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Saturday Evening Movie Thread 05/13/2023 [TheJamesMadison]

Ernst Lubitsch

There are directors who were huge in their day but just end up falling out of the collective consciousness over time. I have a theory that those that tend to last the longest in the minds of film fans over decades after their death are the ones most influenced by German Expressionism (Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Ford, just to name three). Ernst Lubitsch, born in Berlin in 1892, started in theater as a teenager and soon found himself in the nascent German film industry in the early 1910s. He directed his first feature film, Do the Dead Exist? (now lost), in 1916 and steadily became one of the most important German filmmakers. Making a series of romantic, historical epics about such figures as Madame DuBarry, Anne Boleyn, and some more fictionalized accounts based on Pharoah and such, he became world-renowned and attracted the attention of Hollywood. However, while he worked in the German film industry during the actual practice of German Expressionism, his films were never part of it. He was a much more traditionally classical filmmaker inspired visually more by people like D.W. Griffith than F.W. Murnau.

Mary Pickford, the silent star who co-founded United Artists with D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin, brought Lubitsch to America in 1923 to help her change her image from innocent waif to sexualized woman, intending him to make Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall. Lubitsch was happy to come to America, but he didn't want to make that story. They settled on the compromise project of Rosita (she was reportedly very happy with him while making it but would later try to destroy every copy and had nasty things to say about him later in life). A success, Lubitsch left Pickford behind and entered into contract with Warner Brothers where he very quickly became one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, becoming his own producer by 1925. There's a story of him working on the set of The Student Prince of Old Heidelberg starring Norma Shearer, the fiancée of MGM studio boss Irving Thalberg (Lubitsch was working for MGM at the time, having completed his contract with WB). Shearer didn't like how Lubitsch was running rehearsals, and she complained to Thalberg about it. His response was to say that if Lubitsch did it that way, then it must be the right way. Thalberg was well known for meddling at every stage of production (he was very good at it, mind you), so him just letting Lubitsch make the film his own way is significant.

Lubitsch had health problems that plagued him later in life, eventually sidelining him late in pre-production of his 1945 film A Royal Scandal that he didn't direct a day of despite having shepherded the script and managed set design and casting, the assignment going to Otto Preminger (who received sole directing credit). He was able to return to complete one more film in 1946, Cluny Brown but died eight days into filming his final film, That Lady in Ermine, with Preminger also taking over directing duties (without credit this time). He was 55 years old, and he never won an Oscar. He ended up being quite popular contemporaneously. His biggest, most important fan ended up being Billy Wilder who had a sign in his office for years that said, "How would Lubitsch do it?"

The Lubitsch Touch

The unique feel of the man's films was called The Lubitsch Touch, and if you search around the internet for a definition, you'll find several. You get a fair number of references to setting (central and Western European), types of characters (often royalty or royalty adjacent), and to the battle of the sexes. Like most filmmakers, you can't shoehorn every one of his films into the same box, but I think limiting the idea of the Lubitsch Touch to the above characteristics doesn't really capture Lubitsch's filmmaking appeal. A Royal Scandal, the first film that Preminger made for him but has all of those things listed above, is missing the touch, to be honest.

The best definition, I think, comes from Wilder in the below interview with film students. I should note really quickly that Wilder misremembers the film that the joke he describes comes from. He says it's from The Smiling Lieutenant, but it's actually from The Merry Widow.



To best illustrate what he's talking about, I think this short film called "The Clerk" (part of an anthology film titled If I Had a Million) is a great example. Starring Charles Laughton in a wordless role over the course of less than three minutes, it's an escalation until a joke, the Super Joke that Wilder references.

If I Had a Million: Lubitsch episode, starring Charles Laughton from lonchaney on Vimeo.

In reality, the trouble with defining the Lubitsch Touch is about trying to figure out how to replicate the specific feel of Lubitsch's films. I think part of the reason that there's this perception that it's impossible to replicate is that Preminger had two chances to replicate it from scripts that Lubitsch himself helped write and didn't make it happen (it's one of my small unpopular opinions, it seems, that The Lady in Ermine is better than A Royal Scandal and that the first listed actually does have some of the touch while the second is missing it completely which may have something to do with Lubitsch actually filming part of Ermine). Wilder tried to replicate it himself more than once, often in smaller ways, but the most obvious and explicit examples are The Emperor's Waltz and Avanti!. Even One, Two, Three feels a bit like it belongs in Lubitsch's pre-Code period.

