If it’s fair to say anything general based on only this and Little Man, What Now?, Frank Borzage’s films are wonderful little treasures, melding varied tones into a perfectly paced whole in an effortless and heartfelt way. Like Little Man, this is genuinely funny, romantic, and heart-rending, here the young couple with nothing to hold onto in the world but their love for each other supplanted with an older pair whose love threatens to send them to jail, exile or death. Jean Arthur is a woman trapped in a marriage to a psychotically jealous and truly menacing multi-millionaire; Charles Boyer is the handsome and gallant Parisian who would whisk her away to a new life, but finds himself fearing for his own. In Borzage’s hands, not a moment of this descends into heavy melodrama, always remaining bright and engaging, played out beautifully in the leads’ warm performances of a compelling romance. There is a lovely moment on the night they first meet that would surely make any short list I might compile of the great romantic gestures of Hollywood: after years living pent-up and enduring her husband’s rages, and having just escaped a nasty set-up he engineered to block their divorce, Arthur slowly loosens up in Boyer’s arms, gradually lets her guard down as they dance an impromptu tango, and finally kicks off her shoes in a giddy display of both free will and openness to love. The film is full of such lovely moments, actually, and as soon as I’m free again to watch boy-movies not made by Lubitsch, I’ll see if I can indeed offer such wild platitudes to Borzage in general.

 

A truly moving post-war drama sparkling on the edges with Lubitsch’s particular brand of comedy and romance. Paul Renaud is a French soldier deeply disturbed by killing a German counterpart and finding his last love letter to his fiancee at his side. Tortured by guilt, he wastes away for three years, eventually seeks solace in the church, and when all else fails decides he must visit the man’s family in Germany. Nationalist hostility at having a Frenchman in their house soon gives way to welcoming embraces when they realize this is the same young man who has just lain flowers on their son’s grave, and unable to confess he tells them they were great buddies in Paris, soon finding himself a part of the family and falling in love with the fiancee.

As always, Lubitsch takes a run-of-the-mill plot and adds wonderful dimension and character to it; the bonds that form between these characters are deep and ring true, and when his secret is inevitably uncovered it is resolved beautifully and surprisingly. There are moments of real gut-wrenching sorrow, as when two grieving mothers meet in a graveyard remembering their fallen soldiers, lapse into a discussion of recipes, and then suddenly realize anew, “there are so many years ahead of us.” And there are moments of delightful comedy done the Lubitsch way, as when the young couple stroll through town, greeted by the ringing of bells that the viewer knows signal shop doors opening for the townfolk to gape at them, though the camera stays on the pair all the while. It’s a really lovely little film.

 

This is the first Lubitsch film I have found subpar, although I don’t know how much of it he was able to complete before Preminger took over. It aspires to the magic of the luscious Chevalier/MacDonald musical comedies, in a fanciful 19th century romance echoing a 16th century painting and legend of the lady in ermine. It’s missing all of the earlier films’ joy and lightness and sauciness — indeed, it is missing the famous Lubitsch touch. By comparison it feels quite heavy, the song & dance is uninspired, and there is no spark between the actors. No, Fairbanks Jr and Grable are decidedly not Chevalier and MacDonald.

In fact, Betty Grable, oh god, she’s really awful! She has no personality, and for all her wide eyes and raised eyebrows there is absolutely no expressiveness in her. Believe it or not, I had never seen Grable in anything before. I guess I am not really a fan of the classics writ large (though this may change when I have TCM in the house & will watch any random thing they broadcast) but of certain personalities and the idea of that whole world outside the actual movies; so what I have seen is only the result of consuming individual filmographies and a few essentials. That’s a long way of explaining why I’ve never seen any Grable. I do not intend intentionally to watch more Grable now. She’s not even beautiful, a rather ordinary All-American blonde. Was she just a pair of legs? ‘Cause I definitely get the WW2 pin-up girl thing for an All-American blonde with nice legs if that’s all it is. I saw nothing else here.

That’s all. Wanted to express how this underwhelmed me and rag on Grable a bit. So onward, Ernie… well, backward, really: I have nothing left to see but those wonderful musicals and still-baffling silents.

