Reuniting with his regular writing partner from Germany, Hanns Kraly, Ernst Lubitsch followed up his delightful The Marriage Circle with another attempt at bridging the gap between tragedy and comedy in a domestic setting, and this doesn't quite click the same way the previous film did. It demonstrates Lubitsch's continued command of the physical production and ability to find small bits of humor amidst larger scenes, even managing large scale set pieces well in addition to performances. The story up to the end holds up fairly well, it's really just that the ending tries to do way too much, especially tonally, and it just falls flat.
Edmund Lamont (Lew Cody) is a penniless cad who owes money all over town. At a large society party (including a long slide that is the source of a few comic pratfalls), he meets Mrs. Mabel Wilton (Pauline Frederick), a woman in command of a three million dollar fortune. When she gives him a playful eye, he moves in and immediately starts wooing her, dismissing the younger, more attractive women at the party. He's quickly in her good graces, offered control of $100,000 to invest as he sees fit. He's on top of the world again (though we never really see how he spends much of the money), and when Mabel's daughter Jeanne (May McAvoy) comes to visit from college across the country, leaving her innocent beau Fred (Pierre Gendron) behind. Jeanne misses her mother who has refused to come and visit, sending nothing for Jeanne's birthday, and is spending all of her time with Edmund.
However, Edmund's cad tendencies take over when he both sees Jeanne for the first time and learns that she has, in trust, half of Mabel's fortune. Prettier and still wealthy? He's on board, and he quickly changes tactics, balancing both women against each other without their knowledge until he's caught by Mabel and announces his engagement to Jeanne. The emotional core of this film is Mabel's growth as a woman learning to accept her age as well as the failure of her quest for romance combined with Jeanne's growing up into a woman entering a world of predators. You see, Edmund doesn't stop being a cad because he's married to Jeanne. He lied endlessly to Mabel about where he was going at nights, and he does the exact same thing to Jeanne.
The third woman of the title is a very minor character named Harriet (Marie Prevost) who appears in the opening party scene, disappears for a while, and then shows up as Edmund's date after he marries Jeanne. She doesn't have much in the way of character, and after the confrontation that stems from Fred, who has moved to New York to study medicine, lifting Harriet at a party so she can grab a stuffed monkey. Edmund takes it personally and starts throwing punches. Fred hits him with a champagne bottle, and Fred, being a good guy, takes Edmund home where he sees Jeanne for the first time since she left.
Much like The Marriage Circle, it feels like the film is going for straight up tragedy for a while. Fred has lost the woman he loves to an unscrupulous man. Jeanne is trapped in a marriage to a cad. Mabel has been wronged by the same man but she can't do anything about it because he holds her love letters over her which, if published, could invite scandal. She takes drastic action that dooms her but frees Jeanne, and we have the makings of a story that ends with a woman having to take herself beyond moral behavior to undo her own mistakes and save her daughter.
But then there's a quick trial and she's free and everything's happy.
It's...weird. It doesn't work. It happens too swiftly, balancing some weird tonal shifts poorly over a very short period of time.
I'll also say that the building of character is largely better than in most of the other films that Lubitsch worked on with Kraly as writer, but it's a step down from The Marriage Circle. Mabel's need for love is understandable, but her attachment to Edmund feels underdeveloped. That's the big character problem in the film, and it's not a small problem. The whole movie kind of hinges on it when a not-unattractive older woman with several million dollars in the bank and should be fending off lots of suitors, she only seems to have one that she immediately falls for. I also don't quite see the appeal that Jeanne has for Edmund. His appeal to women seems to be more implied that actually shown which is important when the movie really hinges on him being irresistible to two women.
However, with that being said, everything else is actually quite good. I especially like the lovelorn Fred, selling his watch to buy his girl a birthday present. He's also ready to defend her when he finds out the intolerableness of her situation. The acting is quite good all around as well with Lubitsch understanding how to get the best from his actors pretty consistently.
So, the film more firmly fits as a tragedy, but Lubitsch and Kraly wanted to end it like a comedy. I think the central problem is that it's too short. Give it another ten minutes and you can give Edmund a few moments early to demonstrate his irresistibility and draw out the ending to find more human moments of emotion instead of the whiplash through some plot points towards a happy conclusion. There's enough skill on display in both the writing and direction to make the film almost worthwhile. It's a near miss, I think.
