As they fill major gaps in our appreciation of Ernst Lubitsch’s silent-era career in Hollywood, we rejoice in the Museum of Modern Art’s painstaking restoration, supported by The Film Foundation, of Forbidden Paradise (1924), Lubitsch’s only American film with Pola Negri, in its most complete version in nearly 100 years. A delightfully ahistorical costume melodrama about the erotic seductions and lonely deprivations of Empress Catherine the Great, Forbidden Paradise reveals itself to be what MoMA curator Dave Kehr calls “the first fully achieved film of Lubitsch’s mature period,” graced as it is with the comic touches and sophisticated rhythmic compositions for which Lubitsch would become legendary.
Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with funding provided by The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.