A Director and Star Reunite for Forbidden Paradise – Senses of Cinema (2024)

Forbidden Paradise (1924) reaffirmed the promise of two of Hollywood’s most high-profile imports to date, Ernst Lubitsch and Pola Negri, whose historical spectacles together in Germany made them both coveted abroad. Lubitsch immediately had two stateside successes, but Negri, who’d arrived first, had yet to find her niche. Hoping he would work his magic for her again, Famous Players-Lasky borrowed the director from Warner Bros.

Lubitsch’s American debut – 1923’s Rosita, set in a fictional Spanish court of yore and starring Mary Pickford – was a big hit and called “a decided work of art” by Variety.¹ Yet Lubitsch wanted to leave behind the kind of cast-of-thousands epics he had become famous for to make more intimate stories. His first Warner title, The Marriage Circle, a risqué ensemble comedy of contemporary marital mores, came out later that same year, garnering its share of raves, with the New York World critic already wise to the director’s light touch: “Mr. Lubitsch is a man who will tell you a chapter with the fling of an actor’s hand, the shifting of a silken ankle.”²

With Negri, he made another intimate comedy but with a nod toward his previous historical fare, basing it on Lajos Biró and Melchior Lengyel’s play, The Czarina, about Catherine the Great’s capacious appetite for romantic alliances, and which had already been a success as a Broadway adaptation in 1922. Scriptwriters Agnes Christine Johnston (whose scenarios later helped Marion Davies maximise her comedy chops) and Hanns Kräly (Lubitsch’s longtime collaborator who had followed the director from Germany) moved it from 18th century Russia to a fictional Balkan nation (though you’ll notice Russian in the royal insignia) and updated it with motorcars and bobbed hairdos. German art director Hans Dreier, also in Hollywood at Lubitsch’s urging, designed his first of many sets for what became Paramount Studios.

Forbidden Paradise premiered in late November 1924 to more critical raves. Photoplay called it “one of the really great pictures of the year,” named Negri’s performance “the finest of her career,” and reassured everyone that Lubitsch “has at command all his old wizardry.”³ Variety rated it both “an artistic ace and a money bet.”⁴ Iris Barry spilled much ink about it in her 1926 book, Let’s Go to the Pictures, praising not only Forbidden Paradise’s star and director but also Famous Players-Lasky for producing such a gem: “I salute (it) as one of the best, not merely of the company’s, but of all films ever made.”⁵

All his early American comedies, except for 1925’s Kiss Me Again (a devastating lacuna in the director’s surviving body of work), are still around and New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has been gamely restoring them. For its 2017 restoration of Forbidden Paradise, MoMA senior film curator Dave Kehr says that ten percent of the film’s footage was missing, some of which was made up with duplicating shots. One scene of Negri realising her latest conquest (Rod La Rocque) is in love with her lady-in-waiting, Anna (Pauline Starke), was almost entirely lost and had to be recreated digitally.⁶ These few scant moments are noticeable but not distracting, which is a relief for anyone who’s watched a Lubitsch; they know it is the little things that make them so special. When a secret kiss reflected in a royal garden pond is rippled into oblivion by a passing fish, what’s coming for Alexei and Anna’s true love is made perfectly clear.

This type of pithy delicacy animated even Lubitsch’s epic spectacles. The tiny figure of a lusty dancer swoons over her latest conquest on a distant balcony while a hunchback entertains an enormous carnival crowd in the foreground of Sumurun (1920). The drape of a fleeing woman’s skirt is snagged in a doorway, ensuring a young lady-in-waiting and Henry VIII have their meet-cute in Anna Boleyn (1920). A saucy grisette counts the ribbons on her dress to decide between the commoner or the nobleman in Madame Dubarry (1919). Lubitsch explained in a 1947 letter to film scholar Herman Weinberg that his goal was “to de-opera-ize my pictures and to humanize my historical characters – I treated the intimate nuances just as important as the mass movements, and tried to blend them both together.”⁷

By the time of Forbidden Paradise, the de-opera-ization is complete and the mass scenes no longer needed. Rod La Rocque as Alexei thinks he’s quelling some rebellious nonsense when he disperses a small gaggle of disgruntled soldiers. But a casual glance up reveals a handful of high-ranking conspirators huddled in a chandeliered ballroom toasting their “revolution”, a split-second revelation that sets the plot in motion. Even Dreier’s voluminous castle-sets for the film matter more for their emptiness. When the queen leaves her private chambers to seek help and finds no one, she’s as dwarfed by those cavernous outer rooms as anyone would be, one of several potent statements on the nature of power that Lubitsch inserts among all the winking fun.

Joseph McBride, author of 2018’s excellent study, How Did Lubitsch Do It?, has written that the restoration makes all the difference for these Lubitschian moments. A crucial exchange between Adolphe Menjou’s Lord Chamberlain and a coup-plotting general (Nick De Ruiz) culminates with a series of close-ups on their hands, one slipping into a pocket for a checkbook, the other releasing his grip on his sword’s hilt – then counting out potential roubles on his fingertips. In previously available versions of the film, McBride says the sequence went by “so quickly that it was barely intelligible.”⁸ As with the best Lubitsch-made moments, it’s more than a crucial plot point; it forms a couplet with an earlier close-up on another set of fingers, counting lovers.

The film did its job, and well. While star and director never worked together again, faith in Negri was restored. Famous Lasky/Paramount continued to court Lubitsch, later joining with MGM to buy out his contract from the Warners, who’d tired of Lubitsch’s subtleties and he of the brothers’ obtuseness. It also seems to have kicked off a bit of a trend for high-profile films with Russian themes. The next year, Hanns Kräly contributed the script for Valentino’s so-called comeback film, The Eagle, featuring Louise Dresser as another smitten Catherine the Great, and then plunked popular comedy star Constance Talmadge at the head of a tableful of bemedaled White Russians for 1926’s The Duchess of Buffalo. Lubitsch himself is famously behind the storyline that led to Emil Jannings as the tsarist general turned movie extra in Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928). Many were made outside the Lubitsch-Kräly nexus, with most mining the drama of aristocrat crossing with peasant, from Cecil B. DeMille’s The Volga Boatman (1926) to Sam Taylor’s Tempest (1928). Lubitsch and Kräly’s returned to Russian material themselves in 1928 for their Academy Award-winning drama, The Patriot, which starred Jannings as the mad tsar Paul I (another missing piece in the Lubitsch filmography).

Lubitsch’s influence, of course, reached far beyond any minor trend, as he went on to build entire movie genres – from the musical to the rom-com to the black comedy – out of his exquisite little moments. While it’s true, as William Wyler famously quipped at Lubitsch’s funeral in 1947 that worse than no more Lubitsch was “no more Lubitsch films.” We may, at least for now, still get a few more Lubitsch restorations.

Forbidden Paradise (1924 USA 73 mins)

Prod co: Famous Players-Lasky Corp. Dir: Ernst Lubitsch Scr: Agnes Christine Johnston and Hanns Kräly, adapted from The Czarina (1913) by Lajos Biró and Melchior Lengyel Phot: Charles Van Enger Set decoration: Hans Dreier

Endnotes