“The Lubitsch Touch”: From the Hays Code to Stanley Cavell

Hollywood Before the Code (International Conference), June 27-29, 2024 Sorbonne Université and Université Paris Nanterre 28 June 2024 Tatjana Jukić [email protected] “THE LUBITSCH TOUCH”: FROM THE HAYS CODE TO STANLEY CAVELL ABSTRACT: In many ways “the Lubitsch Touch” summarizes the impact of the Hays Code on classical Hollywood cinema: not because Ernst Lubitsch devised a – secret – formula that sidestepped the restrictions introduced by the Code, but because this formula was in operation before the Code, suggesting that the Code in fact served the purpose of reaffirming the very intelligence that Hollywood at the time saw as seminal to its constitution. With this in mind, I propose to analyze Trouble in Paradise (1932), a Lubitsch film in which this particular intelligence is engaged to mediate the prerogatives of genre in classical Hollywood. Rather than being a screwball comedy or a melodrama, Trouble in Paradise interrogates the rationale of genre and codification, so much so that the story, which is essentially about a pair of con artists, ultimately reveals fraud itself as code and censorship against which the intelligence of film makes itself known. I will also address the fact that Trouble in Paradise entails the groupings that Stanley Cavell later flags as the hallmarks of Hollywood’s affinity with philosophy – the remarriage comedy and the melodrama of the unknown woman – only to unpack them and, with them, the philosophy’s mandate in its encounter with film. • I would like to begin by arguing, first, that “the Lubitsch Touch” was essential to the transformation of classical Hollywood cinema into a particular conceptual apparatus and, second, that this transformation was near-complete before the full implementation of the Hays Code in 1934. My position is that, rather than describing the singular cinematic genius of Ernst Lubitsch, “the Lubitsch Touch” served to translate Lubitsch into an index of cinematic intelligence against which no less than a philosophy of film could be imagined, and the truth of cinema. 1 Hollywood Before the Code (International Conference), June 27-29, 2024 Sorbonne Université and Université Paris Nanterre 28 June 2024 • Indeed, “the Lubitsch Touch” is a phrase circulating still among filmmakers and film critics, when that needs to be named which Lubitsch cinema knew and the pre-existing languages did not, so much so that cinema could do transgression – or, say, critique, or even revolution – that called into question the very concept of order, or signification, or thinking, insofar as they were pre-cinematic. It is in this sense that the “the Lubitsch Touch” and not the creation of film itself may have been, in the words of Stanley Cavell, “as if meant for philosophy – meant to reorient everything philosophy has said about reality and its representation, about art and imitation, about greatness and conventionality, about judgment and pleasure, about skepticism and transcendence, about language and expression” (vii, xii).1 Famously, Billy Wilder had a sign on the wall of his office, saying “How would Lubitsch do it?” – the sign that Joseph McBride (1) would later adopt for the title of his Lubitsch biography, even though it only meant that Lubitsch as the biographical subject would remain elusive, pointing instead to no less than the truth of cinema.2 • This is why I would further argue that „the Lubitsch Touch“ summarizes the impact of the Hays Code on classical Hollywood: not because Ernst Lubitsch devised a – secret – formula that sidestepped the restrictions introduced by the Code, but because this formula was in operation before the Code, suggesting that the Code in fact served the purpose of reaffirming the very intelligence that Hollywood at the time saw as seminal to its constitution. Thus Thomas Doherty notes that Lubitsch’s distinctive style was known as “the Lubitsch quality” as early as 1926, and then as “the Lubitsch touch” precisely after 1934; additionally, Doherty notes that, “in a contrite memo to Hays,” Joseph Breen admitted that “the Lubitsch touch 1 Stanley Cavell (1996). Contesting Tears. The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago, London: The U of Chicago P. 2 Joseph McBride (2018). How Did Lubitsch Do It? New York: Columbia UP. 2 Hollywood Before the Code (International Conference), June 27-29, 2024 Sorbonne Université and Université Paris Nanterre 28 June 2024 had outsmarted his own” (106). Like the rest of Hollywood, writes Doherty, “Breen knew that Lubitsch was untouchable” (108).3 • Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, of 1932, is central to my argument for several reasons. o First, it was Lubitsch’s first true talkie, a comedy he directed after a string of musicals, the musicals being his initial foray into sound film. This means that voice, as well as the order implicit to it, was first broadly admitted into a Lubitsch film as a function of music: as acousmatic sound whose source domain, while not cinematic, was not properly linguistic either, and could therefore only hope to disrupt both speech and the moving pictures – not regulate them – thus adding to the film’s potential for uninhibited signification.4 It is for this reason that voice, and dialogue, in Lubitsch’s films may be essentially syncopal, preempting the very idea of codification. Also, this is why the talkie rather than the silent film seemed to entail political cinema for Lubitsch. Incidentally, his writer on Trouble in Paradise was Samson Raphaelson, whose 1925 play, The Jazz Singer, served as basis for the first sound film, in which jazz, with its affinity for syncope, was in effect flagged as decisive to the talkie being invented. o Second, the title, Trouble in Paradise, alludes precisely to the fall, say the fall from grace, as that what this film is about, but perhaps as that what classical Hollywood was all about if its historical condition was one of engaging the Code – and it was. This was how Lubitsch played the Hays Code against the Bible, but also how he played cinema against the human condition, claiming cinema for a veritable theory of 3 Thomas Doherty (2007). Hollywood's Censor. Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration. New York: Columbia UP. 4 For acousmatic sound see Michel Chion (2019). Audio-Vision. Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia UP. 3 Hollywood Before the Code (International Conference), June 27-29, 2024 Sorbonne Université and Université Paris Nanterre 28 June 2024 modernity, for all his belief in the transience of film (itself an index of modernity). The fact that Lubitsch considered a number of other titles before deciding on Trouble in Paradise suggests that this reference carried weight with him; one of the other titles was The Honest Finder, the name of the 1931 play by László Aladár whose story Raphaelson rewrote for Lubitsch. It was not that Lubitsch skipped honesty for trouble when he selected the title he did, or finder for paradise; rather, he identified trouble as fundamental honesty, and paradise as historical contingency (of one happening upon something). This, of course, implied that the Code was fundamentally dishonest, and its idea of prescriptive paradise untenable. o Third, Lubitsch described Trouble in Paradise as his coming closest to pure style and exemplary sophistication.5 By calling it “pure style” he did not label it his best film; rather, he was pointing to the purity of style in it – to style as purity itself – that preempts the concept of the code, so that pushing the Code, any code for that matter, begins to signify impurity. Critics and biographers will praise Lubitsch for his impeccable art déco production design in Trouble in Paradise – for the immaculate lines that define the architecture and the fashion and, by extension, the movement of his humanity inside the film, especially in the Paris sequence.6 I would suggest, however, that pure style is decided as early as the establishing shot – another instance of Lubitsch’s careful deliberation – in the Venice sequence. The film opens onto a garbageman taking the trash into a gondola as he sings “O sole mio” to perfection: this metonymizes into a seamless 5 See Rick McCormick (2020). Sex, Politics, and Comedy. The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 6 See Mc Bride and McCormick. The set designer was Hans Dreier, „who was trained in the Bauhaus tradition, had already collaborated with Lubitsch on Forbidden Paradise and would continue to do so throughout his years at Paramount“ (Sabine Hake. 1992. Passions and Deceptions. The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch. Princeton: Princeton UP, p. 187). 4 Hollywood Before the Code (International Conference), June 27-29, 2024 Sorbonne Université and Université Paris Nanterre 28 June 2024 sequence in which the film’s lead crook, Herbert Marshall’s Gaston Monescu, is followed by the camera as he deftly leaves the rooms he has just robbed for his own rooms in a Venice hotel.7 The film, that is, opens onto taking out the trash, and drops the hint that pure style is precisely that: all trash being taken out – which is exactly why pure style needs no code external to cinema itself, and why such a code may itself be trash to begin with. Also, the hint is that the money and jewelry being robbed as the film opens may be no different than trash, and that pure style is contingent on their being taken out of the film – which, once again, is why true film needs no code external to cinema, and no extrinsic moral economy. • Hence the significance of the story, which is emphatically about two thieving crooks, Gaston and Lily (Miriam Hopkins), and their elaborate scheme to rob Madame Colet (Kay Francis), a rich widow from Paris. o Like the gondolier garbageman, Gaston and Lily begin by bringing style, and purity, to film by taking out the trash: they first meet in Venice – and fall in love – as they relentlessly own up to being crooks and take out what they have nimbly robbed off each other – the pins, gems, wallets, watches, even the garters… – so that these precious objects are eventually revealed to be the trash that stands in the way of that which the two of them, and the film, acknowledge to be the truth (or love, or pure style). o When next – a year later – they decide to rob Madame Colet in Paris, their very first Paris frame together shows that this truth is compromised. During breakfast, in a revealing instant, Lily steals a vulgar bite of her croissant while Gaston is not watching – Gaston, as we will learn, likes his women thin and linear – and thus takes the 7 The singing was by Enrico Caruso; see Hake 176. 