La vita è un charleston

Nice little comedy from Ernst Lubitsch about two Paris couples who get involved in a bizarre mixup of identities and lies.

Monte Blue (hugely underrated silent star) is dull Dr. Giraud, whose antsy wife (Patsy Ruth Miller) pines for a sheik. One day she spies across the way a sheik in a window. She fantasizes about the sheik (Andre Beranger) who is really just the mousy husband of Lilyan Tashman in a dance act. When the doctor goes across the street to confront the sheik all manner of mistaken ideas take place, culminating in a fabulous montage of a Parisienne jazz club.

Blue and Tashman are quite fabulous here and really get into the spirit of the farce. Miller is stuck with the "wife" part but looks great. Beranger is also quite good as the mousy sheik.

Myrna Loy plays the maid!

A delightful jazz-age bon-bon.

Lots of fun and frollick, with some lovely "art titles" and simple but effective camera tricks, keep this from being a run of the mill romantic triangle comedy.

Keep your eyes peeled for a quick-as-a-wink appearance by Myrna Loy as the maid of the Lalle household.

Based on a play by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy, Ernst Lubitsch's So This is Paris is the first time his writing partnership with Hans Kraly bore good fruit. A light comedic farce, a genre that Lubitsch obviously liked to tell stories in, it's the sort of film that is a trifle and a confectionary creation, a film of wit that doesn't ask for too much from its audience, choosing to be pleasing and delightful over anything else. I feel that some parts of it would fall apart, especially morally, if you considered it too deeply, reminding me of Lubitsch's protégé and acolyte Billy Wilder's first film The Major and the Minor.

Doctor Paul Giraud (Monte Blue) is married to Suzanne (Patsy Ruth Miller). Across the street moves in a pair of actors, Maurice (Andre Beranger) and Georgette Lalle (Lilyan Tashman). They are practicing a routine dealing with Arabia where they dress in Arabian outfits just as Suzanne is finishing up a steamy romantic novel set in Arabia. She sees this man in foreign looking attire (without a shirt) across the way and gets all worked up at the sight. It's so bad that Paul goes to the apartment to tell them off for such indiscretion when he realizes that he knows Georgette. They were an item some time ago, long before either of them got married, and she tries to make a pass at him, which he shuts down. When Paul comes back home, he puts on a small show for Suzanne, talking about how he got into a tussle with Maurice, breaking the man's cane in the process, in a show of strength for his wife's honor and decency. This is undone when Maurice shows up at the door, complete with intact cane, and immediately hits on Suzanne while Paul is in the other room, resting after his "ordeal" where he hears everything in the other room.

So sets the stage that the couple of actors use their time to try and get romantically involved, individually, with their neighbors across the courtyard. The joys of the film are in the lies that the "good" couple tell each other to continue down these potentially indiscrete paths with other married people, like when Georgette calls the apartment hoping to get Paul. Instead, she gets Suzanne and tells her that Paul must come to a café where a man is very sick. Believing it is true, Paul drives as fast as he can, getting caught for speeding by a police officer who lets him go in order to save a dying man, only to catch up again to witness Paul and Georgette laughing outside the café. This leads to Paul getting sentenced to three days in jail.

The big finale of the film is centered around the Artists' Ball. Paul is determined to go with Georgette. Maurice is determined to visit Suzanne while Paul is out. There's a bit with mistaken identity that leads to the wrong man going to jail and Paul and Georgette winning the Charleston dance contest which gets announced on the radio that Suzanne is listening to. Is Paul trying to cheat on Suzanne with Georgette? It's not entirely clear, but it probably has more to do with him trying to get back at Suzanne for his perception that she was willingly falling in for Maurice's seductions.

The movie's lack of seriousness is really what sells the film overall. It's got this light and airy tone as it moves from one little domestic event to the next, and it's highlighted in the film's final intertitle that describes the moral of the story as not walking in front of your window with your shirt off. It's an amusing end to a trifle of a film, and it's the perfect little capper to tie everything together. "Don't take this too seriously," the movie is saying. And I happily took that advice.

