A delightful continental comedy, daring for its day and superbly directed by Lubitsch with the visual wit that came to be known as “the Lubitsch touch.” As the film opens, a close-up of Adolphe Menjou's toe poking out of a hole in his sock, juxtaposed to a shot of his wife (Marie Prevost)'s drawer full of lovely stockings, suggests that all is not well in the Menjou-Prevost household. Madame, as it turns out, loves nothing more than to entice away the husbands of others, leaving her own to contemplate his hosiery. The comedy of manners grows into an all-out farce before the marriage circle comes to a full close.
Film history has it that Lubitsch's The Marriage Circle was inspired by Chaplin's A Woman of Paris. But the degree of inspiration is a point of debate. As Andrew Sarris points out (in Richard Roud's “Cinema: A Critical Dictionary”), “What must have impressed Lubitsch was not Chaplin's style...but rather Chaplin's demonstration that American audiences were not entirely alien to European sophistication and cynicism about what Preston Sturges was later to designate as Topic A. To the end of his career, Chaplin was never able to take casual carnality in his stride...whereas Lubitsch never lost his lilt even at death's door.” Museum of Modern Art Curator Eileen Bowser writes, “Lubitsch's approach to his subject...at times seem(s) almost to satirize A Woman of Paris. For example, in Chaplin's film, the suave Adophe Menjou lights a cigarette for his rival in love with a gesture that shows he is master of the situation. In The Marriage Circle, Menjou finds himself in a similar situation, but this time he extends the courtesy with a fine flourish that expresses his delight in having a rival because he wants to get rid of the woman in question.”