1Ernst Lubitsch can offer a smiling interlude to the debate on corruption. With him, it becomes a happy and welcome pause, indicative of a certain refusal of commitment in struggles that are momentarily suspended. Indeed, the refusal of commitment and the slow work of corruption are two sides of the same universe that usually need to be fought. One of the recurring themes of Lubitsch's films is the apparent rejection of political engagement. Thus, in Cluny Brown (1946), Belinski, presented as the heroic Czech resistance fighter who frolicks in London just before the war (Cluny Brown takes place in 1938), postpones his show of heroism for the sake of Cluny for a while... According to Lubitsch, there is a time for happiness in love and a time for courage and freedom. However, corruption is another side of the same coin. This is because the praise - even if it is apparent - of corruption is symmetrical with the refusal of commitment: corruption, a negative force, risks invading the characters, while their commitment strives to advance a just cause. Here, on the contrary, Lubitsch seems to defend a form of acceptance of corruption, just as he sometimes delays the commitment of his characters to a just cause. A counter-example immediately comes to mind. Michael Curtiz's Casablanca, made in 1942, broadcast in September when the USA is engaged in the war in Europe, highlights Viktor Lazslo (Paul Henreid), the unfailing resistance fighter who goes to the USA to transmit the spirit of fighting against the Nazis. He does so after having converted to commitment and resistance Rick (Humphrey Bogart), the American café owner who said "I don't stick my neck out for nobody" as well as the French policeman corrupted by Vichy (Captain Louis Renault, played by Claude Rains). Of course, the original couple, Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) and Viktor are preserved, but they are surpassed by Rick’s and the French Captain’s "beautiful friendship". Their duo embodied the commitment of the United States, which had just entered the conflict with free Europe. Rick's loving sacrifice is all the more magnified. In times of war, action matters more than feelings of love. On the contrary, the spectators of Cluny Brown in 1948 already knew that Nazism had been defeated and that the commitment of the British resistance had been decisive. Lubitsch could then afford a relative distance from the moment of action, an invigorating suspension of the engagement and above all, was free to describe and approve of the slow and delicious "corruption" of his characters, Belinski and Cluny.
2Cautious reserve towards commitment on the one hand and reasoned acceptance of a form of happy corruption on the other — of course, in both cases, it all depends on the specific plot situations in which these elements appear. To study the attitude of Lubitsch as a moralist, we will focus on three films: Ninotchka (1939), Heaven Can Wait (1943) and Cluny Brown (1946), with a detour to The Merry Widow (1934). These films depict a form of seduction that drives young women to renounce part of their social bearings and their moral universe: Ninotchka partly transgresses her Soviet ideals, Martha (Heaven Can Wait) leaves her milieu and, like her, Cluny runs away with her seducer (Belinsky). In each case, seduction implies transgression and a form of corruption of values that were previously respected. Three questions will be asked concerning the topic of corruption in these films: "what" turns out to be corrupt(ed), what are the "effects" of corruption and "by whom" is corruption effected? The issue of what is going to be corrupted suggests that the nature of the “target” of corruption changes the whole interpretation we can make of it. The effects of corruption, secondly, are various: corruption may turn out to be fortunate, unfortunate, useful, or revolting. And finally, we have to wonder who is corrupted and by whom in these films. In particular, this question begs an examination of the balance between genders, men and women, according to Lubitsch's insistence on the reversibility of situations.
3We shall start with a few comments on the definition of corruption. The Robert dictionary suggests different levels of meaning. Among them we find the notions of bribery (financial corruption); then the idea of depravity and moral corruption; then the association with the degradation of a substance, decay; and finally the alteration of language, judgment, taste. All these terms seem negative and they suggest that these corruptions, even in their diversity, must be fought or mitigated. A further examination of the function of corruption in Lubitsch’s films will help us to qualify this judgment.
4Our first move will be to detach ourselves from a purely negative vision of corruption. Rather, we will suggest three places of corruption (three “what?”) that imply three very different operations. Each embodiment of corruption corresponds to a different approach and judgment:
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Bribery is the first type. Baksheesh offers such a perfect example of an obviously negative and immoral corruption, through the corrupt customs officer, or the Chicago gangster, or Capra's politicians (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington).
