful Eight, much like the gravel voiced Charles McGraw's inspired ferociousness in The Threat. Do not mess with these men. Ever. 

I’m not sure if Tarantino was thinking of any of these movies while writing his script (and the script is distinctly, terrifically pure Tarantino, right down to Kurt Russell instructing one to move "molasses like") but regardless, it further proves how Tarantino can drift you towards other movies, even if unintended (a wonderful thing).

For instance, there’s also Burt Topper’s entertaining, down and dirty, The Devil’s 8 (which I know Tarantino admires), a 1969 AIP picture starring the diverse crew of, among others, Christopher George, Ron Rifkin, Fabian, Cliff Osmond and, my favorite, Ralph Meeker. The similarities are really in title only, but dammit,Tarantino knows a great title.

And he knows a great motion picture. We saw it read, live, on stage, now let’s see it sweat and bleed and pulsate on the big screen in, of course, “big super CINEMASCOPE 70MM filmed gloriousness,” grateful to be hateful.

I asked the easy, but often hard to answer: "Who was the greatest director you ever worked with?" He answered, without hesitation, "John Huston."

That was Michael Caine and this was 2009, when I sped up from an away-from-LA respite in Joshua Tree to talk to the legendary actor among a small (surprisingly small) roundtable of film writers. When he walked into the suite, he was casual cool, but burning with that kind of charisma that makes the entire room feel a little high. Actors are actors and often not so exciting in person but Caine, an icon, was thrillingly magnetic. We all looked at him. Stared. I want to say a woman dropped her cookie though I don't think that happened. We couldn't turn away. 

And then he talked. Discussing his current movie (Is Anybody There?), a few of his classics, Batman and more, he was even game when a reporter brought up the Christian Bale Terminator: Salvation outburst. He was surprised by it ("completely out of character" for Bale) but understanding of his co-star. He laughed and said, "I’m more like that than he is. You’re liable to get a volley off of me if you walk around during my takes."

Actors are human, after all. He told us this story:

“I lost my temper on a movie years ago when I was doing a movie called The Last Valley. James Clavell was the director. I’m not a very good horseman and they put me on this horse that they knew was a killer and it ran away with me for two miles and I brought it back at a slow pace and then I got off and all the unit were laughing. And then I started and I outdid Christian by about 30 minutes with more language than he knows. So James Clavell broke the crew for an hour and he said, ‘Let’s have a cup of tea.’ And so we went and had a cup of tea."

"James Clavell was captured in Hong Kong when he was 14 by the Japanese and spent the first part of his life in a Japanese prison camp. He said to me, ‘The way I survived was I became Japanese in mentality. So I knew where they were coming from in their treatment of us and I knew where I should be in everything.’ He said, ‘The one thing that the Japanese never do is they never lose their temper because anger is an emotion that you should never show to strangers because you expose too much of yourself.’ He said, ‘You must never expose yourself like that to strangers.’ And he gave me this long lecture on the Japanese and anger and I have never lost my temper on a set since. I go home and I scream at the kids. (Laughs) But I have never lost my temper on a set since.”

He also discussed retirement, something I just can't see yet. Can anyone?

“You don’t know when your time is up so to speak. There just goes a period of time when the right scripts don’t arrive. And it hasn’t happened to me yet. It might have happened now. I finished this last picture, as I said. I don’t have another picture to do. If a script doesn’t come, then I won’t do anything and I’ll be retired. There won’t be any announcement or anything. I remember MacArthur saying ‘Old soldiers don’t die. They fade away.’ Well, old actors don’t die. They fade away."

Well, he won't. Happy Birthday Michael Caine.

It's often those little moments. What happens while waiting for the train, walking with a girl, sitting at the desk, working your tedious job. Those little things — they work so beautifullly in Italian filmmaker Ermanno Olmi's maserpiece Il Posto (1961), a film that observes work (“Il Posto" means "The Job") through the orbs of a teenager (the saucer-eyed and touchingly languid non-professional actor Sandro Panseri) entering the work force. Olmi displays those little heartbreaks that lead people to inspiration or desperation with a beguiling combination of warmth and melancholia. An auteur whose attention to the small details of everyday life creates quiet character studies of tedium, irony, hilarity, and sadness, he had a marked quality of making the hum-drum almost fantastical.

Reality depends on how you look at it (after all, what is reality?) and Olmi's aggressively common, poignant depictions can veer into Kafkaesque torture while remaining sweet and perilously hopeful. It's not a surprise then, that that perilously depressing (even potentially suicidal) day, New Year’s Eve, showcases a scene so touching, that you find yourself in a place that moves beyond bittersweet. It's more agonizingly human. And then, just lovely.

After Panseri has conformed at his job (or is understanding that's what his  future holds), it’s at at, at first, empy, cold New Year’s Eve party that the tenative teen will finally let loose, surrounded by the dreary commonality of his future. Though he hopes to meet the pretty woman he’s smitten with, he instead enters this rather sterile, flavorless party, and talks to an older couple at a nearby table. As the evening opens up and revelers have downed extra liquids, the shy young man unleashes a joy, perhaps a desperate joy, dancing, smiling, resigned to his sure night of singledom.

The fact that he's momentarily happy, widening his usual placid face with toothy grins and jumping in a circle with other party-goers, makes the sequence all the more heartbreaking. Especially since the New Year brings a new position, as well as a potentially endless life — he will be staring at the back of his co-worker's head for the rest of the year. I always hope his year will be better. It probably won't, but perhaps his life will. And he should always dance. Especially when the girl doesn't show up.

Happy New Year.