 

Watching this film is sort of like expecting to taste a bite of raspberry sundae, and finding only once on your tongue that it’s chocolate instead. Still good, but for a moment psychologically disorienting. I watch this expecting an Irene Dunne film, and find instead only Queen Victoria. After spending six months more or less immersed in Irene’s films, I can’t locate her anywhere in this role, apart from the rare word betraying her real southern-tinged warble, an isolated characteristic facial tic. That’s surely to her credit: her performance goes much, much deeper than the makeup and false pudge they put on her. I mean, given the kind of acting one expects from a movie of this era, the complexity and subtlety of her work is frankly staggering. As I said at the outset of this long venture, she’s such a natural performer she would have succeeded in any period of film history. But for all that, it’s vaguely disturbing to watch, from my position, both admiring her in the particular way I do, and being so personally confounded by self, identity and appearance: that is my Irene, but that is not her face, those are not her eyes, that is not her voice. It is, honestly, unsettling.

Anyway, as to the film, it’s weak as hell when she’s not onscreen, and that’s probably about half the runtime. Anyone should know by 1950 that, as the studio system had been established, in all but the greatest films no one cares about anyone but the stars. Here, the bits with the kid are too cutesy, the romantic interludes between servant and noble couples completely bloodless, the political maneuvering simplistic. As far as I know it does justice to this period in VR’s life, but there’s not much going on. (If one really cared for the subject matter, they should check out the very excellent Mrs Brown). It’s an inoffensively mediocre film with one really incredible (read: freakishly transformative) performance at its core.

 

Really astonishing — I’m mad at myself for not capturing my thoughts in the moment. Length is far from ponderous; long takes filming the artist’s sketches are really hypnotic, and the many sequences in the studio build the intensity between artist & model perfectly. I don’t know what Rivette cut for his shortened Divertimento, but if it was these protracted ruminations on the artistic process I think that’s a shame, and can only guess it upsets the flow of the film. With nothing short of mastery Rivette weaves the lives, relationships and insecurities of a small cast of characters throughout this process, examining to what extent pain and sacrifice are necessary to great art, ending in some very moving choices. Never before have I seen Rivette tie up his loose ends with such precision: each character really ends with essential questions answered, and remaining questions guiding a path into their respective futures. And the idea of total communion between artist and subject is very cool, that only the model and not the artist can know when the painting is complete, because the model will recognize something in it of profound insight into her soul she alone can recognize but a great painter can perhaps unknowingly capture. And the fallout from such a recognition… Ahhh, I’ll say no more. Yes, despite its length it is absorbing and very exciting.

 

A Rivette film covering the usual ground with somewhat less satisfying results: the theater, the relationship between art and reality, interactions between a female group, a bit of intrigue… but it all adds up to less, and certainly nothing new. Nevertheless, it’s a joy to watch, and the typically overlong runtime speeds by. His characters in this film are perhaps more relatable and human than they have been in any other, which is certainly to its credit; I became absorbed in the concerns of these young women very quickly, each of the main “four” emerging as a fascinating individual, and wondered with them what’s the matter with their friend Cécile.

By now I’m not disturbed by Rivette’s sort of stream-of-conscious narrative, following a thread only as long as it interests him, and resolving nothing by the closing credits (careful not to speak of a “conclusion” — his texts are open-ended). Somehow, the questions raised are less interesting here, less the kind one would like to work out for oneself later and more the kind one expects the film itself to answer, such as the revelation that comes two-thirds into the film, never to be revisited, that Anne is searching for a sister who disappeared years ago.

Perhaps that’s just it: in life, things are not wrapped up so easily, and their theater instructor Constance’s guidance to “trust the poetry” has no real value; life does not follow the neat rules of Aristotelian drama. And indeed that may be the point; throughout most of the film, their mentor is only seen from one angle, and only in front of a stage. Real life has a way of breaking into what the girls know of her world, too, when she becomes absorbed in Cécile’s troubles. This is never quite explained, as the viewer knows no more than the students do, but it clearly changes their lives irrevocably, the moment fact engulfs fiction in a way they are not prepared for. Well? I am talking myself into more of an appreciation of this film and suppose I’d better give it some more consideration. I should say: I liked it thoroughly on my first look, and perhaps there’s more substance there than a first look can reveal.

 

This is pretty brilliant… I wonder now if I should have been more attuned to the sort of thing from Ophüls in the past, but this seems to be as saturated with visual romance as usual, and superficially with a narrative to match: a series of couples meet for brief encounters, passing the torch from one to the next. Yet actually there’s a rather nasty flipside to it: not only are these a series of casual infidelities, but actually it tracks the course of venereal disease among nearly a dozen lovers in turn-of-the-century Vienna, beginning with Simone Signoret’s prostitute. Anton Walbrook wanders through “love’s merry-go-round” and orchestrates this waltz in a variety of disguises, a wry and practical Cupid never shocked by nor critical of love’s true course. Amidst the usual dreamy music and sumptuous photography, this is really a savagely funny and terribly frank farce.

