Paid to Love

If a crew of film buffs arrived at a screening of this movie just after the opening credits, and then tried to guess the identity of the director based on content and stylistic clues, they could be forgiven for deciding Paid to Love must be the work of Ernst Lubitsch. After all, consider the evidence: this is a romantic comedy set largely in a mythical kingdom called San Savon—and partly in a mythical-looking Paris—which concerns a handsome young Crown Prince's love life, or lack thereof. It would appear the Prince doesn't care much for girls, but he's obsessed with automobiles, and likes to roll up his sleeves to work on engines and fan-belts and such, and get his hands dirty. His father, King Haakon, is a little worried about the boy, so he conspires with a wealthy American businessman named Roberts to teach his son the facts of life, so to speak, by arranging for him to get intimately involved with a woman brought from France for this purpose, all expenses paid. Roberts has his own reasons for participating in the scheme: he represents a firm with a financial interest in San Savon, and believes his board of directors would feel better about their investment in the kingdom if the Prince showed some interest in the ladies. (Although it's never bluntly stated, the idea seems to be that if the Prince demonstrates he's a regular guy, and might actually sire royal offspring someday, the firm's directors will be reassured about the future of San Savon.) So, the two older gents go to Paris and find a suitably sexy young cabaret performer named Gaby to stir the young man's passions. Their plan backfires, in a rather predictable but amusing way, when the Prince falls in love with her.

Paid to Love was an early assignment for Howard Hawks, made long before he'd established his directorial style or settled on the kind of material he would come to favor. In later years Hawks was dismissive of the project, declaring simply "It isn't my type of stuff." That may be, but viewed objectively Paid to Love holds up quite well today. It's smoothly made, funny and very typical of its time. George O'Brien, cast somewhat against type, makes an appealing Crown Prince. His introductory scene sets a lighthearted note, when he comes to the aid of the crusty businessman Roberts, who has car trouble and assumes that the Prince is a lowly mechanic. Roberts is played by estimable character actor J. Farrell MacDonald, who has so much screen time in the film's opening scenes you'd think this was designed to be his show. But soon the emphasis properly shifts to O'Brien and leading lady Virginia Valli, who plays Gaby. Their "meet cute" is unusual, and surprisingly erotic. Gaby collapses in a storm outside the cottage where the Prince is staying; he finds her, carries her inside and puts her to bed, off camera. When she awakens the next morning, she discovers that she's naked. For a guy who's shy with women, the Prince works fast! (The sequence is something of a precursor to a similar one involving Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo, made many years later.) Needless to add, romance quickly blossoms between the two. Valli and O'Brien make an attractive couple, and both actors are adept in navigating the story's shift from comedy to drama in the later scenes. Until recently Valli was unknown to me, but now that I've seen her in several silent features I've come to feel she's unjustly forgotten. Perhaps her strongest claim to fame is that she was the first leading lady of Alfred Hitchcock—speaking of Hitch—in his directorial debut, The Pleasure Garden.

Several other characters make an impression, such as King Haakon, played by a dignified old actor who happened to be named Thomas Jefferson. I also enjoyed seeing prolific comedian Hank Mann nicely underplay his part as a servant. But the most notable, striking performance of all is given by William Powell, who plays the Crown Prince's raffish cousin Eric. At this point in his career Powell was often cast as bad eggs, and his Prince Eric is a prime example: he's haughty and mean-spirited, a playboy who is a rotter to women, Gaby in particular. The film's most dramatic sequence is a tense confrontation between Eric and Gaby in her boudoir. Viewers familiar with Powell's urbane Nick Charles from the Thin Man series are likely to be surprised, even shocked, to see his dark side on full display here.

This film was believed to be lost for many years. It re-emerged in the early 1970s, when interest in Howard Hawks' career was growing markedly among critics and buffs. Happily, surviving prints look very good: the cinematography of William O'Connell is first-rate, and the film itself is complete, without the choppy continuity or visible decomposition scars that mar so many silent films. Perhaps because the material held little importance for the director, or because he was still honing his style, Hawks felt free to experiment with the kind of tracking shots and swooping camera movements he would later avoid. According to film historian William K. Everson, however, the director was not especially pleased to learn that Paid to Love had been recovered, and he refused to watch it after its rediscovery. While it may not be "Hawksian," Paid to Love is nonetheless a clever, well-acted, amusing romantic comedy in the Lubitsch vein, a sophisticated late silent feature that's well worth a look. Even Hawks might have liked it.

