While not the masterpiece of his previous film, HEAVEN CAN WAIT/’43, Ernst Lubitsch’s final completed project does very nicely on its own terms as a slight delight. Set in Pre-WWII England, it tracks the up-and-down fortunes of exiled Czech Anti-Fascist Intellectual Charles Boyer, penniless in London, sponging off the kindness of society swells & titled strangers. Stumbling into a house party, he meets-cute with amateur plumber Jennifer Jones (subbing for her uncle in a drain emergency), as well as sympathetic scion Peter Lawford and Lady-of-the-Moment Helen Walker. An unlikely friendship continues in the comfort of Lawford’s country estate where Cluny has just been placed in service as Parlor Maid, complicating the rigid class conscious behavior Boyer respects, dissects & subtly ridicules. With everyone (even Jones!) relaxed & amused, and the merest wisp of a plot that sees Jones nearly fall into enervating local domesticity (with Una O’Connor’s putative mother-in-law clearing her throat in lieu of speech), the film tickles rather than wisecracks, using the unladylike task of plumbing as deus ex machina, before working up to a superbly economical Stateside coda that celebrates the Classless Land of the Free sans dialogue. Filmmaking has rarely looked so easy, so natural. Technique that takes a lifetime to build.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Just one scene, with Boyer letting himself into Walker’s bedroom, ostensibly to pitch Lawford, but finding an attraction of his own, hints at layers of desire & assertion a younger/healthier Lubitsch might have developed more fully.
No comments:
Post a Comment