 

Another typically awesome film from Lubitsch, this time with Marlene Dietrich stepping seamlessly, if glamorously, into a cast of regulars. It’s a classic Lubitsch scenario, done with a little more drama than usual: Dietrich is a happily married though neglected wife of an important British diplomat (Herbert Marshall), a fact both husband and wife frankly acknowledge. On a trip to Paris, which escapes her husband’s notice more through his oversight than her deception, she meets and falls in love with another man (Melvyn Douglas). After a night’s flirtation she leaves him under a shroud of mystery, the question of her returning to him or disappearing forever left up in the air. Upon returning home, after being led to believe this incipient romance is just what our heroine needs, the viewer learns that her husband is a good man, both love each other and get along well, and for the most part she is quite happy in her daily life. The predicament is treated with maturity and lightheartedness in Lubitsch’s hands, pitched neither to melodrama nor farce, but a real everyday flow. And, in a film of his high caliber, the story you think you’ve heard a few dozen times before is hardly developed or concluded along the expected lines: it is with his customary ease and wit that he explores the three characters’ points of view and gradually reveals each to the others. There is a fair amount of comedy, mostly assigned to the servants (particularly perhaps my favorite Lubitsch regular, Edward Everett Horton) and Paris’ royal madam, played with expected scene-stealing by Laura Hope Crews. Between the main three, there is only a delicate and very human sort of humor, every instant pervaded by that Lubitsch touch.

 

I’m surprised to report I found this inferior to the 1944 remake overall, though it is still a solid film and in some respects does top the Hollywood alterations. Anton Walbrook is every bit as menacing as Charles Boyer in the role of the husband trying to drive his wife mad, achieving something I can only call underplayed overacting. His performance is a bit over the top, but in whispers and calculated twitches of an eyebrow. Cathleen Cordell too is nearly a match for Angela Lansbury’s smart-mouthed and experienced (though, “depends on how you mean” ;)) parlormaid — high praise, as I’d have to cite Lansbury’s work as one of the best supporting jobs of the decade. Diana Wynyard (not shockingly) pales in comparison to Ingrid Bergman, although it might be accurate to say she plainly underplays the role where Bergman plainly overacts it. In any case, the cast is quite good. The story launches right into the action without the romantic interlude the remake invented. This would seem to work in the original’s favor, but to be honest I felt I needed some evidence that Mallen had not always seemed a scoundrel. On the other hand, the policeman who unravels the gaslight mystery is better here, without another injection of a romantic subplot. Basically I feel the ‘44 remake did a great job of fleshing out the story and adding more intensity to it. This is so bare bones that it leaves it to the cast to make much of anything out of it: they rise to the occasion, but can only take it so far. Still a very good film, but I do prefer the remake.

 

You can tell from the image above time hasn’t treated this film well. And it’s a shame it hasn’t been properly restored, as it’s quite a funny latter-day screwball, quite a charming romance. Surprisingly so, as shamelessly as it does pander to its audience. The “together again” of the title refers to absolutely nothing about the film itself aside from the reunion of the successful Dunne/Boyer pairing; all the actors’ signature bits, together or separate, are clearly showcased here, and the plot turns on the contrivance of Dunne found in nothing more than a slip. And I object to none of this, even as I recognize it for what it is: I am, if sixty-five years late, precisely the audience they had in mind. Whereas in Love Affair and When Tomorrow Comes Dunne & Boyer spent at least as much of their screen time angsting over tragic circumstances as they did falling in love, this vehicle provides for non-stop flirtation, barb-trading and embracing, consummated in an awfully tender and well-nigh steamy stolen moment in the kitchen, unless that’s just me. Comedy or tragedy I’m easy prey for these two regardless, but it’s delight compounded to realize it’s also, and despite its very deliberate origins, a wonderfully fast-paced, fresh, and truly hilarious comedy. It dispatches its teenage challengers for the older pair’s hearts with the grace and charm The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer wishes it had, and nearly resolves a similar problem to that posed in Woman of the Year without offending a modern viewer. Nearly: old Hollywood may not have known what to do with a powerful woman except marry her off, but in her dignified and never self-important way Irene Dunne did, suave and playful Charles Boyer knew what to do with a woman like that, vaguely pervy and entirely suckered me knows what to do with them both, and I know you all know what you can do about that. That’s right.