The Silent Treatment: So This Is Paris

35mm print preserved by the Library of Congress

Featuring live accompaniment by Cliff Retallick!

A glittering social satire staged safely abroad, So This Is Paris passes off the routine infidelities of Jazz Age blue-bloods as “the French way.” Teasing the audience with urbane good humor—and featuring a nigh-surrealist montage of an “artist’s ball” (read: nightclub) that superimposes throngs of dancing legs and arms into a proto-psychedelic rendering of a really good champagne high—this silent doesn’t shy away from wanton hedonism. Lubitsch is a master of glamour and subtlety, with Wilde’s edged wit, and the ability to stack a dozen ironies on top of one another in five seconds flat. Lurid details are suggested by the simple presence of a man’s cane in the wrong woman’s home, or, not so subtly, in a long string of vulgar insults (to a police officer) left conspicuously missing from the intertitles.

Dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1926, 35mm, 80 min.

Watch the Cinefamily original trailer!