Another Christmas, another posting of one of my favorite holiday movies — Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut starring Nicole Kidman and that bizarre force — Tom Cruise. A movie star and a fascinating, sometimes, brilliant actor, Cruise is an actor who thinks he's sincere. And he is. But is he? You really believe that he thinks he's sincere but… there's something off. Something he doesn't seem to understand (or perhaps he does?), which makes him extra compelling. He's charismatic. Charismatitcally creepy. And Stanley Kubrick understood this — all of that mega star weirdo power hiding in plain sight. He might be crazy. He might be a tedious square. Whatever he is, Kubrick and company are dragging out the fubar. All that insanity-inducing yuletide anxiety (and then some) is so perfectly conveyed in Eyes Wide Shut via his leading man that  Cruise is Christmas stress — pretty, festive, overly serious, overly grinning, and often hilariously, creepily Christmassy. 

And then, scared. Terrified, even, delivering Kubrick's social, sexual, surrealist themes within the director's gorgeous holiday milieu. Bathed in Christmas style, Eyes Wide Shut uses Christmas lights, background Christmas trees and traditional colors of red and green with almost perverse relentlessness. With that, I'm dipping into my archives for my annual posting of one of  Kubrick's most underrated pictures –  a film that in terms of love, sex, death, fear and träume remains timeless. And again, it's a perfect Christmas movie…

In  Kubrick's cinematic universe, reality, dreams, order and insanity progress on distinct, intersecting planes. Whether he was depicting an absurd, chillingly real war room in Dr. Strangelove, the disturbing but oddly sexy ultra violence of an Orwellian future in A Clockwork Orange, the siren call of insanity in The Shining, the hyper fantastical yet authentic Vietnam War in Full Metal Jacket, or the irony and powerlessness among such transcendent opulence in Barry Lyndon, life was a surreal work in progress – an ambiguous joke that veered from hilarious to sexy to terrifying, sometimes within seconds. Attempting to understand order, or how any system designed to make our universe more rational or safe seemed fruitless. Think Sterling Hayden approaching such a predicament at the end of Kubrick's The Killing. He watches his life literally fly away on an airport tarmac and bitterly spits one of cinema’s greatest final lines: “Eh, what’s the difference?”

Which brings me to the final line of Kubrick’s frequently misunderstood Eyes Wide Shut in which Nicole Kidman states rather flatly, “Fuck” — as in, that’s the answer, that’s what we need to do. A movie I’ve defended since its release, it’s a picture that deserves closer inspection and a worthy finale for the enigmatic auteur.

The controversial movie (some thought it silly, some, un-erotic) Eyes Wide Shut found the director once again studying the perplexing nature of dreams and reality, this time exploring them in a more personal and private arena: sexuality. As he did with Lolita, Kubrick created more than a film about sexual desire; he created a film about bitter romance, troublesome marital bonds, societal contradictions and, significantly, the fear of death.

An updating of the 1927 Traumnovelle (Dream Novel) by the sardonic Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler, the picture remains an unsettling blend of antiquated garishness and modern transgression — an alternate sexual universe haunted by ghouls of the past, present and future.

In this universe “live” the healthy, handsome walking dead – Dr. Bill Harford  Cruise) and his wife, Alice (a slinky, wonderfully creepy  Kidman), a glamorous, rich couple who appear the picture of storybook perfection. But like most supposed perfection, there are cracks in that portrait, and in their case, it’s the usual: they want to screw other people (or at least they think they do). At a sumptuous party given by Bill's obscenely wealthy friend Victor (Sydney Pollack), Bill almost strays upstairs with two models while Alice flirts with a strange Hungarian man who looks like one of the cadaverous party-goers from The Shining. The next evening, in a fit of jealousy over Bill's near indiscretion (he ended up contending with a beautiful, naked drug overdose instead of a debauched roll in the hay — though the way her body sits in this shot is disturbingly erotic), Alice confesses that she’s had thoughts of cheating and, even worse, reveals that if things had been different, she would have thrown her entire life away for one flight of sexual fancy.

Unmasking something that should remain one of those deep, dark secrets you never confess to your significant other, Alice deftly rattles Bill's perception of her fidelity and the strength of their marriage in a speech that makes his mind spin out of control (Kidman's performance here is superb). After this confession, Bill is abruptly called away to confirm the death of a patient and keeping in tune with the love/death/sex of the picture, the daughter of the deceased makes a pass at him. The grief stricken but, considering the circumstances, kinky gesture aids in Bill’s decision to not immediately return home. Instead, he wanders the streets of New York and embarks on a sequence of actions that, though not as outwardly comic, somewhat resemble those in the Scorsese movie After Hours: He discovers a surreal sexual underworld that he’s both attracted to and repelled by.

A prostitute, a piano player, a peculiar costume-store owner and his Lolita-esque 14-year-old daughter lead Bill to the film's infamous ritualistic orgy sequence, during which participants are cloaked and masked, and naked women are used as sacrificial sex lambs. The gothic, terrifying yet titillating feel of this sequence walks a fine line between horror and parody and true to Kubrick’s genius, manages to cross into both camps. The magnificent, exacting camera work and unrelenting music compel us to look, no matter what happens, and though I was actually a little scared the first time I saw this moment, I found myself highly amused, laughing even. If ever a person was out of place in a Bohemian Grove-like orgy, it is Tom Cruise’s Dr. Bill. And yet, I was absolutely hypnotized, watching these moments like a waking dream and investing it with multiple meanings. What the hell is going on here besides a bunch of silly old rich men getting their jollies with beautifully breasted, long legged Helmut Newton models? And further, what do all of Bill’s adventures mean? Are Bill's encounters simply nightmares that will damage his marriage beyond repair, or are they mere titillating fantasy — fodder for a closer relationship and better sex with his spouse?