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The natural corruption of fruits or seasons repeats its founding metaphor every year, but is very ambiguous because "Nature" shows corruption in its development before being reborn.
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Finally, the "corruption" of languages illustrates a sometimes-creative evolution via, for example, creoles or the transition from Latin to French... This time it is a happy and productive corruption.
5In Lubitsch’s films, it is easy to find examples of dishonest (negative) and creative (positive) corruption, but on different levels. Ninotchka, made in 1939, unfolds a whole itinerary of corruption. The first sequences offer a basic example with the three Russians sent by Moscow to sell the crown jewels confiscated by the Soviets. On an almost burlesque register, they let themselves be carried away by the charms of Paris: a luxurious suite at the Ritz (which will be seen in London in Cluny Brown), and men carousing with very young cigarette sellers. Léon first plays the role of the corrupt and cynical Parisian whose goal is to embezzle the money from the sale of the jewels normally destined for its redistribution in Russia. The attitude of these Russians might be shocking, but above all it is laughable. Moreover, it is preparing the slow corruption of Ninotchka herself. They thus offer a contrast effect with the "real" envoy from Moscow, a rigid ideologue of a just cause, who has nothing but contempt for the "hat" showed in a luxury window by this "corrupt" world. But Paris and Leon (Melvyn Douglas), who is the voice of Paris, begin to seduce - to corrupt - Greta Garbo who will laugh at long last. She will then lock herself alone in her huge room at the Ritz to finally put on the frivolous hat, a symbol of the superficiality of the capitalist world.
Figure 1
Ninotchka, 1939. Warner Bros.
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6Ninotchka retraces the itinerary of a corrupting seduction. First of all, the background of the title character’s mission as special envoy is established: it is about resuming a financial negotiation in order to bring back the money from the sale of the jewels confiscated by Moscow and to redistribute this money to the Russian people. But the three envoys are seduced by capitalist luxury and they deviate from the "right path": Ninotchka must bring them to heel. As is often the case, Lubitsch depicts their corruption through an image of objects, in this case the three proletarian hats on the Ritz's coat hook that a quick cross-fade transforms into top hats.
7He also uses the previous image of the actress: Greta Garbo's persona already announces haughtiness and stiffness. But her arrival on the platform of the station where the Russians are waiting for her worsens this image: she proves quite slow to appear and when an authoritarian man emerges, the Russians are sure that he is the commissar sent by Moscow: "he looks like a comrade," one of them states. The character approaches them on the platform and when he sees those who welcome him, he replies... with a Nazi salute. Is this anti-communist provocation? This is dubious, because in 1939, for Lubitsch and for many American audiences, these two worlds were not so different and this scene foreshadows the initial image of Ninotchka's Stalinist Moscow universe. Lubitsch's stay in the Soviet Union in 1936 is remembered here (see Bourget). We note that Ninotchka and Leon, whose itinerary seems to be written in advance, meet by chance in the streets of Paris and that the seduction is in no way linked to a financial or political interest. Leon seduces the beauty with whom he first falls in love as if in a reflex. Besides, we notice that Ninotchka is in control of the situation and that she easily puts the flirt in his place by simply opposing him with her cold distance and her "scientific" realism: romantic attraction is simply a matter of hormones. The chance encounter and the "materialism" displayed by the ideologue Ninotchka remind us that the love story concerns two individuals who are free to make their own choices.
8Heaven Can Wait (1943) offers other possible examples of seduction and corruption: Henry van Cleve kidnaps Martha on the day of her engagement to a dull cousin. From the beginning, we discover Martha on the phone: Henry hears her from the next cabin and it is because Martha breaks the rules by lying to her mother and pretending that she works while she is actually walking around town that Henry is attracted. Later, she makes her satisfaction clear by naming it: "You mean, elope?" It is indeed a kidnapping that is displayed in front of the entire family. When Martha remembers this moment, she admits that she was waiting for him and that she felt that the seducer was not going fast enough. Similarly, at the end of Cluny Brown, Belinski takes Cluny away from her frozen universe into which she seems to be sinking. He orders her to board the train and, once seated, Cluny throws her bonnet (pointing to her status as a maid) and apron (related to her job) out of the window: Lubitsch stages abductions as if they were as many raptures. His films are also a eulogy of happy corruption. Several characters (Ninotchka, Cluny, Andrew, Van Cleve, etc.) thus experience a gradual shift towards their fulfillment and happiness, but the films above all show the wonderful tipping point when they veer towards rapture. The canonical example is perhaps the unexpected moment when Danilo and Sonia (Maurice Chevalier and Janet McDonald), who are polar opposites, start dancing the waltz of the Merry Widow. Everything seems to tip over into the sensuality that overwhelms them. The body speaks as, later, in Ninotcha, with Garbo's laughter when she abandons herself to her true nature.
