Ctva 310. History of American Cinema: Readings Dr. John Schultheiss Department of Cinema and Television Arts

––Ernst Lubitsch

But he could barely earn a living in Reinhardt's company, and in 1913, young Lubitsch agreed to act in the movies to augment his income. He played a character named Meyer, a good-natured Jewish klutz who bungles even the simplest of tasks but eventually manages to triumph over great odds, for which he is often rewarded with not only the boss's daughter in marriage but also half the business. Drawing heavily on popular Yiddish lore, Lubitsch continued with his persona through a number of cheerful one-reelers, and by 1914 he was one of the most popular movie comics in Germany. In this year too he assumed the duties of writer and director of the Meyer shorts. In 1915 he graduated to feature-length comedies. Few of these earlier works have survived, and those that have are not much admired by movie critics and historians.

In 1918, his producer introduced him to the tempestuous young Polish actress, Pola Negri, and together they persuaded Lubitsch to be her director. Weary of being typecast as the Jewish bumpkin, he finally gave up on his ambition to be an actor and concentrated his energies on directing. Hans Kraly became his regular scenarist and was to remain with him for seventeen years. Another newcomer, Emil Jannings, was also a Lubitsch regular, and eventually Negri and Jannings became important box office attractions in the silent cinema, working in America as well as the Continent. On the basis of their work together, Negri and Lubitsch became a famous star-director team, the most popular in Europe. Their vehicles were mostly costume spectacles, loosely based on historical characters, and directed in the Reinhardt manner, with an emphasis on pictorial richness, striking lighting effects, and a rhythmical stylization of crowd scenes. Such lavishly mounted movies as Carmen (1918), Madame Dubarry (1919), and Anna Boleyn (1920) were immensely popular.

By the early 1920s, Lubitsch was Europe's leading director, working out of UFA, Germany's best-equipped and most prestigious studio. He had directed over three dozen movies, most of them successful and some of them international hits. But he wanted more. In war-devastated Europe, the big time meant Hollywood, which dominated 80 percent of the world's screens. Lubitsch was not long in waiting. In 1922, Mary Pickford, the world's top female star, offered him a contract. She was tired of playing pubescent girls and wanted the sophisticated Lubitsch to guide her through a more mature phase of her career, one more in keeping with the Jazz Age, not to speak of her chronological age. (Little Mary was thirty.) Lubitsch had proved a sympathetic woman's director in the Negri vehicles, and Pickford had hopes that he could perform a similar function for her.

He accepted her offer, little realizing that America's Sweetheart had a will so fixed that even the imperious Negri paled in comparison. After some disagreement on a story, they finally settled on a romantic Spanish comedy. Although Pickford and Lubitsch liked each other personally, they were unable to agree on an approach: She expected a star vehicle; he wanted to make a Lubitsch film. The result, Rosita (1923), satisfied neither of them, and the headstrong star later described it as "the worst picture, bar none, that I ever made." Actually, the film was a modest success at the box office. It taught Lubitsch a valuable lesson early in his American career: The way to make a Lubitsch movie is to avoid powerful stars and use unknown actors who'll do what they're told.

The Pickford connection severed by mutual consent, Lubitsch then signed a five-year contract with Warner Brothers, which at this time was not a prestigious studio. The Warners probably hired him to give their organization a touch of class, which it sorely lacked, their claim to fame resting chiefly with their Rin Tin Tin movies. The front office wisely decided to let their house genius make films his own way, as long as they were reasonably commercial. There followed a series of sparkling comedies which firmly established Lubitsch's artistic reputation. Most of them did moderately well at the box office and were praised by respected critics, thus garnering for Warner Brothers a considerable amount of prestige.

Lubitsch was strongly influenced by A Woman of Paris (1923), Chaplin's only non-comic film. Upon seeing it, Lubitsch realized that the most telling cinematic effects can be communicated indirectly, by alluding to, rather than dramatizing explicitly, a fact or relationship. Chaplin used understatement throughout the movie, commenting obliquely on the plight of his fate-ridden characters. The story per se isn't what matters most but the subtle intelligence of the storyteller. The camera need not be expository and neutral but could serve as an ironic commentator, pointing out information beyond the consciousness of the characters. "I feel that an intelligent man speaks to me," Lubitsch observed of Chaplin's directorial techniques. Although many of his previous movies contained ironic and satiric touches, it wasn't until seeing Chaplin's film that Lubitsch began to conceive of his stories from an ironist's perspective. In short, by intruding overtly into the narrative materials, the director can establish a sly complicity between himself and his audience. The seed of the celebrated "touch" was planted. Beginning with The Marriage Circle (1924), it blossomed suddenly and flourished for two decades.

