TROUBLE IN PARADISE: having too much fun at the expense of the rich

From the opening scene of a Venetian garbage man emptying the island city's trash cans onto a gondola garbage barge and striking up an Italian love song as he rows off down the canal it's clear that TROUBLE IN PARADISE is not going to be your standard Hollywood romantic comedy.
Everything about this 1932 film is ever so slightly off kilter and it keeps the viewer ever so slightly off balance too. It takes a while to figure out what's going on and when you do you still can't be sure of what's going to happen next.

The wonderful Herbert Marshall stars as the suave, urbane and sophisticated Gaston Monescu, a man of apparent means who actually earns his living as Europe's most notorious jewel thief. When we first encounter him he's posing as a Baron, living it up in a 5 star Venice hotel and romancing a Countess, Lily, played by Miriam Hopkins. Of course the Countess is not what she seems to be either, and we follow them as they join forces to target Madame Mariette Colet (Kay Fwancis), the wealthy and beautiful owner of a Parisian perfume company.
Under the elegant direction of Ernst Lubitsch the tale which unfolds is a marvelously witty and stylish farce involving concealed identities, romantic entanglements, jealousy, deceit and the contents of the safe in the wall of Madame Colet's bedroom.
It's also racy, taking full advantage of the anything goes attitude to sex prevalent in many pre-code Hollywood films. Lubitsch's style was as far from smutty as it's possible to get but he leaves very little to the imagination when it comes to Gaston and Mariette's lustful designs on each other, and there's nothing coy about their scenes together in her bedroom even though both remain resolutely clothed. The film's response to social mores and respectability - represented by Mariette's two asinine suitors played by Charlie Ruggles and Edward Everett Horton, and C.Aubrey Smith's stuffy chairman of the board of directors of Colet & Cie - is one of complete disdain. These supposedly upright, proper gentlemen are figures of fun and - in at least one case - a fraud hiding behind a front of starched shirt pomposity.
The real fun is to be had by those causing trouble in paradise - Gaston and Lily and, after a little encouragement - by Mariette too. And their brand of humour is infectious. It's impossible not to become caught up in their devil-may-care approach to life, love, right and wrong.
The entire concoction is an absolute delight, an 85 minute time-out from the travails of everyday life which will transport you to a fantasy world of elegance, wit where the dishonest poor triumph every time over the dimwitted, honest rich.