The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, February 3-9
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Lubitsch’s second American feature was one of founding MoMA Department of Film curator Iris Barry’s most treasured films. The elegant Vienna-set farce focuses on five characters: a professor (played by Adolphe Menjou) who desires to divorce his wife; the vampish woman herself (Marie Prevost), who adulterously desires a physician; the doctor (Monte Blue) guiltily torn between desire and duty; the physician’s spouse and vamp’s best friend (Florence Vidor), who desires everyone’s happiness, especially her own; and the physician’s partner (Creighton Hale), who occasionally comforts the woman while longing to take his taller colleague’s place in the man’s wedding bed. These peoples’ roundelays are presented with minimal editing and camera movement in favor of an emphasis upon the performers. In 1924, shortly after the film’s release, Barry wrote for the weekly British publication The Spectator that The Marriage Circle “may well silence those who claim that the film cannot compare as a dramatic form with the stageplay. For this is at once perfect cinematography and perfect conventional drama… Everything is visualized, all the comedy is in what the characters are seen or imagined to be thinking or feeling, in the interplay, never expressed in words, of wills and personalities.” Aaron Cutler (February 7, 4:30pm; February 9, 7pm at MoMA, with live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin on the 7th and Bernie Anderson on the 9th)