The Marriage Circle

Vienna in Ernst Lubitsch’s Hollywood comedy is less a place than an atmosphere, a series of elegant parlors, boudoirs, and gardens where the European cultured class slips on the banana peel of its own attitudes. Adolphe Menjou, ever the icon of continental sophistication, adopts an expression of shell-shocked bemusement while his would-be bombshell of a wife (Marie Prevost) sets out to explode the domestic bliss of her best friend (Florence Vidor) by seducing her husband (Monte Blue). The devilish wit is in the details, such as a hole in a sock that exposes both a forlorn toe and an unraveling marriage.