Film Forum

U.S., 1932
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Starring Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Herbert Marshall
Art Direction by Hans Dreier
Approx. 83 min. 35mm.

“Baron, I have a confession to make. You are a crook.” Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins share champagne, caviar, and moonlight, while debonairly picking each other’s pockets, but Kay Francis proves rival as well as mark.

Presented with support from The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film

Reviews

“In TROUBLE IN PARADISE, Edward Everett Horton eyes Herbert Marshall suspiciously during a cocktail party. He tells himself that he’s seen this fellow somewhere. Clearly, Horton will remember at a certain moment, and with nine out of ten filmmakers—lazy bunch that we are—what do we almost always do? We show the fellow asleep in bed; all of a sudden he wakes up in the middle of the night, slaps his forehead: ‘That’s it! Venice! The dirty bum!’ That was not Lubitsch’s way. He worked like a dog, bled himself white, died twenty years too early. Lubitsch shows us Horton smoking a cigarette. Visibly wondering where he could have met Herbert Marshall before, he takes a last draw on his cigarette, crushes it in a silver ashtray shaped like a gondola… a shot of the gondola ashtray… we return to Horton’s face… he gazes at the ashtray… a gondola… Venice. My god! Horton finally understands! Bravo! And the audience rocks with laughter.”
– François Truffaut

“ONE OF LUBITSCH’S BEST AND MOST RISQUÉ COMEDIES.”
– Film Journal

“When I was small I liked to go to the movies because you could find out what adults did when there weren’t any children in the room. As I grew up that pleasure gradually faded; the more I knew the less the characters seemed like adults. Ernst Lubitsch’s TROUBLE IN PARADISE reawakened my old feeling. It is about people who are almost impossibly adult, in that fanciful movie way—so suave, cynical, sophisticated, smooth and sure that a lifetime is hardly long enough to achieve such polish. They glide.”
– Roger Ebert

“The masterpiece of American sophisticated cinema.”
– Leslie Halliwell

“The last word in modernistic design”
– Theodore Huff