Well, I can’t answer that. Given the picture's ominous tone, however, there is something definitely rotten within its slinky, Christmas-lit loveliness. Like the impeccable environment of The Shining, the aura of Eyes Wide Shut is one of beauty ready to be defiled, sexuality ready to be slaughtered, lovely exteriors that reek of formaldehyde. The pall that hangs over this picture is fear: fear of the unknown; fear of yourself or of others; and fear that if sex can lead to freedom, it can just as easily lead to death.

In fact, the picture can be viewed as a commentary on sexual attitudes in the last few decades — a time when meaningless indiscretions can lead to horrifying blood-test results. It is no surprise, then, that Bill is a doctor and that throughout the film, he flashes his physician's ID as a police detective would his badge. "I'm a doctor," he constantly says, for both reassurance and intimidation.

In a profession that requires intimate investigation of flesh that may well be on its way to the morgue, sex is serious. These unsettling references to AIDS, necrophilia and forbidden sex (not to mention Kubrick's own death upon bringing the film to completion, une petite mort of sorts) permeate the picture like one giant prick tease. In today's world, sex is still there for the taking, but at what cost and for what gain? Kubrick's frustrating, brilliant coda neither answers nor ignores its own questions. Rather, it leaves us in a mysterious, contradictory mishmash of dream and reality, where not only are our eyes wide shut, but our legs are too.

Merry Christmas.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's's 1963 Cleopatra, a grand spectacle beset with production hell, hirings, firings, budgetary insanity and one of the most legendary affairs in Hollywood history. Re-released to coincide with Cleopatra's 50th is the book "My Life with Cleopatra: The Making of a Hollywood Classic" by Cleopatra producer Walter Wanger. Wanger's journals offer some intriguing inside information, but digging into the producer's own life and scandal proved extra fascinating. I discuss at The Los Angeles Review of Books. Here is my piece. Originally excerpted but read it all here.

Cleopatra producer Walter Wanger had surely seen it all. Having lived and worked through the silents, the talkies, and Todd-AO, the movie veteran understood the art and commerce of Hollywood, the deals and decadence. The eminently erudite and sophisticated producer also understood the infidelities — the groin-crushing infidelities — and with a cinematic vengeance, he shot a man for it. So it’s quietly startling to read, in his published production diary, My Life with Cleopatra, this miniature entry regarding Eddie Fisher’s infamous betrayal by wife Elizabeth Taylor and her new lover Richard Burton. It’s darkly amusing, and almost winkingly cryptic: 

"March 19, 1962

"Eddie Fisher to New York.

"I think it is ill-advised to leave now. He didn’t ask me for advice, however, which is just as well. I was no expert in solving a similar problem myself."

Indeed, he was not. Wanger went to the slammer for the felonious confrontation with his wife’s lover. There was no “we need to talk about this, honey”; no higher ground or any of that path-of-least-resistance business. Simply put: he shot his wife’s paramour in the crotch. But with prison comes wisdom. And, certainly, with Elizabeth Taylor comes wisdom.

Had heartsick crooner Fisher actually sought advice from educated ex-con Wanger, perhaps he would have learned something. Or, perhaps he would have gotten too many ideas. In any case, Eddie Fisher did not seek counsel with Walter Wanger before exiting the Cleopatra set, so distraught over his violet-eyed wife lusting for that ruggedly handsome Welshman-in-the-grass that, according to Elizabeth Taylor (via Vanity Fair contributing editors Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger), he put a gun to her head. “I’m not going to kill you. You’re too beautiful,” he told the woman who’d just survived a life-threatening and emergency tracheotomy the year prior. 

Who knows what might have happened had Eddie Fisher shot Elizabeth Taylor? The bullet would have connected, for Liz was notoriously catastrophe-prone, but something would have saved her, for she was also freakishly resilient. A jewel from one of her glittering headdresses or a flinty sequin from her customized Cleo eye-makeup would have deflected the fell bullet. Instead of spending a couple days in the morgue, Liz would have returned to the hospital after a months-long vigil while Fischer anguished darkly in the slammer. Wanger would have had no choice but to endure the production delays as he had all the others, and Taylor would have returned to the set alive and refreshed. Wonderful. Except for the hair department. They’d have to alter all of her wigs to cover that damn bullet wound.

But Fisher’s fresh hurt must have rustled up some past tumult within Wanger — much more than that skinny, enigmatic 1962 diary entry suggests. One can only speculate how much Wanger knew of Fisher’s rage, but he surely reflected on l’affair — particularly when considering Liz’s lover, Burton. Fisher reportedly bought a gun just for Burton, whom he dreamt of shooting (I can’t help but think of Fisher humming his own hit “I’m Walking Behind You” in his sleepless fantasy murder scenarios), but, thankfully, never fired a bullet. 

Walter Wanger was a different kind of man. When in 1951 he found himself in a similar predicament, the pipe-smoking producer didn’t pack his bags and run to New York. He packed a heater and headed for the MCA parking lot. 

Wanger barely discusses his own scandal (of course he doesn’t) in My Life With Cleopatra (co-written with Hollywood columnist and author Joe Hyams), his making-of diaries dating from the film’s beginning in 1958 to his epilogue dated March 7, 1963:

"It would be pleasant to say that the trials and tribulations which characterized the making of Cleopatra ended with that day in Egypt eight months ago when I made my farewell speech. It would also be pleasant to say that the pleasures of fame and fortune made all our sufferings worth while and, that in the true Hollywood tradition, we lived happily thereafter. The truth is something else again." 