What exactly is the Lubitsch touch? Herman Weinberg, the foremost authority on the subject, points out that it's a mock-heroic, skeptical undercutting––a knowing wink to the audience at the expense of the characters. In the credit sequence of The Merry Widow (1934), for example, Lubitsch ridicules the insignificance of the tiny principality in which the story is set by showing a map of Europe, with a hand holding a magnifying glass in a futile effort to locate the setting. Lubitsch is seldom severe in his satire: He's too genial and civilized to maintain a hard line. He punctures the vanities of his characters, not to demean them, but to make them more human, more like us. In the musical, One Hour With You (1932), the philandering husband (Maurice Chevalier) sings a song explaining his sexual infidelity of the previous night. "What would you do?" he sings plaintively to the camera, to us. "Well, I did too!" is his chagrined response––all without losing a beat.

The touch can take many forms: a malicious close-up of an incongruous detail, an edited juxtaposition, a raised eyebrow. Among his favorite targets are sex, money, snobbery, politics, and stuffiness. Though sex was his favorite topic by far, Lubitsch never had problems with censors because he seldom spelled things out. Some of his most risqué scenes are suggestive, not because of what's shown, but because of what's left out. Trouble in Paradise (1932), perhaps his greatest film, features a witty juxtaposition of shots to suggest a sexual liaison. The setting is Venice. Two elegantly dressed people (Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall), magnetically attracted to each other, are seen sitting on a couch. Then there is a shot of the empty couch, with the lights dimmed; next a shot of the apartment door, with a "Do Not Disturb" sign hanging on it; a final shot of a gondola plowing into a darkened tunnel of a canal. What was there to censure? The Lubitsch touch is elusive precisely because it's allusive.

At its best, the touch is a way of exposing the inconsistencies of the characters––their vulnerabilities, their low cunning, and their efforts to preserve their dignity. In Trouble in Paradise, he reveals these contradictions with rapier-like deftness, often without a word being spoken. In one scene, for example, Lily (Hopkins) is packing a suitcase, preparing to abscond with the riches she and her con-man lover Gaston (Marshall) have taken from the wealthy Mme. Colet (Kay Francis). Lily is happily tra-la-la-ing as she packs. At the appointed time, she calls up Gaston, who is presumably finishing up at Mme. Colet's. No answer. Strange. Lily returns to her packing, her tra-la-las considerably diminished in intensity and brio. She narrows her eyes suspiciously: Mme. Colet is, after all, an extraordinarily beautiful woman . . . indeed, a ravishing creature, truth to tell. The tra-la-las are barely audible, limping after her thoughts. Shaking her head in self-reproach, she resumes her packing and her brisk tra-la-las. But once again she reconsiders, trying to stifle her worst––and well-founded––suspicions about her partner. And so on, through a variety of tra-la-las, each of which reveals yet another facet of this all-too-human charmer.

The legitimate theatre provided most of the major influences on Lubitsch's movies, particularly in terms of genre and style. Once he arrived in America, he abandoned the operatic style of Reinhardt in favor of a simpler, sparer mise-en-scène. Such comedies of manners as Congreve's The Way of the World, Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest, and Shaw's Man and Superman became his new models. Derived from the works of Molière, this genre flourished on the English stage from the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 to the middle of the eighteenth century. In a modified form the genre was revived in the late nineteenth century by such dramatists as Wilde and Shaw. It is associated with the upper classes (which comprised its principal audiences) and satirizes their follies in fashions, manners, and values. A few of Lubitsch's works are adaptations of these stage classics: Lady Windermere's Fan (1925) is based on an Oscar Wilde play; Design for Living (1933), on a comedy by Noel Coward.

[Definition of Comedy of Manners] Relieved of such mundane considerations as having to earn a living, the characters of the comedy of manners concern themselves with matters of style. Wit, elegance, and urbanity are their ideals, especially in such rituals as courtship and sexual dalliance. The plays are characterized by an air of refined cynicism, most notably in the dialogue, which emphasizes a sparkling, epigrammatic polish. Women are portrayed as the equals of men in most respects, and in their repartee they're often superior. The heroines are sophisticated in sexual matters––at least in word, if not always in deed. Like most neoclassical genres, the theatrical comedy of manners abounds in neat symmetries, ingenious recapitulations, and parallels of every variety. Instead of one pair of lovers, there are usually two and sometimes three. Sexual triangles are common and are often cleverly juxtaposed with other triangles. The rococo plots, despite their complexity, are manipulated with delicacy and finesse. The comedy of manners has seldom enjoyed the patronage of mass audiences, either on the stage or in the movies, in part because of its implicit contempt for middle-class values.