Now, just a quick note on some technical stuff. This is Lubitsch really stretching himself in interesting ways. Firstly, there's the big Artists' Ball where Lubitsch uses montage and really complex multiple exposures to create a kind of euphoric representation of the out of control party. It's the kind of stuff that Murnau put into Sunrise and Hitchcock did in Champagne, and Lubitsch predates them both by a couple of years. There's also a moment where a husband is put in his place by his wife late in the film, and Lubitsch uses a surprisingly sophisticated compositing trick to diminish the husband in the frame like The Incredible Shrinking Man, and he walks through a doorway quite convincingly. I really did not expect to ever see Lubitsch using special effects and visuals this sophisticated, and he handles them quite well.

Lubitsch's early period in Germany largely disappointed me, but since coming to American I'm seeing why people like Wilder and even Irving Thalberg were so taken with his work. There's a light, effortless feel to Lubitsch's final products that so easily entertain that he makes it feel simple. Filmmaking is never simple, and that light touch is really why his films are becoming more and more enchanting, even when we're dealing with lesser works of a man obviously made for greater things.

Ernst Lubitsch cannot be over-praised. One of his classics is a silent version of "Lady Windermere's Fan," by that iconic wordsmith, Oscar Wilde.

Lubitsch knew how to use a camera to tell a story, and "So This Is Paris" illustrates -- if you'll pardon the expression -- that facet of his talent perfectly.

But he also had four of the most expressive actors available, especially Lilyan Tashman, who certainly should be better known now, even if nearly a hundred years later.

She was lovely, yes, but what a talented actress, so animated and full of facial and bodily gestures to get her point across.

She lit up the screen, but her character's husband, played by George Beranger, listed here as Andre Beranger, who had a long and busy career, including as director, was not totally in her shadow.

Beranger needed to stand up straighter and hold his shoulders back, but he was obviously in good shape, and even looked as if he lifted weights. It's nice to know he kept busy for so many years since he was talented as well as good looking.

Another good-looking actor was Monte Blue, who eventually accumulated nearly 300 credits, working nearly to the last years of his life, to the credit of Hollywood, which -- sad to say -- so often forgot its pioneers.

The fourth star, and star she was, is Patsy Ruth Miller. Probably her most famous film is "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," with Lon Chaney, but she went on to play in about four score movies, making a praised appearance in her last role as the title character in "Mother," 1978.

When "So This Is Paris" was presented on Turner Classic Movies, 9 May 2021, it was a surprise to me, being totally unfamiliar with it. Apparently it is a refurbished film with a new score, and I hope it plays often, so you can see it.

The script, by the way, steals quite a bit from Strauss's "Die Fledermaus," and I don't know how many others, including critics and reviewers of 1926 as well as audience members of today, realize the source.

Never mind, even if it is plagiarized, "So This Is Paris" is so beautifully performed and directed, we will overlook the theft and just enjoy.

"So This is Paris" is another delightful comedy by Ernst Lubitsch and which features a concert with Charleston dancing that's a quintessential jazz-age cinematic sequence. Once again, the director returns to the themes of marital flirtations with infidelity and the dramatic irony of the spectator knowing more than do the characters, who fall prey to a series of comical misconceptions based on partial views and information, lies and masquerade. Such elements occupied much of his German oeuvre, as well as being prevalent in his more sophisticated romantic comedies in Hollywood beginning with "The Marriage Circle" (1925). While "So This is Paris" lacks the nuanced and subtle acting and craft of that predecessor, it makes up for it, at least in part, with some zany action, including a considerable amount of camera trick effects and even a hint of Freudian homoeroticism involving a cane.