9Such are the effects of corruption that constitute the essence of the articulation with seduction. Obviously, Ninotchka's initial state, which she herself sees as a state of purity and "nature," seems to us to be a state of corruption: it shows a blindness to the Stalinism of 1939 and a waste of Greta Garbo's beauty. For viewers of the post-war years, the atmosphere of McCarthyism will make such lightness of tone much less practical, but here we are in 1939 and the question of the starting point before corruption turns into seduction is posed: what exactly is corrupted? Is there a supposedly "natural" initial state corrupted or rectified by Léon and the luxuries of Parisian life? This is Stalin's Moscow and the film takes its time to show the effects it has on the daily lives of Muscovites. Here we shall address the recurring motif of reversibility in Lubitsch's work. We have seen how Ninotchka is substitutable for a Nazi on the station platform and how life in Moscow turns out to be even more corrupt than life in Paris. Indeed, it would be a shame not to notice how sincere Ninotchka is, how she believes that her initial project is right and refuses to give it up entirely. Even if she stays in Europe, she wants to fight for her people. This is because there is a time for everything. Even the most unreliable characters can prove their worth when they really need to. Even Danilo, the Maurice Chevalier gigolo from The Merry Widow, has a sense of duty as he sets out to conquer the rich heiress to save his country. The Carmel aristocrats, in their island indifferent to Europe, will end up enlisting and the 1946 spectator knows this very well: thanks to enthusiastic young people like their son Andrew, they will win the war. Even if they are ridiculous or blind, there is something right and true in their emotions: Ninotchka is right to compare the price of a night at the Ritz with the price of a tractor that would feed the people in the Soviet Union ( "Unless we can get foreign currency to buy tractors, there'll not be enough bread for our people"). Her "Bolshevik" cause, as she sees it herself, is a just cause that she does not renounce at the end of the film. But Paris, luxury and champagne got the better of her rigidity. It does not change her horizon, but it manages to illuminate it. Above all, as Belinsky postpones his heroism, Ninotchka cries out "give us our moment", a fragile moment of intoxication and happiness shared with Leon.
10Lubitsch therefore opts for liberation and happy corruption, but he maintains the diversity of the starting points: for example, Cluny Brown's British society is blocked, everyone must keep to their allotted "place" in it, the central pivot of the film. Each class has its own universe, rules and language. To comply, the beautiful Cluny (Jennifer Jones) has ended up wanting to lock herself into the narrow world of pharmacist Wilson. So, to "corrupt" Cluny, an 18-year-old servant, is to liberate her and make her assume her desire. Similarly, in Heaven Can Wait, the seducer Henry Van Cleve abducts beautiful Martha (Gene Tierney) and thus saves her from a boring husband. Sonia, the "Merry Widow" of 1934, runs to party in Paris and Ninotchka gets drunk on champagne... So many corruptions liberating from the supposed purity of a joyless world, made obvious to the spectators.
11This take on corruption connects to the age-old debate about Nature, presented as an idyllic starting point (Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ideal Nature, but also Bossuet's) that civilization or society perverts. We know that Voltaire defended the "frivolity" (Dictionnaire Philosophique) willed by nature itself:
- 1 “To console us for our innumerable miseries, nature has made us frivolous.”