Dramatists catering to bourgeois audiences created a more satisfying imitation of the comedy of manners in the so-called Boulevard Theatre [Definition], which flourished in Paris from the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1920s. Such popular playwrights as Sardou, Labiche, Feydeau, and de Najac provided a steady stream of "naughty" farces, revolving usually around themes of marital infidelity. Ingeniously crafted, the pièce bien faite, or well-made play, is less literary than the comedy of manners, emphasizing action rather than verbal virtuosity. Farce specializes in a more physical form of humor, in which a desperate urgency propels the characters into increasingly more bizarre situations. Comic props, like letters, a hat, or an incriminating pair of gloves, reappear perversely throughout the action, embarrassing their guilt-ridden owners and forcing them into ever more improbable flights of mendacity. The settings for such farces are often boudoirs or hotel lobbies, where gentee1 lechers dash behind doors just moments before being discovered by suspicious spouses or lovers or both. The reversals and counter-reversals in the plots are dizzying in their rapidity, and most of the laughs are prompted by the adroitness with which the characters keep one step ahead of the game.

Industry regulars were amazed at how Lubitsch would buy up the rights to some obscure eastern European play and transform this sow's ear into a silk purse. Most of these plays were crude imitations of French originals, though Lubitsch sometimes raided the real thing too. Kiss Me Again (1925), for example, is based on Divorçons (Let's Get a Divorce) by Sardou and de Najac. Lubitsch seldom preserved much from his original sources––an idea, a situation, perhaps an amusing novelty. He was concerned with plots only insofar as they allowed him to reveal character, which was his main interest. The conventions of the pièce bien faite are found throughout his movies, sometimes fused with those of other genres. In general, the earlier films tend toward the comedy of manners, whereas the later works, like Ninotchka (1939) and To Be or Not to Be (1942) are more indebted to the farces of the Boulevard Theatre. Most of the movies are set abroad: Paris, London, Vienna, or a mythical kingdom "somewhere in eastern Europe." Americans liked to believe that they were too wholesome to lead a decadent existence, and Lubitsch, glad to oblige, seldom used native locales. "The American public," he once said, "the American public with the mind of a twelve-year-old, you know––it must have life as it ain't."

Lubitsch lifted the use of doors from classical French farce and transformed this motif into a trademark. Indeed, one of Pickford's pet exasperations about the director concerned his obsession with doors, which are used as comic symbols of concealment, deception, and untold but unseen pleasures. Monte Carlo (1930) contains a famous scene in which the lively heroine (Jeanette MacDonald) oohs and ahs voluptuously as her male "hairdresser" casually gives her a massage. Lubitsch then cuts to a shot outside the room, where the maid listens lasciviously at the door, her eyes wide in awe at the presumed debaucheries within. Standard farcical props, like reappearing hats, scarves, canes, and other telltale impedimenta also abound in his movies.

Lubitsch didn't introduce the comedy of manners to the screen; he only refined and polished the genre. Immediately after World War I, films dealing with the absurdities of the idle rich grew in popularity. Before Lubitsch, the genre was dominated by Cecil B. De Mille, whose works in this vein are often amusing, though they lack the elegance and bite of those of Lubitsch. Inspired by the example of De Mille, a number of American filmmakers explored the new sophisticated attitude toward sex in a profusion of Jazz Age comedies. The titles speak for themselves: Dancing Mothers, Dancing Daughters, Male and Female, Don't Change Your Husband, Why Change Your Wife?, Strictly Unconventional, and so on. Such flapper stars as Gloria Swanson, Clara Bow, and young Joan Crawford were considered the last word in feminine emancipation. But for all her defiance of social convention, the flapper was a true American innocent––at least on the screen. As critic Molly Haskell has pointed out, the flapper might smoke, drink, and attend wild parties, but beneath the flamboyance, she's as chaste as her prewar mother.

