silver nitrate notes

Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise and the Door That Stays Closed

08 may 2026

For roughly thirty-three years, between July 1935 and the collapse of the Production Code in 1968, Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932) was effectively unavailable in the United States. Paramount could not re-release it because the Code office, under Joseph Breen, had refused certification on grounds that the picture's two leads were unrepentant thieves and that the film treated their adultery as a comic structure rather than a moral problem. The studio shelved the negative. Television rights were sold for the first time in 1968 after the Code was replaced. The picture's first proper revival was the New York Film Festival retrospective in 1972, the same year Andrew Sarris published the long Lubitsch entry in The American Cinema. By then Lubitsch had been dead for twenty-five years.

I think this is the funniest film made in the United States before the Second World War. It is also the most carefully designed. The two facts are related.

Two thieves, Gaston (Herbert Marshall) and Lily (Miriam Hopkins), meet at a Venetian hotel under assumed identities, recognise each other for what they are inside the first ten minutes, and pair up. They relocate to Paris, where they take positions in the household of a wealthy widow, Mariette Colet (Kay Francis), with the intention of robbing her. Gaston falls for the widow. Lily watches him fall. The widow falls for Gaston. The plot turns on whether the theft will go through anyway. The plot resolves in the most elegant possible refusal of consequence: the theft does go through, the widow lets it go through, and the two thieves catch the next train out of Paris together. No one is punished. No one is reformed. No one expresses regret.

This is the part that the Code office could not abide and that contemporary audiences ought to find still bracing. The film's ethics are not loose; they are precise. Lubitsch's argument, encoded across eighty-three minutes of dinner-party choreography and bedroom doors that close before the camera follows, is that the conventional moral structure of romantic comedy (the comic-error, the recognition, the punishment, the reform) is a misreading of what comedy is for. Comedy is for the door that stays closed. Comedy is for the audience trusted to imagine what is on the other side. Comedy is for the people who agree, by social contract, not to demand that the film show them what they have already worked out for themselves.

The closed door is not metaphor. It is a specific compositional choice that recurs across the picture and that constitutes, more than any other single element, what subsequent critics have called the Lubitsch touch. The film's first sex scene (Gaston and Lily, the morning after the Venice meeting) is photographed entirely as the exterior of the hotel-room door. The camera holds on the door for ten seconds. The door does not open. We hear what we need to hear. The film cuts. The next scene is the breakfast tray.

This kind of compositional discretion does specific work in a 1932 American film. It permits Lubitsch to stage romantic and erotic content that the Hays Office would have blocked if photographed directly. (The Code was technically in force from 1930 but unevenly enforced before Breen's appointment as administrator in 1934. Trouble in Paradise is the most refined of the pre-Code films, and the example most often cited when historians describe what the period was permitting.) It also, more interestingly, makes the audience the third party in every scene. The viewer is asked to do the work the camera will not do. The pleasure of the picture is the pleasure of being trusted.

Victor Milner's photography supports the strategy. Milner had been at Paramount since 1924, was Lubitsch's regular cameraman through the early 1930s, and would later win an Oscar for Cleopatra (1934). His work on Trouble in Paradise is restrained where his colour and Technicolor work of the late 1930s would be lavish. He shoots the picture in tight medium close-ups during dialogue and in elegant long-shots during transitions, with deep blacks in the women's evening gowns set against the Art Deco lighting of the Hans Dreier sets. Dreier's design (the geometric Paris flat, the curved staircases, the lacquered piano rooms) is the production's other unsung hero. The picture's visual rhythm is Lubitsch's, but the visual substance is Milner photographing Dreier.

Samson Raphaelson, who wrote the screenplay (with Grover Jones, credited but functionally junior), considered Trouble in Paradise his best work and said so in interviews into the 1970s. Lubitsch agreed. In a 1947 interview shortly before his death, Lubitsch was asked which of his American pictures he was proudest of, and he named Trouble in Paradise first and the 1939 Ninotchka second. The two pictures share a writer, a sensibility, and a structural commitment to the closed door. They are also, between them, the strongest argument I know for what was possible in the Hollywood comedy before the Code became enforceable.

The picture is now on Criterion in a 4K restoration that handles Milner's blacks correctly. It can be watched in eighty-three minutes. It is, after ninety-four years, still the funniest film I have written about on this site, and I wanted to put that on the record before the year ended.

[ « prev: T-Men · latest post ]

» leave a comment in the guestbook

sources
[1] Eyman, Scott. Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise. Simon & Schuster, 1993.
[2] Raphaelson, Samson. Three Screen Comedies by Samson Raphaelson. University of Wisconsin Press, 1983 (introduction discusses the writing of Trouble in Paradise).
[3] Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968. E.P. Dutton, 1968. Lubitsch entry, Pantheon section.
[4] Doherty, Thomas. Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934. Columbia University Press, 1999.