Based on a German operetta, "Die Fledermaus," which in turn was based on a French farce, "La Réveillon," Lubitsch had already adapted a version of the stage story in one of his early German comedies, "The Merry Jail" (1917), a film that is fairly indicative of the type of broad humor the director employed during his early career. The Parisian setting here is inconsequential to the narrative, but Paris was usefully associated with sexual promiscuity, so this film's title was a convenient advertisement of the subject matter, as well as surely allowing Lubitsch and company to portray adultery without drawing the ire of censors, which it presumably would've had it been set too close to home, say, in Middle America, or, too honestly, in Hollywood (which was already having enough problems from associations with deviancy in the minds of moralists).

Meanwhile, the hint of homosexuality between the two husbands, the doctor and the actor, and the phallic symbolism of the walking stick would've presumably largely escaped notice. For much of the picture, the actor possesses the doctor's cane, wagging it, as he goes to visit the doctor's wife, Suzanne, while her husband is away--although, little does he know, the doctor is away visiting his dancer wife--the two men oblivious to each other's attempts to cuckold one another. Having already complimented the actor on his shirtless physique in a sheik costume in the fashion of Rudolph Valentino, and having misinterpreted the actor's complement of Suzanne's profile as alluding to that of his own, the doctor admires himself in a mirror. He also has a vexing dream where his lost cane pokes him in the face and forces its way down his throat, as Freudian film theorists delight. Similarly, the actor, during one of his attempts to woo Suzanne, literally deflowers her vase, tossing the stems at her.

As in prior films, especially "Lady Windermere's Fan" (1925), Lubitsch gets a lot of play from characters being mislead by what they see through windows; in this case, from the fact that the doctor and Suzanne see the neighboring couple from across the street this way. Point-of-view shots are also effectively used later, in addition to superimpositions, including Kaleidoscopic effects, to represent drunkenness. There's also masquerade and mistaken identities: the actor dressed as a sheik, oblivious to his attracting the desire of Suzanne and the jealousy of the doctor (who initially puts a thermometer in her mouth and diagnoses her as too hot); the dancer, in a setup similar to a scene in "The Marriage Circle" and its remake "One Hour with You" (1932), inventing an imaginary illness as a pretext to bring the doctor away from home; the jail mixup; and Suzanne even wearing a mask to trick her husband into an affair with his own wife. One gag that reverses this general dramatic irony, however, is the tirade of insults between the doctor and a policeman, with the detail of the remarks being left to the imagination or for the amusement of lip readers.

Yet, the most remarkable sequence here has to be the Artists Ball. It's framed by Suzanne listening to the orchestra from the event over the radio, with the announcements from it appearing on the screen as overlaying text. The Ball itself is unlike the rest of what is a rather intimate and small-scale production, with a large crowd of Charleston dancers and large ballroom. Although the scale is right, it's surely not quite the kind of scene that earned Lubitsch the title of "the Griffith of Europe," although it's somewhat reminiscent of a dance scene in his German film, "The Oyster Princess" (1919), as well as anticipating his later musicals. As the jazz band plays and the flappers gyrate, the sequence features a series of dissolving images, superimpositions, prominent displays of dancing legs, twirling lights and the first of the film's multiple-exposure Kaleidoscopic effects. Apparently, Lubitsch and cinematographer John J. Mescall were having a ball on this production, exploring the limits of trick effects as old as the days of Georges Méliès, repurposed for the Roaring Twenties. There's even a shrinking effect via superimposition to reflect the metaphor of the doctor's smallness and emasculation in a later scene.

It's unfortunate that this film has yet to receive wider distribution. I would love to see a quality print, as the copy I viewed had a washed-out look. It's bad enough that most silent films are considered lost, including such Lubitsch classics as "Kiss Me Again" (1925) and the Best-Picture nominee "The Patriot" (1928); the ones that remain, such as "So This is Paris," or "Rosita" (1923) and "Three Women" (1924), deserve to be released from the vaults. The Artists Ball scene, however, is featured on the DVD "Light Rhythms: Music and Abstraction," as part of the "Unseen Cinema" series.