Four Periods


Which leads me to talk about the distinct sections of his career. By my count there are four, and they are the German period, the American Silent period, the pre-Code period, and the Mature period. It's not a perfect delineation, though. Trouble in Paradise, a pre-Code film, feels more like it belongs in his Mature period, for example. However, in general, the periods are very different from each other.

The German period is easily my least favorite of them. Largely defined by the romantic epics mostly starring Pola Negri, the epics often have serious scripting problems like Madame DuBarry ignoring her true love for most of the film only to turn around and demand of the audience the belief that she still loves him deeply after loving her life in the French court or Anna Boleyn being completely passive in the face of Henry VIII's advances and her father's scheming for power and position. However, there are some joys to be had with the few comedies he made, mostly The Doll and The Oyster Princess which are sillier, lighter affairs that seem to mostly be the kinds of stories Lubitsch wanted to tell more than the epics.

The American Silent period contains my favorite of all his films, The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, and shows him as a talented young filmmaker who could largely make what he wanted. His largest creative block, in my opinion, for this period is that his types of comedy tended to require dialogue to help specify character and bring wit to the action, although I find it interesting that he adapted an Oscar Wilde play, Lady Windermere's Fan, and it is a very successful film. Others of this period like The Marriage Circle and So This is Paris are entertaining little films as well.

The pre-Code period is largely defined by musicals, mostly starring the pair of Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, and they are mostly really, really entertaining (the only exception is One Hour with You, a remake of The Marriage Circle that ends up missing the point of the original, unfortunately enough). However, my favorite moment in film history is the transition from silent to sound, and I'm always aware of filmmakers from the era making their first sound film, and Lubitsch's first, The Love Parade, is a remarkable sound achievement that also entertains greatly. Up until this point, the most impressive early sound achievement in my mind was Fritz Lang's M, which he made in 1931, but The Love Parade was made 2 years earlier in the earliest days of the sound era, and it's just as impressive. There are hugely talented filmmakers from the era (John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock in particular) who could not make their first full sound films work at all (Ford's, The Black Watch was plagued by a terrible directorial decision to give instruction while cameras were rolling, and Hitchcock's, Juno and the Paycock, was just a flatly shot play), but Lubitsch triumphed on his first go at it.

The pre-Code period is also defined by a certain raunchiness. Lubitsch was very rarely explicit when it came to matters of sex, but he was still pushing the envelope in terms of showing affairs within the context of the battle of the sexes. The most outrageous example is The Merry Widow, which is technically a Code Era film except that the Code was enforced too late in the post-production process so that the distributors had to make the required cuts instead of the studio which helped preserve the original film pre-cuts. There's an extended sequence in a real Parisian establishment called Maxime's (it's a set in the film that looks more like the Moulin Rouge, but there's a real place with the name) where Maurice Chevalier, thinking Jeanette MacDonald is just one of the girls who works there instead of the titular widow, takes her up to a private dining room that includes...a bed. Maxime's is an outright brothel, and yes, that got cut down as much as possible when the Hays Office saw it.

The Hays Office forced Lubitsch to really change with the implementation of strictures on the portrayals of sex on screen, and it seems to have taken him a bit of toying with things to find his way. The first film of this Mature Period is Angel, a drama starring Marlene Dietrich, a genre he didn't work in regularly (his earlier drama, Broken Lullaby is a very good, if unusual, entry in his pre-Code period). It's still a film about infidelity, but it's toned down a bit. Lubitsch often ended his films with husbands and wives remaining together, but it was the journey itself that got reduced in raunchiness (the dramatic angle of Angel helped). His next film was Bluebeard's Eighth Wife the first of two collaborations between Lubitsch and Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, and the film is a miss. The comedy doesn't quite work, and I largely blame the writing. Ninotchka the second of those two collaborations is often held up as Lubitsch's greatest work, and it's where he really found his niche in this brave new world of censorship. To Be or Not to Be, The Shop Around the Corner, and Heaven Can Wait are all restrained, witty films that don't reflect the more raucous pre-Code Lubitsch all that closely. He was changing.

