A Film Canon

This extraordinary film strains the parameters of silent cinema, exhibiting a conversational ingenuity that gestures towards sound and, more specifically, the screwball comedy. Most explicitly, Lubitsch presents some of the most graceful, naturalistic conversations to date, enabling him to discard intertitles, or at least deflect them into diegetic writing (letters, notes, scrawls), moving one step closer to the spoken word. More subtly, the film abounds with those delicate, ironic cross-nuances that typify screwball, as if bathing the characters in a playfully conversational medium, itself encapsulated in the jilted husband's sharp moustache, which gives the impression that a half-smile lurks beneath even his most ostensibly serious pronouncements. By the final third, every romantic sequence comes to possess a radically different meaning for its participants, culminating with an exquisite three-way conversation in which each speaker is completely mistaken as to the true nature of what is occurring; or, alternatively, with the recurrent situation of mistaking one body for another, even in the midst of embracing it. As the latter might suggest, any pretention to a DeMillean defence of marriage is undercut by Lubitsch's implication that the whole "circle" of marriage and infidelity is one in which no net movement can ultimately occur - a sentiment that equally anticipates Ophuls - and to which no prescription should ultimately be attached. Instead, the viewer is invited to take delight in the transformations that this natural cycle, like any other, involves, many of which are condensed to the comic and erotic reinvention of domestic objects, bolstering its screwball sensibility with a mild slapstick; or, more accurately, reinventing slapstick in the dim, future image of screwball.