The doors are also a brilliant means to sendup Old World mores, whose chambers of secrets barely conceal a neurotic obsession with sex.Equally distributed as clusters of 3-6 shots through the film-but never happening during the song sequences, which unfold mostly in single shots-they lend a snappy, dance-like rhythm to the script and impart the viewer a feeling of constant movement. Besides tying into Lubitsch’s obsession with what goes on behind closed doors, it performs a musical function here. Seventy-four shots feature opening or closing doors (and countless others have doors and doorways as the backdrop)-every fourth or fifth shot of the film. All the comedy derives from the acting (Chevalier alone carries a ridiculous French accent while others speak American), line delivery, découpage and cutting. There’s hardly a funny line in the script, but the film is hysterical.The scene simply collapses without their intelligence. Both actors reproduce lines and gestures conceived by men, but their comic genius consists of owning it and making them their own.

(And it turns out that the man needs nothing more.) And through these rather anti-Bechdel exchanges, they arrive at the film’s most memorable, moving relationship based on recognition of mutual desires and vulnerabilities. They don’t discuss anything but the man, their need for the man, about the sort of song to sing for the man, the kind of lingerie they should wear to please the man. It’s a bedroom scene in which two young women fight, reconcile and drool over descriptions of their common lover in various stages of undress. The scene between Colbert and Hopkins is a masterpiece of subversive feminism later reprised by Monroe and Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.The whole movie talks about only one thing-the perils of testicular thought-without actually talking about it. Every object becomes a sexual symbol, its value predicated on the fact that the connection isn’t made concrete. In another musical, the morning-after breakfast song, “ Magic in the Muffin”, might pass largely without a guffaw.

But Lubitsch’s sense of suggestion is so subtle and delicate that it suffuses the whole film, colouring ordinary lines and sequences with sexual charge.

A pre-code sex comedy is just as outrageous as it sounds.

The smiling lieutenant 1931