The truth, Mr. Wanger, the truth. Whatever that means is questionable, especially in regard to something as chaotic as Cleopatra. Knowing more about the man, you get the feeling his past dramas pale when dealing with the madness of Cleopatra, a fiasco that famously cost, in some estimates, up to $44 million and is considered, adjusted for inflation, the most expensive movie ever made. My Life with Cleopatra, first excerpted in The Saturday Evening Post two months before the movie’s opening in 1963, was a fascinating move on Wanger’s part.

Yes, publicists Jack Brodsky and Nathan Weiss unleashed the divulging Cleopatra Papers: A Private Correspondence in the same year, but Wanger was big stuff. What working producer would write a tell-all about a major production his name was still attached to? Executives were shocked, the public was insatiable for Liz and Dick, and Wanger needed some good publicity. And yet, even as Wanger spills secrets and names names while detailing the exhausting production and its budget-bleeding stresses, these aren’t soul-baring journals of a man entering the final years of his life. The diary is, in part, a face-saving account: a glimpse into the inner workings of production to disconcert studio executives; an exposé that was a first of its kind. Wanger knew he might never eat lunch in this town again and was up for the gamble. His legacy and reputation were more important. 

And Wanger deserves some respect. Cleopatra was a throwback, a movie to reclaim the glory of Wanger’s opulent “orientalist” spectacles from the ’20s and ’30s. Nearly four decades earlier, the young producer was prescient enough to bring a project called The Sheik to Paramount vice president Jesse L. Lasky, making Rudolph Valentino a sensation and the vogue of exotic spectacle a phenomenon in 1921. Based on his accomplishment, the 69-year-old understandably desired more credit, veneration, and, of course, more money. My Life with Cleopatra underscores his efforts in sometimes brief, sometimes extensive detail penned by a man sorely disappointed and burned by studio executives, the men “who made my job as a producer of the picture an obstacle race.”

“I am bitter indeed,” Wanger wrote,

"about what I consider to be their bungling indifference. In retrospect, however, I can say that I understand that they were operating, for the most part, out of insecurity and fear. They were desperate, nervous men, trying to protect the studio from further losses, and Cleopatra soon became their scapegoat."

In basic, sometimes writerly style, well suited for popular consumption, Wanger recounts his then-recent history (the book was published when the movie was released) concerning a picture that switched directors (Rouben Mamoulian to the tragically overworked Joseph L. Mankiewicz), switched locations (London to Rome), switched Caesars and Antonys (Peter Finch to Rex Harrison; Stephen Boyd to Richard Burton) and, in the end, switched Fox presidents (Spyros Skouras to Darryl F. Zanuck). Insider-ish and dishy enough to cover Cleo essentials for both the casuals and the obsessives, the memoir of the nightmarish production and its famous affair (Liz was accused of the deliciously worded “erotic vagrancy”) makesCleopatra ever-enthralling 50 years later. A gloriously restored Cleopatra showed this year at Cannes with a Blu-ray to follow, and indeed, this forever fascination is the very reason Wanger’s diary has been dusted off and put back in print (with a new afterword by Kenneth Turan). The backstory has always been more interesting than the movie itself, and Wanger capitalizes on its glamorously morbid curiosities. He claimed to be proud of the picture, but he understood what the public wanted: scandal.

Though the book reads relatively tame by today’s confessional standards, there are plenty of intriguing, page-turning smaller details that ring wonderfully bizarre. Wanger’s accounts of Roddy McDowall’s broken tooth (the Pope’s personal dentist is called to the set) or the night Taylor’s dress ignited after she stepped on a book of matches at a party (who else spontaneously combusts after stepping on a book of matches?) or anything to do with elephants (circus owners sued production for $100,000 based on an elephant supply and threw in a slander claim for daring to call their pachyderms “wild”) prove more surrealistically entertaining than the endless budget issues or how Wanger felt about the travails of poor Joseph L. Mankiewicz (One wishes world-class wit Mankiewicz had published his own diary.) Whatever his intention, Wanger does deliver something powerful: battle fatigue by proxy. He makes you sick and tired of the thing. The bloated production becomes wearisome enough that just reading about the budgetary issues makes a person resentful and scattered. You just want it to end. I felt myself wishing Elizabeth Taylor, bless her, would just stop having so many goddamn problems. 

And yet, it was Taylor who saved the picture because of her glamorous preposterousness: in those four years she nearly died, won an Oscar, dumped her husband, incited a world-wide scandal, and made Richard Burton a household name. That sells tickets no matter how turgid the movie. But despite its faults, Cleopatra is, in moments, dazzling, and it eventually became popular and profitable. It also inspired many, including Andy Warhol, who called it “the most influential movie of the ’60s." A new generation of women would ditch their red lipstick in favor of nudes and carefully draw those sultry, smoky Cleopatra eyes before slithering into their skimpy mini dresses. The story may have been bogged down by old fogey studio gloss, but Liz’s look was positively youth-quaking.

Survivor Liz reigns triumphant. Cleopatra did not damage her. Wanger is another story. You can’t help but feel for the man, even if you question the veracity of his self-reflection and responsibility in these diaries. How heartbroken was he? What was going on with him, personally? Near the end of the long and laborious production, he writes on June 20, 1962:  

"Haven’t heard a word from the executives in New York or Hollywood since they left here. 

"Although I am off salary and, theoretically, without any real authority I am remaining with the picture and still functioning as producer. 

"I don’t think the executives know what they are doing. Regardless of what they think and do, this is my project."

