The Garden Of Eden is as charming and delightful a film as Hollywood ever turned out in the silent era. It's also a most curious concoction -- a light Viennese-style romantic comedy directed with a kind of gum-chewing sidewise humor that's distinctly American . . . sort of like a Lubitsch comedy as it might have been imagined by Howard Hawks.
The film is radiant with visual invention and style -- it makes its nod to Lubitsch's visual wit but eschews his delicacy . . . the visual gags here are more like carelessly tossed-off wisecracks.
The result is a perfect showcase for the marvelous Corinne Griffith, appealingly casual and fresh but capable of deeper emotional undercurrents. She was a real star. Her leading man in this contemporary Cinderella fable is Charles Ray, who's generally charming but threatens at every moment to become just a little too fey to hold his own with his formidable co-star.
As Griffith's Cinderella prepares to marry her prince, she acknowledges that almost everything she's wearing was a gift from her husband-to-be, but adds that she provided her own underwear. When complications ensue she removes the gifts defiantly and races through the wedding party in her skivvies -- and we're suddenly a very long way indeed from the subtle sexuality of Lubitsch's world. Griffith's Cinderella has the soul of a flapper, and we're relieved that her upper-class fiance has the wisdom, finally, to appreciate her for who she is . . . and she is, unmistakably, details of the narrative notwithstanding, an American girl, in her own underwear.
