Angel

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.