But by that time, was it? In spirit, yes, but that’s about it. For elucidation, I reached for Matthew Bernstein’s indispensable Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent, the definitive biography of Wanger and a fascinating look at Hollywood history from the silent era to the confused 1960s. In Bernstein’s book, I read accounts, written or spoken by Wanger, that were more illuminating and eloquent than My Life with Cleopatra.  Where was that Walter Wanger in his own diary?  Obviously My Life With Cleopatra wasn’t going to read like John Cheever’s beautiful, laceratingly honest journals (not many diaries do), or Richard Burton’s charmingly acerbic, intelligent, and frequently moving diaries — the beleaguered producer cannot resist spin. My Life With Cleopatra contains some keen insight and nicely worded observations (“I sometimes feel as though I am living a scene from The Snake Pit. Every time I turn around there are grinning, leering, shouting photographers — the paparazzi. They are everything and everywhere. They are like the cats of Rome, hiding on rafters, hiding under beds, always screaming for a morsel.”) But I’d wished Wanger had penned a more dramatically thought-provoking, forthright tome. Wanger’s life certainly contained drama — melodrama, in fact, and a love triangle that, though less glamorous, was intriguingly darker and more shocking than Eddie, Liz, and Dick.

Which leads me back to 1951, Wanger, his wife, and that parking lot. As detailed in Bernstein’s book, 57-year-old Wanger was besieged with career worries, money stress, absurd Red Scare pestering, and the extra-marital wandering, however understandable, of his frequently cheated-upon wife, the talented, versatile, smart and sexy actress Joan Bennett, who’d played everything from saucy Fritz Lang femme fatales to a ’50s freeze-dried Douglas Sirk housewife.

Wanger, the independent who worked at every major Hollywood studio, produced, among many, movies like The Cocoanuts, Queen Christina, Stagecoach, Foreign Correspondent, Scarlet Street, and up to that point, portentously, The Reckless Moment; he was an intellectual, an educated man intent on making movies a more respectable art form. And yet he found himself committing a criminal act Eddie Fisher only fantasized about. Suspecting an affair with Bennett’s agent, Jennings Lang, Wanger hired a detective to tail his wife and learned exactly what he feared: she’d been sneaking off for months, even meeting Lang in a flat (which reportedly inspired Billy Wilder’s classic, The Apartment). In a fit of violent jealousy, Wanger drove to the MCA parking lot where Lang and Bennett were chatting outside her car. Wanger approached; argued with Lang, shot twice, the second bullet hitting Lang where it counted most: in the groin. The irate husband was swiftly caught; conveniently and ludicrously, the Beverly Hills Police Station was just across the street. Upon arrest, Wanger, possessed with a furious sensibility, stated: “I’ve just shot the son-of-a-bitch who tried to break up my home.”

What followed was counsel provided by Jerry Giesler (who else but the man who represented Errol Flynn, Charlie Chaplin, Bugsy Siegel, and Lana Turner?), studio heads from Darryl Zanuck to Samuel Goldwyn contributing to his legal costs, a not guilty by reason of temporary insanity plea, and a four-month stint at Castaic Honor Farm Prison. As related in Bernstein’s book, Wanger explained his actions to Giesler with an almost poetic reiteration, staring down a very real prison sentence (which he never thought he’d serve — it was a forgivable crime of passion, he thought) while maintaining his dramatic panache. In words that read like Humbert Humbert’s repetitive “because you took advantage” letter to Clare Quilty, Wanger mournfully avowed:  

"I am 57 years old and I loved my wife and family and had no desire for any change — I was not only jealous of Joan I was jealous of our way of life […] I was jealous of Joan’s forthrightness — I was jealous of her good judgment […] I was jealous of the time we had with the family — I was jealous of our liking or disliking a book or play and our reasons – of her interest in my clothes and mine in hers — of her perfume (La Rose) and my cologne (Fraser’s) — the way she ran the house, the way she organized — the efficiency of her means of travel — her interest in my work — my interest in her pictures — the discussion over directors, scripts and all the rest of show business — her desire to entertain well — her love of church and her desire to be with the children — these are all things I was jealous of plus the physical attraction […] her lack of conceit and willingness to look objectively at her career […] I was jealous of all of this which I saw changing from day to day and a hardened new code of behavior and an attitude so foreign and distant and bitter that it was quite obvious to me that our marriage had entered a new phase and a dire one — I did not want to see this change occur and was ready to do all I could to stop it." 

Four months in prison was a depressing experience, but Wanger understood the raw humanity of it, the rough romantic glory. You catch the man screwing your wife, you shoot his balls off. But by Cleopatra, Wanger reveals a refreshingly liberal attitude toward such matters. The macho rage has lessened, and women, not just goddesses like Elizabeth Taylor, can be forgiven. In My Life With Cleopatra he writes: 

"These are hypocritical times, when men are permitted to have more than one love at a time and women are castigated for the same kind of behavior. I believe that Elizabeth loves two men. And who is to say that a woman can’t love two men at the same time, any more than that a man can’t love two women at the same time?" 

"I have lived in several of the great cities of the world during my lifetime, and I have known many women considered to be paragons of virtue. I doubt, however, that many of these moral women have as strong a code of personal ethics as Elizabeth. Further, I doubt that many of them would have been able to resist Burton’s charm."

