Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

This 1932 film is an adaptation of a Noël Coward play directed by Ernst Lubitsch.  If the combination of Coward and Lubitsch suggests a concoction that might be a little too arch for its own good, one can rest easy because it seems that screenwriter Ben Hecht coarsened the play almost beyond recognition. And if that wasn’t enough coarsening, the unlikely duo of Gary Cooper and Frederic March play the two male leads, rather than Lubitsch’s initial choice of Ronald Colman and Leslie Howard. Cooper and March are a struggling painter and writer respectively, eking out an existence in Paris.  When they meet Gilda (played by the wonderful Miriam Hopkins) they both fall for her. She for her part seems equally attracted to both, creating a Jules-et-Jim-type love triangle. Rather shockingly, one imagines for cinema-going audiences at the time, they agree to live together, but as Gilda states explicitly, with “no sex”.  Inevitably though Gilda's relationships with both men moves be...

This 1940 romantic comedy is an adaptation of a play by one Miklos Laszlo.  Hats off to him for coming up with a brilliant concept that has gone on to be used in several films and musicals. Anyone who has seen 'You've Got Mail' will know the basic idea: two people falling in love with each other through correspondence, all the while not realising that the object of their affection is someone they know and think they  dislike. In the case of the play and this film, the setting is turn-of-the-century Budapest.  It takes a little while to get used to the idea of James Stewart as an Hungarian shop assistant but once I was over that small hurdle this confection was a delight from start to finish. And who better to serve it up than Ernst Lubitsch, a master of this type of light sophisticated material? Stewart is Mr Kralik, who works in a leather goods shop owned by Mr Matuschek.  Besides the romance plot there is a secondary storyline in which Mr Matuschek suspects Kralik ...