Desire (1936)
January 14, 2025 12:42 PM - Subscribe
An automotive engineer bound for a holiday in Spain meets a sultry jewel thief.
After stealing a valuable necklace in Paris, a jewel thief surreptitiously uses a vacationing American engineer to smuggle the necklace over the border into Spain. However, retrieving the jewels from the unknowing American proves more difficult.
Raquel Stecher: Directed by Frank Borzage and produced by Ernst Lubitsch for Paramount, Desire (1936) is a dazzling romantic drama bolstered by its two magnetic leads. The film certainly has the Lubitsch Touch with plenty of wit, charm, humor and sophistication. There are plenty of very subtle sexual connotations which makes for enjoyable repeat viewings. While I don't feel like Cooper and Dietrich quite matched the chemistry they had in Morocco (1930), they still make for a captivating duo. Desire is perfect escapist fare offering viewers a highly romanticized vision of Europe and a tantalizing story of an all-American man falling in love with an exotic European woman. And as an added bonus, Akim Tamiroff, one of my favorite character actors, has a small role in the film as a Spanish police official.
Kathy Fennessy: When Madeleine arrives in San Sebastian, she and her wily accomplice scheme to get them back, but after Tom catches up with the crew, the warm feelings between him and Madeleine heat up to the extent that she finally succumbs to his goofy charms (like his terrible singing), sets things right, and bids the criminal life adieu. Borzage adroitly avoids any moralizing or heavy-handedness, even reuniting the lovebirds with the hoodwinked jeweler and psychoanalyst, who have become the best of friends--and possibly more. Ernst Lubitsch, the head of Paramount at the time, reportedly directed a few scenes, which may explain why the film has a certain fizz not normally associated with sweeping Borzage melodramas like 1927's 7th Heaven.
Rolland Man: The protagonists also have to keep an eye on themselves, as they are almost invariably lying about their true identities and motives. Madeleine pretends to be an aristocrat rather than a thief, while Tom pretends to have a higher position, salary and social status than he actually has. Once they fall in love, as in many other Borzage films, they have to stop pretending in order to achieve that spiritual community of the couple noted by most critics as a constant of the director’s work. Even in adverse circumstances, they achieve happiness. According to Kent Jones, “Happiness is far too weak a word to describe what Borzage’s couples experience.”6 In Desire, as in many of his other films (the most obvious – and, at the same time, most subtle – example being 1928’s supremely erotic The River), this communion is more than spiritual. Madeleine and Tom admire one another’s appearance under the Spanish Moon, but we are left in no doubt that waiting for the Moon to come out is the lovers’ erotic code for the next instalment in their passionate physical love. The spirituality in Desire is as much carnal as sacred.
Trailer
Full movie
After stealing a valuable necklace in Paris, a jewel thief surreptitiously uses a vacationing American engineer to smuggle the necklace over the border into Spain. However, retrieving the jewels from the unknowing American proves more difficult.
Raquel Stecher: Directed by Frank Borzage and produced by Ernst Lubitsch for Paramount, Desire (1936) is a dazzling romantic drama bolstered by its two magnetic leads. The film certainly has the Lubitsch Touch with plenty of wit, charm, humor and sophistication. There are plenty of very subtle sexual connotations which makes for enjoyable repeat viewings. While I don't feel like Cooper and Dietrich quite matched the chemistry they had in Morocco (1930), they still make for a captivating duo. Desire is perfect escapist fare offering viewers a highly romanticized vision of Europe and a tantalizing story of an all-American man falling in love with an exotic European woman. And as an added bonus, Akim Tamiroff, one of my favorite character actors, has a small role in the film as a Spanish police official.
Kathy Fennessy: When Madeleine arrives in San Sebastian, she and her wily accomplice scheme to get them back, but after Tom catches up with the crew, the warm feelings between him and Madeleine heat up to the extent that she finally succumbs to his goofy charms (like his terrible singing), sets things right, and bids the criminal life adieu. Borzage adroitly avoids any moralizing or heavy-handedness, even reuniting the lovebirds with the hoodwinked jeweler and psychoanalyst, who have become the best of friends--and possibly more. Ernst Lubitsch, the head of Paramount at the time, reportedly directed a few scenes, which may explain why the film has a certain fizz not normally associated with sweeping Borzage melodramas like 1927's 7th Heaven.
Rolland Man: The protagonists also have to keep an eye on themselves, as they are almost invariably lying about their true identities and motives. Madeleine pretends to be an aristocrat rather than a thief, while Tom pretends to have a higher position, salary and social status than he actually has. Once they fall in love, as in many other Borzage films, they have to stop pretending in order to achieve that spiritual community of the couple noted by most critics as a constant of the director’s work. Even in adverse circumstances, they achieve happiness. According to Kent Jones, “Happiness is far too weak a word to describe what Borzage’s couples experience.”6 In Desire, as in many of his other films (the most obvious – and, at the same time, most subtle – example being 1928’s supremely erotic The River), this communion is more than spiritual. Madeleine and Tom admire one another’s appearance under the Spanish Moon, but we are left in no doubt that waiting for the Moon to come out is the lovers’ erotic code for the next instalment in their passionate physical love. The spirituality in Desire is as much carnal as sacred.
Trailer
Full movie
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Curious too how this interacted with the Hayes code. We don't see really any comeuppance for the main criminals other than her. I know early days the code was much laxer, I'm curious if this had been made 5 years later, we would have had to have shown a lot more consequences for the thieves.
Also interesting is that even then there was talk of war in Europe. I know rearmament was just being announced, but there was still a lot of daylight between that and Anschluss and Czechoslovakian loss of independence. Shows how much it was in the air to make it's way into a light romantic comedy movie.
posted by Carillon at 12:48 PM on January 14 [1 favorite]