This is lovely, a tribute not only to Taylor who “goes where her heart leads her,” but perhaps to both his wife and himself. He may have hardened after four months in prison, but he seems to have evolved emotionally. And yet, four years of Cleopatra destroyed his pride; it was a spirit-crusher, a quagmire of business and emotions, a once passion project that through time, could only feel passionate when Elizabeth’s name was invoked, which Wanger does frequently in his journals: “It is not a far stretch of the imagination to compare Elizabeth with Cleopatra. She has the intelligence and temperament of the Egyptian Queen — and she has the honesty and directness that characterize all big people.” Writing My Life With Cleopatra was Wanger reaching for that .38, hoping the pen would be mightier than the gun. But alas, the book couldn’t have possibly provided the relief he sought, and he remained a troubled man. In a letter published in Bernstein’s book (and not in Wanger’s diary), a heartbreakingly humiliated Wanger begged Zanuck to save his reputation after firing him during post-production of the picture: 

"I beseech you, Darryl, as the new president of the company to not aggravate this situation and further damage my status as producer of Cleopatra by not bringing me to Paris for the conferences and cutting and editing of this picture. Not only will this further harm my reputation and status, but I think you, as the new president of Twentieth Century Fox would not want to further humiliate and degrade me, a fellow producer, in this manner, in the eyes of the entire industry and of the entire world […] I appeal to you as a man not to do this to me."

After shooting Jennings Lang, Wanger stayed with Bennett, albeit with understandable friction, for another 14 years, produced (among other films) three terrific, lean, and meaningful-masterful pictures that resonated with him personally (Riot in Cell Block 11, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the award-winning I Want to Live!), and entered a new stage in his career. He wasn’t a radically different man but a changed one, inasmuch as movies, life’s indignities, and a prison sentence can change a person. He was both tired and tireless. He suffered heart ailments. He was old. But he endured the 1950s. He was ready for new projects and adventures. 

And then came shooting Cleopatra. He survived Cleo’s four-year stretch, but he didn’t survive the 1960s. He died at age 74 in 1968 — the same year a truly underrated Taylor and Burton picture was released, Joseph Losey’s Boom! There, his queen Elizabeth, dissipated and drugged-up, playing Tennessee Williams’s Flora “Sissy” Goforth, dons enormous headdresses, screams at servants for injections, and takes overripe, bar-ragged Burton as a lover while rotting in her mansion on the Isle of Capri. The picture is an engorged wonder; tumescent, histrionic, and hilarious, but beautifully bizarre and emotionally honest. Taylor shows us the dark side of excess, the desperation of love, and the disillusionment of lust and, despite the picture’s poor reviews, she is fantastic. Here is the “the honesty and directness that characterize all big people.”

And here is the honesty of opulence, its fading glamour that was already losing its luster by the time of Cleopatra, the vulgarity of a queen in her own mind, and her lover (now older) sliding into the 1970s, garish, sagging, and exceedingly brave for it. Building on their groundbreaking brilliance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Boom! presents the glittering duo reveling in and revealing their decay with an almost avant-garde perceptibility. At this point, regardless of the baubles and booze and purple, writ large, Liz and Dick seemed to get it. One wonders if Wanger saw an early screening. One wonders if he got it, too. I hope so.

Originally published at The Los Angeles Review of Books.

How in the name of Felix E. Feist did I manage to miss the wickedly efficient The Threat until 2011? What a bracing, lean and mean movie this is; a tense, simple, yet vigorously acted action/hostage picture with not an ounce of flab on it. Current action pictures or, really, any modern motion picture (not all, there are exceptions, of course) with their frequently abused 120-plus running times, should take note of this one. Get to the point. We can read between the lines. Or in the case of this movie, the broken furniture.

The Threat (1949) stars one of my favorite forces/icons of noir, Charles McGraw, as a ruthless killer who breaks out of Folsom only to kidnap the police detective (Michael O’Shea) and district attorney (Frank Conroy) responsible for his incarceration (with Anthony Caruso, Frank Richards and a wonderfully wan Virginia Grey along for the ride.) Everyone’s terrific here, but it’s McGraw’s party and he'll bust some heads if he wants to. From his silent menace to his terrifying bursts of violence (like pinning a man's wrists with his feet and crushing his head with a chair) he is like nothing you’ve ever seen, and probably never will. Is there any actor alive like McGraw? The answer is no.

When the picture moves into its sweltering set piece — a hot California desert hideaway — it grows even more desperate and volatile. Feist (who directed two of my other favorite hellraisers — Lawrence Tierney in the tough, excellent The Devil Thumbs a Ride, and Steve Cochran in the rough and romantic Tomorrow is Another Day) working with cinemtographer Harry J. Wild, knows how to showcase McGraw in such doomed digs. Tension builds so much that you can practically smell the sweat among McGraw and company. They perspire and dread and grow crazier and crazier while their big bad captor sits and waits, radiating wrath.

The room rumbles with McGraw's blood, his pumping black heart bouncing off those hate-shack walls. But what makes him even more intriguing is how casually savage he can be, like a tired cat swiping a claw over his trembling prey. And yet, McGraw is so persuasive that if he even briefly stares forlornly into the void, you find yourself feeling something for him. McGraw, that furnace of vengeance, is boiling his captive's lives away. But mostly his own.

And all in just 66 minutes during which this hysterical entrapment does not waste one minute of intensity, style, intelligence and Charlie-McGraw-magnitude. That's six minutes over an hour. It worked then and it works now. So, watch your old movies, new Hollywood. And try to find another Charles McGraw. Good luck. You may need to actually bust a guy out of prison to do it. 

Each week, The Dissolve "designates a movie of the week for staffers and readers to watch and discuss, with a leadoff essay on Monday, a roundtable-style forum on Tuesday, and another related feature to follow."  This week, they chose Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise and asked me to write their related feature. Here's an excerpt from my piece on the pre-Code comedies of Lubitsch. Read it all at The Dissolve.  

