Film review: Trouble in Paradise (1932)

 

This is a breezy little number!  Definitely pre-code - no actual nudity but plenty of very suggestive imagery and talk (such as showing a couple's shadows falling on a bed).  The three leads are excellent.

Herbert Marshall we've seen before in If You Could Only Cook and the early Hitchock talkie Murder! and I, frankly, could stand to see a lot more of his velvety urbanity.  (Looking him up, I am reminded that he lost a leg in WWI, but you'd never know it.)  He would be ideal in The Importance of Being Earnest.  And this film is also perfect for him, as requires him both to be suave and romantic, while also being funny, a trio he pulls off effortlessly.  Adopting a more crass, slapstick style is his co-star, Miriam Hopkins.  The two of them play swindlers both pretending to be rich people in order to get close enough to rob them, and at the beginning you think that you're going to have the tired plot point of swindlers fooling each, but we skip past this almost immediately, as neither is fooled by the other (and both manages to pick each other's pocket) 

but fall madly in love anyway.  Their meeting takes place in Venice, but they cannot stay long lest they be caught, and the rest of the film takes place in Paris.  There we meet the third lead, who is Kay Francis playing Madame Mariette Colet, 

heir to the perfume company her father started, and pursued by two men she finds equally dreary: the Major and M. Filiba 

(played by very familiar face Edward Everett Horton), who was robbed by Marshall's Gaston Monescu (in disguise) in Venice, and who will eventually recognize him.  Meanwhile, Marshall and Hopkins steal Mme. Colet's incredibly expensive purse at the opera, intending to sell it, but, reading about her reward for its return, decide that's more lucrative.  But when Gaston meets Mariette, he hatches the plan to become her secretary and defraud her of a whole lot more.  But things are complicated when he starts to fall for her, and she for him.  And she is no wilting violet - when she wants something, she goes for it.  Meanwhile Miriam Hopkins has been hired as his secretary and is starting to worry.  Will they get found out?  Will it be Filiba or will it be the trusted family advisor whom Gaston has squeezed out (who may not be fully on the level himself)?  Very droll and lots of good lines - too suave to be a screwball comedy - something Wilde might have turned out if he had been working in Hollywood in the 30s.