5 Hollywood Before the Code (International Conference), June 27-29, 2024 Sorbonne Université and Université Paris Nanterre 28 June 2024 trash back in: it is already at this point that the film can no longer truly do with Lily, because Lily is no longer a staple of its truth. o Tellingly, the first, and only, object Gaston steals from the beautiful Madame Colet is her superexpensive bejeweled purse: an object whose value is concentrated in the jewels attached to its outside for decoration and for screening, so that the less-than-cinematic inside of the purse can only hold the trash that is of no true consequence to film – which is precisely why Gaston is extra careful to catalogue them and show them for trash. It is therefore only logical that Gaston should decide to return the handbag to Mariette Colet, for a finder’s fee: what he thereby secures is fast money, but also the narrative fact that the dazzling purse remains in circulation for screening, and with it the cinematic truth of taking out the trash. (To be sure, the purse can be seen in the very last frame of the film.) By also taking up the post of Mariette’s secretary, Gaston is officially installed as the custodian of that truth: the truth being that cinema cannot sustain trash, only take it out and show it for what it is, which, once again, is why imposing any code on cinema is itself trash. Indeed, with lovely Mariette, as with Lily, Gaston continues as the agent of taking out the trash – including self-identifying to the rich widow as one of the “nouveaux poor” of the Great Depression who is after money, after all. o What distinguishes Mariette from Lily is that she does not take in the trash: like Lily, she will steal a bite of forbidden carbs, but – unlike Lily – she freely parts with money and pearls, acknowledging that, ultimately, they are the trash of her world and the film’s. When eventually she relinquishes even Gaston, who is smitten with her – and is voraciously taken back by Lily, as are the Colet pearls and money – it is for the sake of remaining true to Gaston’s idea of pure style to which he humanly cannot live up after all. Hence the ending 6 Hollywood Before the Code (International Conference), June 27-29, 2024 Sorbonne Université and Université Paris Nanterre 28 June 2024 of the film: Lily and Gaston are reunited, screening the stuff they took from Madame Colet and, once again, from each other, but the taxi taking them to the railway station is actually no different from the gondola in Venice which is taking out the trash, now from the film itself. With one important distinction: if you watch the ending very closely, you will see that Gaston is not keeping a single stolen Colet thing – he is only taking them out, and Lily is taking them all in. He finishes as sacrifice, and sacrifice is his only compensation for having to forgo the truth. This is why I would identify Gaston – or Herbert Marshall for that matter – as the pharmakon of the Lubitsch touch, as well as its tragic flaw. In the words of Joseph McBride, “the final choice Marshall makes is as melancholy as anything Lubitsch has given us” (239). • I would therefore disagree with the critics and film historians who choose to understand the ending of Trouble in Paradise as an upbeat reunion of the initial romantic couple. The reunion of Lily and Gaston may be upbeat, but its sparkle is one of trashy jewelry: the two begin as pure style but come back together as the trash that the film takes out. Their reunion is precisely “a beautiful mistake which two people make together,” which is how Madame Colet, a widow, defines marriage. And if marriage is fundamentally a mistake in a Lubitsch film, it follows that marriage for Lubitsch is no different from remarriage, and to the same person, its narrative circulation identical to one of Madam Colet’s glitzy purse. • That, of course, is exactly a grouping Stanley Cavell privileges when he speaks about the appeal of Hollywood to philosophy. To Cavell, there is an intelligence to classical Hollywood which is preeminently political, one that makes itself known in the comedy of remarriage, and receives a formative 7 Hollywood Before the Code (International Conference), June 27-29, 2024 Sorbonne Université and Université Paris Nanterre 28 June 2024 inflection in the melodrama of the unknown woman.8 To Cavell, no less than the fate of the democratic bond is at stake in this grouping, as well as the fate of America, insofar as America is one true laboratory of political modernity in the twentieth century; hence philosophy’s interest in classical Hollywood. This, in my view, also suggests Cavell’s implicit but ongoing engagement with the Hays Code, and an attempt to absorb it into the moral economy of Pax Americana. What was affected by the Hays Code, Cavell seems to imply, was not only Hollywood but the idea of the modern world. o Lubitsch supplies both Cavellian components in Trouble in Paradise: a remarriage and a deserted woman whose voice is ultimately claimed for melodrama, along with a musical excess to her speech that is equally important to Cavell and Lubitsch. Lubitsch even anticipates Cavell’s philosophical interest in codification that, in Cavell’s cinema books, tends to shift from the Hays Code to the Bible as the Great Code in which philology and anthropology join hands; hence Cavell’s appreciation of Northrop Frye. In fact, Lubitsch seems to have preempted Cavell as, earlier on, he had preempted the Hays Code. o Admittedly, Cavell was no fan of Lubitsch, and there is hardly a reference to Lubitsch in Cavell’s cinema books: precisely, perhaps, because Lubitsch anticipated him. And tied Cavell’s philosophical arms behind back: because Lubitsch – contrary to Cavell – suggests that remarriage may be a glitzy purse for a narrative circulation whose true intelligence is one of tragedy, not comedy, as is the original intelligence of the democratic bond. 8 See Stanley Cavell (1981). Pursuits of Happiness. The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge (Mass.), London: Harvard UP. 8