Judith Rosenberg on Piano

Lubitsch opens his adroit continental comedy with a close-up of Adolphe Menjou's toe poking out of a hole in his sock, juxtaposed with a shot of his wife (Marie Prevost)'s drawer full of lovely stockings, suggesting that all is not well in the 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 it comes full circle. Film history has it that 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 pointed out, “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.”