« Pour nous consoler de nos innombrables misères, la nature nous a faits frivoles »1
12But it is not this frivolity that Lubitsch is dealing with. His "frivolity" is not a desperate lucidity that takes refuge in pleasure, but the search for the truth of our desires and the possibility of a happiness that, obviously, does not exist. Thus, the combination of corruption and seduction is paradoxically a self-affirmation. Not the somewhat easy "rite of passage" of textbooks, rather a radical transgression and always a great risk: it is a question of giving substance to the more or less conscious desire of the subject, most often a woman. To know one's true "nature". So, it becomes obvious that to corrupt is to liberate. But there are traces of Calvinism in Lubitsch and the same gifts for pleasure and happiness are not shared by all characters. Cluny, Henry Van Cleve, Sonia, Ninotchka and Belinsky have this gift, which is quickly manifested; after a drink, Cluny purrs like a cat and dreams of returning to the Ritz; Ninotchka puts on her new hat and discovers champagne; Henry can't resist the nurses' charm and he dies of happiness. Of course, the spectator is fully aware of all this and participates in their rebirth. However, Wilson and other "stuck-up" groups such as the aristocrats (Carmel), the servants (Syrette) and the bourgeois (Wilson) of Cluny Brown, the New York family of Heaven Can Wait, or the Bolsheviks of Moscow, have other desires: security, conformity, power, even obedience to the Mother for Wilson. This duality in the treatment of corruption leads us to a last development focused on the “victims” of corruption.
13There are always two partners in the games of corruption and seduction. And, in these films, it is most often the desiring man who seduces the desired woman by rekindling through her a dwindling desire. Lubitsch always faces questions of gender and his films belong in their time. The world of The Merry Widow is even set in 1885, in the luxury brothel that was Maxim's in Paris at the time. The range of power relations between women and men in these films is quite rich: Danilo (Maurice Chevalier) consumes his dozens of prostitutes at Maxim's; Henry Van Cleve, a fickle husband, flirts from decade to decade; Belinsky, a somewhat mature seducer, kidnaps Cluny, a very young servant.This is almost a caricature of ordinary machismo. Yet it is not impossible to defend Lubitsch. First of all, these representations are compensated by the director’s irrepressible taste for inverted situations, for the reversibility of situations — the best example of which is probably in another family of films: To Be or Not To Be meticulously tells how a bunch of clowns (Jack Benny and the actors, full of themselves) become heroes, while the "glorious" Nazis in the film turn out to be nothing more than clowns to be fought without fear. More modestly, all viewers in 1946 know that the softly "pacifist" aristocrats of Cluny Brown (Lord Carmel) will be transformed into the heroes of 1945. This is at the heart of the telic construction of the narratives: the viewer already knows how "all this is going to end". Such a construction redeems the apparent indulgence for corruption and relies on reversibility.
14Here is another example characteristic of this Lubitschian reversibility: in The Merry Widow Danilo is attracted to the pretty Fifi who is actually Sonia, the rich widow he mistook for a prostitute at Maxim's. He then grabs her face and comments on "Not Bad" [42’00], as if she were an object. But Sonia soon returns his gesture, grabs him by the cheek and evaluates the object in turn: "not bad". Such a scene is rather promising for 1885. Above all, in this film, the real power is reversed: Sonia knows who is who and she is in control of this situation. This is not the case for her male partner, who has not understood anything. More generally, male heroes are willingly ridiculed and, for example, just when Leon is the laughing stock of the restaurant (his chair collapses under him), Ninotchka breaks up, finally laughs and discovers that she is in love.
Figure 2 and 3
The Merry Widow, 1934
15For if women are desired, they also discover themselves to be desiring. Not only when Danilo is the plaything of a dozen women, but rather when men become the midwives of female desire. A desire that is sometimes already assumed, with Angel (Marlene Dietrich) who treats herself to nights in Paris as the men of her time do — but more often than not, a dormant desire that these men help to awaken. Leon, Henry and especially Belinski are there to show the Beauty of things, as Cluny simply tells Belinski. Embarked on the train of her future life, she tells him:
« you do make one see things ».
16It is no longer so much a question of corrupting as of revealing and fulfilling those whose daily world was diminishing. Lubitsch takes us on board and helps us to see things, to find some of our buried desires. This means a desire for everyday life. Corruption thus leads to the revelation of a true nature in each person — and Lubitsch graciously invites us to work precisely on our desiring "nature".