His health seems to have taken an effect on him creatively because his final couple of films don't have the same kind of spark. Even Cluny Brown, a delightful little film that was his final full work, isn't really at the same level as something like The Shop Around the Corner. Though, how many films are?

Steadily Forgotten


I traffic in a few film circles, and Lubitsch is simply a non-factor in discussions. You can pull opinions from people about directors like Ford and Hitchcock pretty easily. Howard Hawks, with some prodding, can start a discussion. But Lubitsch? People outside of those who specialize in old films and almost nothing else are the only ones who can place him. Those that do know him tend to love him, but he only seems to lose fans as the years go on. And that's really unfortunate. Lubitsch is an absolute delight.

Thinking back through my reactions to his movies, the one word that came up again and again and again was "delightful". From The Doll to The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg to The Smiling Lieutenant to The Shop Around the Corner I found so much of what he made to simply be entertaining. He was mildly naughty, giving just the right kind of edge to his well-composed pieces to make them feel more than just nice, giving his work a surprisingly timeless feel to films and comedies (most impressive) that are nearly a hundred years old.

It's also interesting that the fans that do talk about him tend to focus on his Mature period. Here's a video of Peter Bogdanovich recommending four Lubitsch films, and all four are from 1939 onward, them being Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, That Uncertain Feeling, and To Be or Not to Be. Lubitsch had been making movies since 1916, movies in America since 1923, and sound films from the first introduction of the technology. He made The Smiling Lieutenant, The Merry Widow (which, to be fair, Bogdanovich made this video talking about and celebrating), The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living, So This is Paris, Lady Windermere's Fan, and The Oyster Princess. His filmography is a wealth of treasures that I highly encourage more people to explore. Limiting it to just the movies he made in the final six years of his life seems deeply unfair to the man and his work.

When I first started this run through his films, I barely knew who he was. I could point at a handful of his films (mostly the later, more famous ones), but I didn't really know what kind of films he made, their appeal, or why he was so beloved in his day. I walked away discovering a technically inventive, intelligent, and very funny director who had little concern other than to delight and entertain his audience. That he's steadily being forgotten makes me sad. That I had no real idea of who he was before disappoints me. That I know who he is now makes me very, very happy.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Knights of the Zodiac

Fool's Paradise

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Scream VI (Rating 1.5/4) Full Review "At some point someone is actually going to break some of the rules of the Scream franchise in a Scream movie where they constantly talk about breaking the rules, right?" [Paramount+]

The Shop Around the Corner (Rating 4/4) Full Review "Directing from a wonderful script by Samson Raphaelson, Lubitsch made one of his absolute finest films while evoking a kind of place he grew up in." [Library]

Ninotchka (Rating 4/4) Full Review "This is one of the triumphs of Lubitsch's body of work. Funny, touching, and involving, Ninotchka is one of his best films and a classic that really does stand the test of time." [Library]

To Be or Not To Be (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "I don't think To Be or Not to Be quite reaches the highest ranks of Lubitsch's body of work, but it's still really good and entertaining. It's just that Lubitsch's highs are so high." [Library]

Heaven Can Wait (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "As it stands, the movie is a small delight. It's the sheer strength of Lubitsch's body of work that this could be considered a minor success, though." [Library]

An American in Paris (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "That being said, I do love the film overall. It helps that the ballet is really good, but beyond that, the film is just a delight. It's fun, bright, colorful, and got a great soundtrack and effectively uses Gershwin's music from beginning to end." [Personal Collection]

Around the World in Eighty Days (Rating 2/4) Full Review "It's handsome but thin. It's colorful but dull. I can't say that I hate the work of director Michael Anderson, but that it won Best Picture I find odd." [Library]

Catch Us if You Can (Rating 3/4) Full Review The lack of clarity around the opening as well is something of a frustration, but once this film settles down, it becomes quite compelling." [Library]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 6/3, and it will talk about the directing career of John Boorman.