“Darling, remember, you are Gaston Monescu. You are a crook. I want you as a crook. I love you as a crook. I worship you as a crook. Steal, swindle, rob. Oh, but don’t become one of those useless, good-for-nothing gigolos.”

What a stunningly erotic line; pleading for not only devotion, but also larceny, both monetary and sexual. And what a perfectly Lubitschian line, layered with meaning, hunger, sincere feeling, ironic humor, and even sadness. “Don’t leave me, but do steal, swindle, rob. And on top of that, stroke, seduce, and ravish me,” robber Lily (Miriam Hopkins) seems to be saying to her live-in lover, gentleman thief Gaston (Herbert Marshall), in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 masterpiece Trouble In Paradise.

Most, possibly all, of the multiple themes of Lily’s romantic entreaty could apply to Lubitsch’s comedies made between 1929 and 1934, most co-scripted by Samson Raphaelson. (Though not his one drama of the period, 1932’s Broken Lullaby.) These movies offer not just a twist, but a twist atop a twist, and a joke atop the joke: the “superjoke,” as Billy Wilder called it. Those themes repeat: the lively, often-painful love triangle, the sexual and romantic jealousy, the thrill of sex, and in this case, the carnal kicks co-mingling with the art of stealing, an act more erotic than gold-digging. (Gold-fleecing is much more penetrating.) And then—important during one of the worst economic times in America’s history—there’s Lily and Gaston’s hard, artful work, something to respect, to take pride in.

Stealing is magical in Trouble In Paradise. Sleight of hand is more titillating than Don Juanery. (Don’t hook, darling: crook.) Prostitution is too easy, too boring—about as boring as marriage. And marriage needs to stay saucy, or who needs it? Here’s the power and thrill of pre-Code Hollywood, propelled into elegant, inventive, intelligent orbit within the luminous world of Ernst Lubitsch.

The Motion Picture Production Code was adopted under Will H. Hays in 1930, but not fully enforced until Joseph Breen got his mitts all over it. (“Pre-Breen” is a more appropriate term than “pre-Code,” Thomas Doherty writes in Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, And Insurrection In American Cinema 1930-1934.) Pictures were submitted for review, Trouble In Paradise among them. Lubitsch was told to remove some of the more “scandalous” lines, including “Oh, to hell with it!” But countless movies flaunted the “Don’ts” and "Be-carefuls” the Code warned filmmakers about. Just a handful of the transgressions indulged in films ranging from scrappy Warner Bros. gangster pictures to glossy MGM melodramas: criminals getting away with it, sex before marriage, adultery, drug addiction, drunkenness, mockery of matrimony, and suggestion of nudity. (Check how many times Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell dress and undress in William Wellman’s Night Nurse.)

From 1929’s innovatively crafted talking musical The Love Parade (Lubitsch’s first sound picture) up to 1934’s Code-rupturing threesome in Design For Living, Lubitsch worked strictly at sophisticated Paramount. (Also released in 1934, The Merry Widow was an MGM picture.) There, he became one of the studio’s top directors, a name audiences remembered just as they would Frank Capra’s—rare for a director at the time. For a brief spell, he was even Paramount’s Head Of Production, which, according to Lubitsch biographer Scott Eyman, was possibly related to the director’s quiet turmoil once Breen took over, and Lubitsch needed to “get out of the line of censorship fire and take some time to figure out what to do.” After all, Lubitsch comedies were about sex, love, joy, and the messy human complications that come from voluptuous adventure. Breen and the Catholic Legion Of Decency held such ardors suspect, a wicked playground for lotharios and trollops.

For Lubitsch, a romantic triangle or adultery wasn’t just the side story, it was often the central plot, making his pre-Breen pictures as gracefully scintillating as William Wellman’s Other Men’s Women or Dorothy Arzner’s Merrily We Go To Hell. According to the Code (as quoted from Olga J. Martin’s Hollywood Movie Commandments, quoted in Doherty’s Pre-Code Hollywood), a love triangle needed “careful handling,” especially if “marriage, the sanctity of the home, and sex morality are not to be imperiled.” Furthermore, adultery was a forbidden subject and “never a fit subject for a comedy.” Lubitsch disagreed: He found it a comedic, musical, elegant, fantastical, oh so real-life.

1932’s One Hour With You concerns both triangles and adultery, and has its own sticky history between George Cukor and Ernst Lubitsch. Originally assigned to direct One Hour With You, Cukor was doing such a frustrating job that the exacting Lubitsch took over the production, according to Eyman: “For the next six weeks, Cukor sat quietly on the set, drawing his salary, confining most of his conversation to expressions of approval after each Lubitsch-directed scene.” The result was a direction credit for Lubitsch, a lawsuit from Cukor, and a compromise with the added credit, “Assisted by George Cukor.” As Eyman wrote, “Lubitsch pictures could not be mass-produced.”

Despite the picture’s difficult production, it’s a fascinating, joyfully randy work about, yes, cheating. Colette (Jeanette MacDonald) is married to impish Andre (Maurice Chevalier), who can’t help but succumb to her horndog best friend Mitzi (Genevieve Tobin). He even sings his dilemma directly to the audience, praising his wife’s virtues while gleefully returning to the potential mistress with, “Ohhhh! That Mitzi!” When the deed is done, Andre again breaks the fourth wall and asks, in song, “What Would You Do?” inquiring of men—and, since this is Lubitsch, women, who aren’t exempt from the equation—how they would handle such a pickle: “Do you think you could resist her? Do you think you would have kissed her? Would you treat her like your sister? Come on, be honest, mister!”

