beyond the blue horizon
by Douglas Messerli
Ernest Vajda and Hans Müller-Einigen
(screenplay, based loosely on the fiction by Booth Tarkington and the play by
Booth Tarkington and Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland), Ernst Lubitsch (director) Monte
Carlo / 1930
In 1930 Ernest Vajda and Hans Müller-Einigen readapted the Booth Tarkington story to create a new version of Monsieur Beaucaire, directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch which, if not precisely an LGBTQ film, certainly leans deeply into its territory in manner that reveals its original film's roots.
With her last 10,000 francs she suddenly gets the whim to visit Monte
Carlo where she is certain with her luck that she can quickly turn her it into
millions and live happily ever after. What she doesn’t know is that she has
something more powerful than cash, a beauty that so captivates the male species
that before she can even slip into the casino, ladies’ man Count Rudolph
Falliere (Jack Buchanan) has attempted to introduce himself several times,
winning only a gentle stroke of his head for good luck.
It
seems to have worked, but when he turns away to call for a dinner reservation,
her luck fails her and the Countess loses everything. What is a poor girl now
to do, since she’s already rented out of the full floor of the grandest hotel
in Monte Carlo and hired a butler, chauffeur, and hairdresser to boot?
Thinking the Count to be simply a common masher she basically ignores
him until he telephones her in the middle of the night, allowing them to
perform the film’s popular duet "Always in All Ways." He may wow her
by night, but by day he seems not to have a chance until he overhears another
gentleman sitting along the Strand also humming the number.
The gentleman’s name is Paul (John Roche) who at first appears to know
so many intimate details about the Countess that one might suppose he were her
lover until Rudy and his friend Armand (Tyler Brooke) uncover the fact that he
is her barber, the situation of which so delights the womanizing Rudy that he
sings a ballad (“Trimmin the Women”) to the sissy brotherhood who are permitted
to reap all the benefits that come with the company of beautiful women without
the consequences of knowing what to do with them.
Although he has absolutely no barbering skills, Rudy gets Paul to
introduce him as a substitute and before he can even soothe the headache of the
tensed-up countess, now threatened by the hotel management for her non-payment
after she has fired her butler and chauffeur, assigning their tasks as well to
her new hairdresser, who she calls Paul, unable, she declares to bear the name
of Rudolph, hinting that Valentino may not be the kind of barber she wants to
run his hands through her hair.
In the meantime, Otto, her permanent fiancé, has followed her to Monte
Carlo and she admits to him that she run out of money and is finally willing to
marry him for his money only. Otto is such a loser that he is overjoyed that
she has been so honest and, fortunately, he has so much money the whole affair
will be a pleasure. He clearly wants the Countess as an expected acquisition
rather than a bedmate, further leaving the road open from Rudy / Paul.
But now that she’s been honest with Otto, so too must she tell Paul
since she can’t pay him for all of his work, announcing that she must let him
go. In response, he simply insists that he will gamble, and since he never
loses (his method is that when standing near a redhead he bets on black, and
when standing near a brunette he bets on red. If the girl is a blonde he asks her
name).
But once more by morning he seems to have lost the bout, as she throws the money back into his face, and sends him off, realizing the impossibility of her actually marrying a hairdresser. She realizes her mistake, of course, the minute after he has left and spends of the rest of the day calling around to all the hair salons to find him, only by the accident of his overhearing a conversation in a salon where he is getting his hair cut for the opera finally resulting in bringing to her suite. There she commands him to cut her hair, which he—having utterly no intention of clumsily clipping her golden locks—insists he will do so only so after having given her the best haircut ever all the women of Monte Carlo, she will rush to his door.
She refuses the cut, mussing her hair into a pile of frizz with the
intention to telling everyone what he has done. She arrives late to the opera,
newly coiffed, to be told the plot by Otto, before noticing that Paul/Rudy sits
in a nearby loge where he seems to be pointing out the elements of the story in
which the character Lady Mary refuses to have anything to do with Beaucaire the
barber, only to discover that he is, in fact, a Duke.
After the opera, she meets up with Paul, now Rudy, to beg his
forgiveness, realizing that, as in the opera, he is true royalty. He pauses,
with the expectation that like the Duke de Chartres he too may dismiss her
attempts to make up for her haughty behavior. But as this Rudy has explained
earlier in the film, he does not like unhappy endings.
If Buchanan is no Rudolph Valentino for the eyes, his Rudy is surely
more virile and the movie a hundred times more charming in its robust comic
moments. And Lubitsch, as always, has carefully inserted sly but friendly
innuendos of queer behavior in the characters of Otto and Paul, while
simultaneously cutting Valentino down to size. In this director’s world of
comings and goings—the door being perhaps his major metaphor—by 1930 the sheik
was clearly on his way out.
Los Angeles, May 21, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May
2022).
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