“Madame Colet, if I were your father, which fortunately I am not, and you made any attempt to handle your own business affairs, I would give you a good spanking – in a business way, of course.”
“What would you do if you were my secretary?”
“The same thing.”
“You’re hired.”
Ernst Lubitsch, 1932. What happens when you take Oscar Wilde’s wit out of the Victorian era and put it in pre-code Hollywood where characters slyly joke about having sex for no other reason than the act itself? Box office gold! Only this gold had to be quickly buried and wasn’t dug up again until 1968, when the Hays code responsible for its absence was replaced with the MPAA rating system we use today.
It’s incredible how easily this film seems to exist with the earliest days of the talkie era. If you didn’t know any better, you’d assume it was just another smart comedy from a well-practiced genre. But this razor sharp, sexually charged dialogue really was something new to the silver screen, and 92 years later, it still feels cool.
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