Retrospective: Trouble in Paradise (Patreon)

The Hays Code took away not just filmmakers' freedom of speech but, to a large extent, their ability to explore character relationships with nuance and discernment. While not free of propagandistic elements, pre-Code films are more willing to depict relationships as complicated or ugly or free from closure than even many post-Hays films. Scarface, The Public Enemy, and The Front Page show people having messy relationships without any external compulsion to resolve into conventionality in their third acts. It's not that pre-Code cinema is a lost Golden Age — no such thing ever existed. But as sound film slouched towards Burbank waiting to be born, it discovered some truths along the way that later eras of Hollywood filmmaking often forgot.

One of the highlights of pre-Code Hollywood is Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise, a clever, sophisticated, and surprisingly horny caper flick which allows its characters to be disastrous without impelling them into conventional modes of living by the end. The storytelling is unusually smooth for this era: a con man and a jewel thief fall in love, try to swindle an extremely wealthy woman out of her riches, and the con man falls in love with her. At a glance, this may sound like a film where the con man comes to his senses in the end and repents of his wicked ways, or where the characters spend the running time wrangling with a love triangle. Delightfully, neither arrangement is the case. The criminal couple are delightfully unhinged, bonding over their mutual predilections for stealing, and the love triangle is pleasantly de-emphasized. The characters get to be themselves all the way through. I won't spoil the rest for you, because Lubitsch is a wonderful storyteller, and you should just treat yourself to his magic in Trouble in Paradise.