Never mind that that the song explains and excuses his indiscretion; it’s so damn charming that viewers feel mischievously complicit with Andre. (I wonder how many couples gave each other the side-eye during his ode to adultery, or even a jab in the ribs.) Chevalier’s considerable Gallic delights help him get away with such things, but even us non-Chevaliers, we’re all human, we all transgress. Be honest. Grow up. Get over it.

And yet Lubitsch isn’t merely flip here; he understands the pain Andre and his Mitzi have caused the distraught Colette. Even Colette’s lovesick revenge kiss with poor Charles Ruggles (which becomes another amusing Lubitsch twist on deception) is tinged with sadness. She can’t even cheat properly! And Ruggles, well, he doesn’t have a chance next to that dashing so-and-so Chevalier. Pain presents itself in all Lubitsch’s comedies, with some characters standing on the precipice of tragedy.

In 1931’s The Smiling Lieutenant, Chevalier’s Niki is forced to marry a besotted princess (Miriam Hopkins) after she mistakenly accepts his smile and wink, when in fact, he’s directing the amour to his girlfriend, beer-drinking band leader Franzi (Claudette Colbert). Stuck in an unhappy marriage with the ridiculously prim, innocent Princess Anna, Niki refuses to sleep with her, leaving her to play a sad game of checkers on the marriage bed with her blowhard father, King Adolf (a wonderful George Barbier), which is simultaneously hilarious and poignant. (The father-daughter relationship becomes increasingly touching as the movie progresses.) Franzi has tearfully left Niki with a garter to remember her by, but she later becomes his mistress, trysting with her lover while his wife putters around the palace, unfulfilled and heartbroken. This is a comedy musical?

Lubitsch goes even further. Once Anna discovers the affair, she summons Franzi to the palace. (In a kinky touch, Niki has been using the police to arrest Franzi and deliver her to their rendezvous spots.) The confrontation is surprising—both women flop on the bed to blubber their eyes out. Franzi realizes Anna is no enemy and takes pity on the square, surprisingly sweet princess, teaching her how to play a jazzy piano, wear silky négligées (to the tune of “Jazz Up Your Lingerie”), and let down her prissy, pinned-back hair. The mistress instructs the wife how to properly make love to the man the mistress loves. Well, they both love him, but someone has to get their man. The princess reigns (although she’s much less self-sufficient than Jeanette MacDonald’s Queen Louise in The Love Parade, or Countess Helene Mara in Monte Carlo), and Lubitsch allows sacrificial Franzi a mournful exit with the self-defeated, undeserved line, “Girls who start with breakfast don’t usually stay for supper.”

Perhaps this is a flawed, too-easy resolution to the aching triangle, but it’s also an ironic twist. It’s the aforementioned “superjoke.” With The Smiling Lieutenant, Wilder perceived the superjoke as “the wrong girl gets the man.” Some joke. And yet it works, leaving viewers with the shot of Colbert dejectedly waving from behind her back so Niki and Anna can dig into their final scenes of jazzed- and juiced-up foreplay, and finally, a whole lot of sex. Poor Franzi. It was fun while it lasted.

In Trouble In Paradise, the short but memorable affair is not only fun—if that is the right word for a thing so elegant—it could have been marvelous, Gaston says. “Divine,” agrees Mme. Colet. But what can transform such smooth, dreamy sophistication into something clumpy and common? The cops. And so Mme. Colet, knowing Gaston intended to rob her but has fallen in love with her, watches him flee into the night with his other lover. She’s understanding enough to allow him to nab her pearls as a parting gift for Lily, and like Franzi in The Smiling Lieutenant, she’s left alone. Such is life. Gaston and Lily ride away in a cab, culminating their sex-as-stealing one-upsmanship, with Gaston grabbing Mme. Colet’s stealthily snatched wad and stuffing it into Lily’s purse. That purse sits on her lap, or, if one wants to be Freudian about it, between her legs.

And so the crooks get away with it. Paul Muni’s Tony Camonte and James Cagney’s Tom Powers would have been impressed, had they lived. Even they have to pay for their crimes in pre-Code films—but what spectacular endings those two were granted. Gaston and Lily aren’t gangsters or killers; they’re aristocrats incognito (the reverse of Jack Buchanan’s sweet incognito hairdresser in Lubitsch’s Monte Carlo, also released in 1931.) But they do indeed break that bendable code by making lawlessness so sumptuously attractive that pickpocketing is not only exceptionally suave, but synonymous with sex.

And yet within this dreamscape so graceful that it feels musical, with its fluid panning shots, meaningful use of clocks, knowing shadows on beds, superbly climbed staircases and perfectly timed edits, is a waft of Depression-era actuality. Gaston gently complains, “You have to be in the Social Register to keep out of jail. But when a man starts at the bottom and works his way up, a self-made crook, then you say, ‘Call the police! Put him behind bars! Lock him up!’” Reading that, not with Herbert Marshall’s exquisite cadence in mind, and instead with James Cagney’s rat-a-tat pugnacity—well, the two men could have shared a drink together. Marshall may have been too sophisticated, too elitist for Cagney, but he wasn’t a snob. And between the two of them, they had the streets and boudoirs covered. And even better in Lubitsch-land, in which a bit part is often allowed a big moment, they could have invited the fellow who contributes to Trouble In Paradise’s famous opening shot, the garbage-man gondolier.

Read the rest of my piece on Lubitsch's pre-Code comedies and especially their triangles, continuing with Design for Living and what may have even charmed that uptight schoolmarm Joseph Breen, The Merry Widow, at The Dissolve.