With the Film Forum's Paramount: Before the Code winding down, something needs to be said concerning the true value of the program's best films. Their excellence, ultimately, has less to do with their content and more to do with their formal grace, which provides the best pictures in the series with a certain timelessness. Of course, formal qualities are not what bring audiences into theatres, which is among the reasons the program is packaged and sold according to the films' sexual frankness and their basic strangeness (to the modern observer). The best most critics can come up with regarding the program is that they are frank even by today's standards, or some nonsense of the sort. The audiences themselves act as though they were a late middle-aged urban liberal version of a Saved by the Bell studio audience, caterwauling at any instance of sexual explicitness. This is menopausal adolescence at its very worst. Which is unfortunate because many of the films screened are classical Hollywood at its very best, not that the films demand a hushed reverence per se, but at least some decorum would be nice.
As to their "formal grace," there is no better exemplification than Ernst Lubitsch's 1932 masterpiece Trouble in Paradise. From the very beginning, the director achieves a gestural precision that demonstrates the medium's ultimate vocation: there is no more sensual moment in the American cinema than Herbert Marshall's delicate unwrapping of Miriam Hopkins' shawl early in the film. Certainly, the heart of any viewer with a pulse should skip a beat at this moment; a reliving of the same reactions generated by middle school sex ed videos doesn't strike me as the proper tone here.
His is also a film of precisely calibrated glances, showing that Hollywood cinema is at its very best when it is at its simplest. This same economy is manifested in Lubitsch's utilization of actions, set-pieces and objects to denote psychological tension, with no more powerful instance than when Kay Francis' character goes to open the safe. As Herbert Marshall looks on, it is as though we are watching James Stewart's wheelchair-ridden protagonist watching helplessly across the courtyard as Grace Kelly is being attacked by Raymond Burr's character. Indeed, Lubitsch's cinema serves in many ways as a prototype for Hitchcock's in not only his masterful expressivity in gesture and usage of objects, but in the Lacanian precipice that his criminal couple finds themselves teetering over with Kay Francis stealing Marshall's attention away from Hopkins. These stakes are the very essence of the "Lubitsch touch."
Yet, if it is a simplicity that marks this early golden age of sound, it is a different brand then most observers seem to catch. One of the importance heritages of this pre-Wellesian moment in the American cinema is its spatial debt to the silent cinema. Lubitsch of course was a master of the silent cinema before directing his first sound picture in 1929. With this background, Lubitsch's cinema retains a spatial integrity through the last of his films; put another way, Lubitsch's narratives are acted out in space rather than in scripted dialogue which is simply committed to celluloid. This basic trait is something that all the finest directors who made this transition share -- an understanding that film is fundamentally spatial in its formal organization. If classical Hollywood's sins can be limited only to single most grievous deficiency in the intervening years, it is precisely a tendency to ignore this basic component of the medium, exchanging it for the thoughtless filming of dialogue.
So how then does Lubitsch's silent origins manifest itself in his spaces? First, in a most basic sense, one can see this inheritance in his tendency to allow characters to interact in space, which far from thoughtlessly mimicking theatre, belies a fundamental humanism in its conceptual conflation of players (versus the isolation brought forth in the shot-reverse structure). Second, there is the director's utilization of doors and other such set pieces which conceal drama and accumulate resonance in their representation of absence, whether it connotes romance or the potential for characters to feel real pain. Lubitsch's is a cinema that flatters its audience, presenting the romantic couple as an endangered entity. The movie's power indeed derives from Lubitsch's very handling of space, assuring that its strength as a narrative is intricately fused with the director's understanding of the art.
All of this is to say that the best pre-code films, like Trouble in Paradise, represent Hollywood narration at its very best, not simply for what they say, but more importantly, for how they say it. For those of us who value this cinema most for its formal excellence, at least a program like Paramount: Before the Code offers us a chance to see Hollywood filmmaking at its best, even if it is presented primarily for its capacity to induce an experience best described as ironic titillation.
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