It’s Valentine’s Day in a couple weeks, and you can tell from the movie releases. Last week we got When In Rome, this week it’s Dear John, and next week it’s all about Valentine’s Day, which looks OK, but I’ll take Richard Curtis’s Love, Actually over anything released this season. Anything by Richard Curtis, really. Four Weddings and a Funeral. Notting Hill. Yes, even Notting Hill. The Brits know how to do it.
Lately the American romantic comedy seems to have been hijacked by the boy-man shtick of Judd Apatow and his imitators. Not that I don’t dig his stuff – it’s just that I can’t get those old-time screwball comedies out of my head.
American rom-coms have their root in the screwball comedy, which is all about the battle of the sexes – a man’s man and a woman’s woman go head-to-head in a battle of wit and heart in which only love can come out on top. The Apatow formula has taken the battle out of the equation by removing the man from the equation. Instead, his comedies are about a savvy woman teaching a boy-man how to grow up.
In olden times, the real sizzle came from the conflict that explodes when you put a real man and real woman into so much conflict that as they try to one up each other, they accidentally fall in love.
Case in point: 1932’s Trouble in Paradise.
Early on in the movie, two of the lead characters, Lily and Gaston, are having dinner. Lily’s a thief pretending to be a countess; Gaston’s a thief pretending to be a gentleman. During the dinner, Gaston points out that Lily has stolen his wallet. He gets it back from her and goes back to eating dinner. He then gives back to her the brooch that he stole from her, and she realizes that he’s a thief as well. That’s when she asks him the time, but he can’t tell her, because she’s stolen his watch right under his nose. He grins and says, “I hope you don’t mind if I keep your garter,” pulls it out of his pocket, and gives it a kiss. (Check out the video below, starting at around 4:00.)
The scene is about two professionals proving themselves with wit and humor, a mutual seduction between equals. Ever seen that in an Apatow movie? Lily and Garcon are a couple of thieves who are perfect for each other. Until the third point of the romantic triangle comes in, but that’s the rest of the movie.
Trouble In Paradise is directed by Ernst Lubitsch, who came to Hollywood with a lot of other German filmmakers after WWI. One of the first superstar directors, his movies were said to have “the Lubitsch touch,” a phrase as popular in its day as Hitchcock’s “master of suspense.”
Before Lubitsch, American movies all tasted a little bit like D.W. Griffith – an influence that can certainly be seen with Thief of Baghdad and All Quiet on the Western Front. After Lubitsch, however, an air of sophistication came into the Hollywood movie. He allowed a bit more subtext, a bit more complication, and a whole lot more sexual entendre.
In Trouble in Paradise, Lubitsch gets at sex and sexual tension indirectly. He has couples kiss, he fades to a naked couch, and he cuts to a gondolier’s ecstatic song. He has characters enter bedrooms, leaving the door suggestively open. The indirect nature of sexuality lends the movie a naughty kind of sophistication you just don’t find nowadays. When you can show everything and say anything, a lot of the subtlety and artfulness that real sexiness demands, falls away.
Trouble In Paradise laid the groundwork for later screwball comedies like It Happened One Night, His Girl Friday and the transcendently wonderful Bringing Up Baby – all made possible by real men and women one-upping each other into bed.
You want some sizzle in your romance? Give up the boy-man bit and learn a thing or two from the screwball comedies of yore.
Next week, things get scary with our first horror movie.
Check out last week’s Movies That Changed My Life
