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.

OLD ACQUAINTANCE: a scenery chewing spectacular!

There weren't many actresses who could hold their own against Bette Davis but Miriam Hopkins was one of them.
Miriam who?
She was the Faye Dunaway of the 1930s appearing in a number of critical and box office successes ("Trouble in Paradise", "These Three", "The Old Maid") before fading from sight and memory. OLD ACQUAINTANCE, released in 1943, was Hopkins final film as a big star and she certainly went out in style.
She and Davis had worked together four years earlier in "THE OLD MAID" during which Davis had an affair with Hopkins husband, so there was little love lost between the two of them by the time Warner Bros reunited them for this overheated melodrama.
Knowing this backstory makes watching the film an even more pleasurable experience. Here are two big, temperamental stars, both accustomed to being queen of their domain, and with a history of mutual dislike, being asked to play a couple of lifelong friends who fall out over men and success.
Davis was the bigger star by 1943 but Hopkins refuses to yield. Where Davis is content to chew at the scenery Hopkins rips out large chunks and swallows them whole. To counter the by now familiar Davis mannerisms - the clipped speech, the vigorous sucking on cigarettes etc - all of which are on display here, Hopkins resorts to the sort of histrionics for which the word overacting is an inadequate descriptor.
Faced with two such forces of nature it's not surprising that the men in the story come off like potted plants. Both John Loder and Gig Young are so dull and colorless that it's difficult to understand how they avoid getting simply chewed up and spat out. 
To the best of my recollection OLD ACQUAINTANCE was the first Hollywood film to deliberately cast two such mutually antagonistic stars in order to record the sparks that would inevitably fly. Their barely masked on-screen contempt for each other would not be seen again until Davis was pitted against arch rival Joan Crawford almost twenty years later in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" The acidic bitchy energy generated by their rivalry contributed greatly to "Baby Jane's" status as a cult classic. OLD ACQUAINTANCE deserves similar consideration.