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Review: Angel (1937)

 



Billy Wilder, by way of dubious compliment, says of the master of early humane comedy: “Ernst Lubitsch, who could do more with a closed door than most of today’s directors can do with an open fly, would have had big problems in this market.”[i]The time was 1975 and Wilder’s observation betrays his concealed repugnance at the contemporary film scene. As is natural to the law of history, the past decays and whatever that has been salvaged from complete obliteration is bound to seem a little peculiar to the posterity. Wilder in the 1970s was coming to terms - although not without certain resentment - with the expected depletion of creative ideas brought on by old age and a growing sense of alienation from the prevailing cultural climate. Lubitsch, on the other hand, had his name and legacy established but his films in a steady process of obsolescence. 

 

There is a misplaced tendency nowadays to view those films, which enjoy a resurgence of interest, as lighthearted and slightly whimsical drawing-room comedy. They seem to be on the surface, especially given their general tone of bourgeois sybaritism and a joy that is very rarely contrasted with pain or pathos. Lubitsch celebrates a love that invariably triumphs amidst troubles and crises that range from the pettily domestic to one of overwhelming momentousness in terms of their social/historical contexts. A note of flippancy and incongruousness (with the gravity that the situation demands) characterises the love stories: my only complaint with the otherwise unimpeachable adaptation of Noel Coward’s Design for Living (1933) is its omission of the heroine’s pensive monologues that punctuate the revelries. The lovers are mostly, in the initial stage, mismatched, or attached by means of an unusual alliance (one that is not without hidden agendas and/or underlying intents); individually, Lubitsch’s characters, including the ostensibly straight ones, always possess some degrees of oddity and waywardness.

 

Angel (1937) shows Lubitsch at his most subversive. Marlene Dietrich is the neglected and lonely wife of a British diplomat frequenting Paris to seek surreptitious thrills; on her latest tryst she is in the company of a mysterious charmer (Melvyn Douglas) to whom she insists on being called by the name Angel. The film up to this point, with its stylised imagery, chiaroscuro lightning, and wispy progression of events, seems like it is pursuing the vein of a Max Ophuls melodrama. The director reasserts his emblematic “touch” in the later part, wherein Dietrich’s character returns home to her husband, played by Herbert Marshall, who invites an old comrade to his home. There the wife and the lover come face to face with each other. This particular sequence is as psychologically charged as it is crisscrossed with suggestive humours (the film, despite its subject matter, keeps at bay the flagrantly erotic elements): it is one of Lubitsch’s common rules that great filmic suspense is borne out by denying what the audience most want to see. Climaxes are periodically omitted: Douglas’s reaction when he finds out the true identity of Angel, Marshall’s reaction when he cottons on his wife’s affair, Dietrich’s parting words with Douglas before she rejoins her husband. They all compose aspects of the so-called “Lubitsch touch”, but, on the screen, the psychological effects transcend technical explanation - each deceptively simple visual trick carries, in relation to the film as a whole, a much more complex import and mechanism.

 

As the least characteristic of Lubitsch’s oeuvre, Angel is overall weighed down by its want of a lyrical movement and an established tone (levity intercepts but never able to raise itself above a few strands of whistle). In light of the success of The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), Trouble in Paradise (1932) and Design for Living, Lubitsch, tackling yet another ménage à troisstory, probably thought better of sticking to a recurring pattern and decided to evolve a new one. The shift to a somber keynote yields its awkwardness especially given that, like other Lubitsch’s films, the texture of Angel is loosely formulated. On the other hand, one might argue that were the resultant work a more rigorous production, it fails to offer itself as proof of Lubitsch’s inimitable genius. Besides, the idea of Dietrich, Marshall, Douglas together in a frolicsome comedy, although they all had their fair share of it respectively, is, for some reason, curiously disconcerting (I came to the conclusion that Dietrich might be brilliant in one with Gary Cooper, and it would only work were Marshall and Douglas joined with Miriam Hopkins - thus sums up the unreasoned magic of good casting). 


[i]Quoted in Wilder, Billy. Billy Wilder: Interviews, ed. Robert Horton(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), p. 91.

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