Tag: Edward Everett Horton

Ladies Should Listen (1934, Frank Tuttle)

There’s a funny moment in Ladies Should Listen. As in a singular one funny moment. I can’t remember the joke because it wasn’t very good and was too busy being shocked at something vaguely amusing in the film, especially coming from Rafael Corio, who has the distinguished honor of giving the worst performance in a film of bad performances.

Though it’s hard to blame the actors much for their performances. At its best, Tuttle’s direction is scant middling while the script manages to be charmless, laugh-less, bad, yet decently paced during the first half. Screenwriters Claude Binyon and Frank Butler are adapting a play and afterwards I got to look back on how naive I was during the opening titles when I thought the worst problem would it being stagy.

In fact, I don’t think I’d ever use stagy as an adjective for Ladies Should Listen. Something about the truly atrocious editing—by an uncredited, unknown cutter—makes it seem far less stagy than prescient about laugh-track heavy sitcoms. After every joke or gag, the shot lingers or, worse, and these ones are on Tuttle, goes to a close-up, then lingers. Every time it brings the film to a dead stop and it’s a race to see if there will be any significant momentum before the next stop.

The answer is always no.

It’s possible the film would be funny if it had a Marx Brother in the lead instead of Cary Grant. He doesn’t mug well and his character is a little thin. He’s a penniless blue blood who sleeps around a lot but never settles down because he’s of weak character. Or because his partners soon realize he’s a pretty boy without any substance. We only find out about his romantic history after Frances Drake shows up.

So, Grant’s this creep who tries to manipulate women into sleeping with him—including deceiving them about meteorological conditions—but then it turns out Drake is his apartment telephone switchboard operator who’s stalking him through the phone. And Grant apparently always calls someone and gives a full account of his day, because Drake knows things he says in person. Doesn’t matter.

When it turns out his latest conquest—Rosita Moreno—isn’t just married (to Corio) but they’re out to get Grant’s options on a Chilean mining concern, Drake has to save him even if he doesn’t want to be saved. Throw in Grant’s best friend, a similarly unfunny Edward Everett Horton, and Horton’s romantic pursuit, rich girl Nydia Westman (who the movie craps all over for wearing glasses and thinking Cary Grant is handsome), and you’ve got an hour of comic gold. Or so someone at Paramount incorrectly thought.

Grant’s not good, Horton’s not good, Drake’s not good but gets some sympathy because it’s obvious Tuttle is messing her up with his direction, Westman’s not bad but the movie’s literally against her so maybe she’s just overly sympathetic, and Moreno’s actually nearly okay. Moreno and Charles Arnt are the closest Ladies gets to okay acting. Arnt’s Grant’s valet and makes all sorts of date rape-y inventions for Grant to use around the apartment. Because what if Quagmire were great looking.

Look fast for Ann Sheridan.

But if you’re suffering through and wondering if it’s ever going to get better… no. The answer is no. It’s bad right up until the last scene, even if there’s a decent Paris cityscape backdrop.

Trouble in Paradise (1932, Ernst Lubitsch)

Trouble in Paradise features some great filmmaking. Here, Lubitsch runs wild with the passage of time–there’s a great sequence with various clocks marking the minutes, but there’s a lot of carefully orchestrated fades as well. The film opens with an excellent mixed shot–again, careful fading–moving from one side of a hotel to another. It goes from actors to a model to actors. It’s exquisite.

I almost forgot Lubitsch’s transition between the first and second acts–he goes to a radio advertisement (seeing the announcer deliver it into the microphone), then does an actual advertisement for the product, then transition to the makers of the product–all before revealing if it has any bearing on the story. It’s a gleeful move. These techniques make it almost impossible to recognize Trouble in Paradise‘s origin as a play.

Being Lubitsch, his direction of his actors is, no shock, perfect. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Herbert Marshall give a better performance. He and Miriam Hopkins have a half dozen fantastic scenes together. They even make the final scene work, even though it really shouldn’t. But the film has three leads–Kay Francis is the third–and Hopkins gets the boot for much of the second act. It’s impossible to forget her, but the film practically begs for the viewer to do it. Trouble in Paradise‘s trouble is its genre–it’s an infidelity comedy. Unlike the more sophisticated members of this genre, Trouble leaves Hopkins in something of a lurch. Worse, it never corrects its perspective. Hopkins is always the primary female protagonist, which makes Marshall into a heel. Even worse, it never gives much room for Francis to make an honest impression. She goes from being the mark to being the other woman with a nicely edited sequence involving the butler never being able to figure out if she’s in her room or in Marshall’s.

The film’s third act is something of a narrative disaster. The film’s been building to it all through the second act, but since the script doesn’t love triangle… it seems possible it will be avoided. There are countless opportunities for it to go the other way (I’m not really sure where it would go, but it’d have been somewhere creative, I’m sure) and as they all fall away, it gets kind of tedious. The film doesn’t turn out the way I expected, but only because the third act’s constant oscillation confused the hell out of me.

In the end, Trouble in Paradise is almost a better viewing experience than a finished product. It’s fantastic throughout, only to fail to deliver in the last quarter. It’s got the great Marshall and Hopkins performances. Francis is quite good, even if her character is poorly written. Charles Ruggles and Edward Everett Horton–and Robert Greig as the butler–are excellent in supporting roles. The script’s approach to Horton in the late second act, however, serves as ominous foreshadowing of the problems to follow. C. Aubrey Smith has a smaller role and is solid, but much like Francis, there isn’t a character.

I was thinking my high expectations for the film might have lead to undue harshness, but then I realized the film raised those expectations… I don’t even think I properly conveyed my disappointment.

3/4★★★

CREDITS

Produced and directed by Ernst Lubitsch; screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, based on an adaption by Grover Jones of a play by Aladar Laszlo; director of photography, Victor Milner; released by Paramount Pictures.

Starring Miriam Hopkins (Lily), Kay Francis (Mariette Colet), Herbert Marshall (Gaston Monescu), Charles Ruggles (The Major), Edward Everett Horton (François Filiba), C. Aubrey Smith (Adolph J. Giron) and Robert Greig (Jacques the Butler).

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