After the first 20 minutes I wasn't sure I was going to like this movie because I was having a very difficult time following what the heck was going on. Despite it having a fairly straightforward story (con man and his wife infiltrate the world of a very rich society woman's world in order to rob her but things grow complicated when a love triangle begins to form) its very short running time (83 mins) means that there isn't a lot of time spent setting things up. Scenes move along at a very brisk pace and don't spoon feed you any information. You're expected to just keep up and fill in the blanks yourself. In fact that's one of my few complaints about the film, I wouldn't have minded it filling in some of those blanks on screen, but after the first 20 minutes I had a pretty good grasp on everything and started to really enjoy it a lot.
One thing that surprised me a great deal was the amount of innuendo, implied sex and sexual humor there was. I guess I just assumed a romantic comedy from 1932 would be fairly puritanical. Not sure why I thought that, but I was very wrong. I also liked the very rapid-fire dialogue between the 2 thieves (I suspect this paved the way for a lot of the screwball comedies of the 40s) and also the guy who plays the butler made me laugh a lot.
I'm surprised by how this extremely early romantic comedy seems so much more believable than most modern ones. By that I mean that the things the characters did and the situations they were in didn't feel contrived in any way, everything felt quite natural in fact. The ending (like the rest of the movie) seems pretty fast, but it works quite nicely.
I thought this was the first Ernst Lubitsch film I ever saw but upon inspecting his IMDB page I see that he also made "Shop Around the Corner" which I remember watching with my mom when I was younger. I remember very little about it, but perhaps I'll do a Lubitsch marathon at some point in the future.
2 movies into the marathon and we're going quite strong! I probably didn't enjoy this one quite as much as Rope, but it was wonderful nonetheless.
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