It’s always nice to discover a previously unseen film with the power to surprise and enthrall you. Ernst Lubitsch is one of my favorite directors, easily on a short list of five or ten, but a lot of his movies aren’t available on DVD in R1. So while I’ve seen most of Lubitsch’s work after the silent era there are a couple that have still eluded me. Until now, one of those was Angel, the 1937 feature he made for Paramount starring Marlene Dietrich, Herbert Marshall, and Melvyn Douglas. I’d ordered the Universal R2 disc when it was released but one thing after another had postponed my watching of it. Despite Angel ranking at a healthy 518th in the most recent round-up of They Shoot Pictures Don’t They?’s list of the 1,000 greatest films, it’s flown well below the radar in my own experience. Some of this is no doubt attributable to Universal’s poor treatment of Lubitsch on R1 DVD, with only Design for Living currently available and Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife promised for release next month, both exclusive to sets designed around the films’ stars. An additional five Universal-controlled Lubitsch pictures have been licensed to Criterion, still leaving Angel and his drama Broken Lullaby unreleased in R1. My point here is that the lack of herald and general discussion for Angel has perhaps positioned it as just another Lubitsch film, but I’m now thinking it could perhaps be the director’s most uniquely successful work.

In some way, I guess I’d already imagined what sort of film Angel was given its director and screenwriter (Samson Raphaelson). I’ve seen their other collaborations and they’re all highly entertaining movies which tend to lighten the viewer’s mood on impact. This should be in the same general mold, I figured. Now I realize I was mistaken. Angel doesn’t lighten your mood. It manages to combine Lubitsch’s ability to ease the viewer into pleasant situational humor with a much darker tone favoring misdirection and ambiguity. Far from being the “failure” Scott Eyman calls the movie in his biography Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise, Angel must be seen as a special case where the director relished the internal just as much as or even more than the external. Lubitsch films often masterfully show conflict above the surface, told with a wink and a smile as if to say that silly little diversions can tell us as much about ourselves as complex drama and tragedy. With Angel, Lubitsch seemed to largely leave behind these reassurances.

The film is short and plotted as beautifully as we’d expect, but what caught me off guard was how much gravity Lubitsch gives most every scene. Consider the intangible, feathery quality of the “Lubitsch Touch” in his other films and then look at how Angel manages to cherrypick aspects of that perceived lightness in terms of mood and feeling while still adding emotional weight, sometimes more for the viewer than even the characters. What results is a Lubitsch film that flies by yet unexpectedly devastates us, particularly in the third act. Some degree of seriousness wouldn’t come as a surprise because even the most frivolous of his pictures retain pockets of hidden truth about love or desire or wealth or power or whatever, but Angel impresses with its commitment to shed much of the comfort to which we’re accustomed. This is a piercing of the romantic comedy veil. There are moments of humor and of deep romanticism, but it’s not a romantic comedy. I have a problem with considering Angel a comedy of any sort. It feels airy but never insubstantial, and the tone, aided by a largely absent musical score, seems to also favor more serious ideas.

From the start, Lubitsch revels in establishing an air of mystery. The initial setting is Paris. Marlene Dietrich greets our eyes. Her actual identity is shrouded from the audience just as it is from Douglas’ character. That he meets her in some sort of high class escort service run by the remarkably poised grand duchess, played by Laura Hope Crews, would seem to indicate that Dietrich’s character is at least an interesting lady unafraid of creating secrets. Douglas is there at the recommendation of a military friend. I believe he’s supposed to be as British as Herbert Marshall, to whom we’re later introduced. The way these first few scenes play out could be described as deftly straddling the line between efficiency and confusion. While the situational seeds are certainly planted, the wheres, whos and whys are pretty much all left in the dark. Especially intriguing is that the film never seems to unnecessarily obscure the characters. Dietrich and Douglas meet by chance, make a date and are already on dessert by the time we next see them.

It’s her idea for the two to not exchange any information, including even their names. They next move to a park and a bench where they sit to talk. When she disappears into the night we see neither Dietrich’s exit nor Douglas’ reaction but the look of an older woman selling flowers to the after dark lovers of nightfall. It’s a bold choice to let the scene play out while focused on a largely inconsequential character who appears just once. A similar stray from the obvious occurs later in the film when Douglas is about to make a mental connection as to who Dietrich, his beloved Angel, really is and the camera impolitely abandons his quest entirely. Over and over again, from these two instances of chasing the viewer’s eye away from where it typically should be to the conviction Dietrich shows in denying her past encounter with Douglas then returning again to her behavior in the final scene with Marshall, Angel almost always opts for the unexpected path. It’s simply never the film for which the viewer has been trained.

Since I’d unintentionally dismissed the film sight unseen for months now, my view is that this degree of uniqueness found in Angel is quite welcome indeed. I would never tire of watching a great Lubitsch comedy, but realizing, without any doubt, that he had the ability to more or less subvert the happy cynicism seen in Trouble for Paradise, Design for Living, Cluny Brown, etc. was a revelation. The depth of Angel and its insistence on pitting a half-lonely marriage first against an (apparently) unconsummated fling and, then, itself impressed me a great deal. There’s nothing else I’ve seen from Lubitsch which so boldly tackled the reality of love and its sadnesses. The ending here possibly feels out of place in its seeming neatness, but what of the other party? Isn’t the final shot just another example of withholding the reaction we want and expect? Instead of the quote-unquote loser of the ordeal, we see the perfunctory happiness which very well might be temporary. That there are three main characters ensures that at least someone will be left wanting, thus exploding the entire idea of the happy ending entirely. The characters are carefully positioned as being likable in basically equal amounts so any resolution can only be viewed as, at best, bittersweet. At a time when screwball comedies ruled the day, Lubitsch went for a more delicate and resonant tone.