Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast worked as Parisian advisor on A Woman of Paris and as assistant director on The Gold Rush. So it’s reasonable to place his own films squarely in the School of Chaplin–particularly the Lubitsch branch emanating from A Woman of Paris. Even the title of d’Arrast’s second feature rightly suggests a spinoff. Yet for me, the caustic celebration of the carousing and deceit of a wealthy scoundrel (Adolphe Menjou) and the revenge of his servant (Nicholas Soussanin) also suggests Stroheim, above all in the sly attention to details, even if the deadly games in this case aren’t played for keeps. But maybe the most apt cross-references for d’Arrast are literary: Schnitzler here (though the literal source is a 1904 novel and a 1908 play by Roy Horniman, updated by Herman J. Mankiewicz’s brittle titles), just as the forced gaiety and jaded wealth of the subsequent Laughter evoke F. Scott Fitzgerald by way of Donald Ogden Stewart.

Jonathan Rosenbaum