Hawks' third movie, The Cradle Snatchers, is partially lost, so we skip that and head to Paid to Love, a romantic comedy with mistaken identity tropes that plays surprisingly entertainingly. It's an unchallenging little comedy, but it understands character-based comedy well enough to have aged quite well.

The king of a small Balkan nation is desperate to secure a loan from an American bank, represented by Peter Roberts. The king has a son, Michael, and a nephew, Eric, and the two couldn't be more different. Michael is obsessed with cars, and Eric is obsessed with women. Roberts is happy to sign over the loan to the king, but he's unsettled by the idea of the king having a son uninterested in trying to continue the family line. In order to feel more comfortable in the country's future, he insists that the king find a girl, not to marry Michael but to simply get him interested in girls in general. Then the movie becomes a buddy comedy about two old men looking for a woman, and I kind of love it.

The king and Roberts become a pair of drunk louses working the streets of Paris, looking for a girl who can play up any role in order to accomplish their mission. They end up at a dive in the middle of Paris that's designed to appear tougher than it actually is, to scare tourists into coughing up their money in an effort to get out and give them a taste of the tough life. In this bar is a nightly show, so to speak, where a girl, Gaby, pretends to be attacked by a man behind a curtain, and fighting him off with a night in the middle of the bar. The king and Roberts figure out it's a show when the girl wipes her bloody blade on the king's hat, only for them to discover that it's actually catsup. Perfect! She can act...okay, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but I'm going to roll with it. This is an advantage of being amusing can have. You roll past some logical inconsistencies from time to time.

They bring the girl back to the country, dress her up finely, and set her out to capture Michael's heart. She, though, gets lost in a rainstorm and ends up at a castle with Michael whom she does not know is Michael and he doesn't want to reveal that he's the Crown Prince. He has suddenly fallen in love with this girl, just as the plan has dictated, but no one knows about it. So, sure, we end up with a sitcom plot where some simple communication could fix a lot, which prevents this movie from being more than amusing, but it is certainly amusing in spades.

The next day, Gaby follows instructions from the King to meet the Crown Prince Michael. Coincidentally, Eric is at the same place while both are wearing white military uniforms. Eric convinces Michael to go off shooting at the range right before Gaby shows up, and we have our case of mistaken identity when Gaby thinks that Eric is Michael. She does her duty to seduce the Crown Prince, finding it far easier than she had been led to believe because Eric is a complete sleaze and ladies man. At the same time, Michael is removed from seeing Gaby because she's promised to return to him after two weeks, when her job is done.

The resolution is the sort of stuff one would come to expect from this sort of movie with aghast reveals and heartfelt promises. It all comes back together with the king and financier taking Michael back to Paris where Gaby had run back after the reveals for the final reveals of love. The repetition of key moments from the original run with different emotions and focuses makes the film's final moments work surprisingly well, especially with the king and financier realizing their idiocy.

The whole film is really endearing, if completely unchallenging. I find no fault with it being unchallenging, but it's certainly a good silent comedy, a step up from the less successful Fig Leaves. This is a confident little comedy with strong appeal more than 90 years after it was made.

J. Farrell MacDonald is negotiating to lend King Thomas Jefferson enough money to keep his money afloat, but feels that the Crown Prince, George O'Brien, should be married or engaged to make him and the dynasty more popular. The trouble is he isn't interested in anything without a carburetor. So the two old gentlemen head off to Paris to find a woman to jump-start his interest and come back with Virginia Valli, set her up with clothes and money and offer her a big bonus if she succeeds. However, the prince's cousin, William Powell -- the rotter! -- interferes with their plans...

It's the sort of story that I might have expected to have seen from Paramount in this period, and Hawks is working with much surer comic performers in uncredited support, like Hank Mann and Henry Armetta. He has established a nicely moving camera under William O'Connell and has some fine comic sequences -- Miss Valli is discovered in a bar in Montmartre where she pretends to kill her boyfriend with a knife to give the tourists a thrill. Even more, he establishes the characters' personalities in single shots and offers a series of "meet cutes". It's only a year since he had first taken up the megaphone, but Hawks is already an assured director of a superior genre movie. His next would be the first of the same story he would tell time and again over more than forty years, A GIRL IN EVERY PORT.