The Lubitsch heroine, on the other hand, is disarmingly lecherous, and there's nothing coy about her either. Like Shaw's New Woman, on whom she's partly modeled, she is often the sexual aggressor in a relationship. Several are rulers of petty principalities, and as such they can select their consorts without the pretense of being "modest" about such matters. Social reversals of this sort afforded Lubitsch the opportunity of satirizing sexual role playing and stereotypes. Some of the heroines are married but restless, and they initiate intrigues without embarrassment or such bourgeois encumbrances as a guilty conscience. A few of his characters are older women––poised, mysterious, gently amused at the clumsiness of admiring young males. Even the unmarried females are clearly women and not girls. Unlike the American flapper, the Lubitsch heroine––almost invariably European––doesn't make a rebellious show of her worldliness, which she wears with the same nonchalance as she wears her gowns. Confident and independent, she is almost never conventional in her behavior. At a dinner party he once attended, the director listened impatiently as a British actor extolled the homely virtues of old-fashioned women, especially their artless simplicity and modesty. In his thick German accent, Lubitsch finally quipped, "Who vants dat?" Certainly not Lubitsch, for he preferred women with backbone and bite. The Lubitsch heroine doesn't permit men to define her nature, which is primarily why they find her so alluring. Generally more quick-witted and realistic than the males, they are shrewdly aware of the economic realities of existence––though there's often a touch of dreaminess about them too.

But to speak of the Lubitsch heroine is to imply a lack of diversity, which is far from true. Few American directors could match the variety of his females, ranging from the slightly bitchy to the sublimely ethereal. A good example of the former is the flirtatious Mizzi in The Marriage Circle and its musical remake, One Hour with You. Unhappily married and contemptuous of conventional morality, she seduces her best friend's husband and even taunts him for his guilty scruples. In the middle of a party she lures him off to a darkened terrace, where they embrace and kiss. His bowtie askew from their groping, he asks her to tie it for him, fearful lest his wife or the other guests might become suspicious. With a malicious twinkle in her eye, she reties it, kisses him again, then saucily unties it, leaving him stranded helplessly on the terrace. So much for the hypocrisies of the respectable male.

Not all Lubitsch's heroines are so brazen. Most of them, like the characters played by Miriam Hopkins and the musical heroines played by Jeanette MacDonald, are sportsmanlike and endearingly funny. They're certainly among the most charming heroines of the American cinema––headstrong and not quite ladylike but wonderfully feminine for all their aggressive high spirits. They're quick talkers, especially when they suspect men are trying to take advantage of them, and they're alarmingly prone to calling a spade a spade––usually at some suitably public moment. Resourceful and adventurous, they are basically a romantic lot but smart enough to realize that the doers rather than the dreamers fare best in life. Some are exquisitely subtle in their eroticism, such as the roles played by Kay Francis in Trouble in Paradise, Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, and Carole Lombard in To Be or Not to Be. More sensitive, romantic, and aristocratic than Lubitsch's other heroines, these wistful creatures are also more likely to end with their dignity intact.

Of course the appeal of the Lubitsch heroine is due in large part to the charm of his actresses. After his Pickford fiasco he tended to favor little-known or off-beat performers. Reviewers often noted how his players had never acted so well in the movies of other directors. Irene Rich, who plays the worldly older woman in Lady Windermere's Fan, was never lucky enough to get another role requiring so much of her artistry. Kay Francis, the graceful Mme. Colet in Trouble in Paradise, was wasted in a series of Warner Brothers potboilers for most of her career. The Love Parade (1929) introduced Jeanette MacDonald, who became the director's favorite singing actress, and she performs with engaging spontaneity in a number of Lubitsch musicals. Unfortunately, her artistic reputation and star status were based more on the saccharine operettas she made at MGM later in her career. Teamed with the baritone Nelson Eddy, this glossily embalmed duo became known in the trade as the Iron Butterfly and the Singing Capon.

When Lubitsch worked with established stars, mostly in the later part of his career, the results were mixed. Garbo considered him the only great director she ever worked with. Shrewdly incorporating his star's sober brusqueness as part of her early character in Ninotchka, Lubitsch then revealed a facet of her personality few would have expected: "Garbo Laughs!" the advertisements proclaimed, and audiences laughed with her, delighted that such a mysterious woman could also be funny. In other movies, Lubitsch was less fortunate. The Student Prince (1927), an Irving Thalberg production for MGM, was badly miscast (by Thalberg), with the unexciting Norma Shearer (Mrs. Thalberg) in the starring role. In his final years, Lubitsch's casting instincts began to desert him. Gene Tierney in Heaven Can Wait (1943) is beautiful but dull. Even more disastrous in Cluny Brown (1946) is Jennifer Jones, whose neurotic, overwrought mannerisms are at odds with the heroine's whimsical freshness. Never had he been strapped with an actress so utterly humorless.

Lubitsch was immensely good-natured, which in part explains his popularity within the industry. He never did shake his comical German accent, and in his physical demeanor he was what his father stoically prophesied. Like his characters, he was a study in contradictions. Childlike in his enthusiasm, he could also be pretty cynical. He was celebrated for the airiness of his style and his virtuosity as a technician, but his favorite movie was Vittorio De Sica's powerful masterpiece of realism, Shoeshine, in which the technique is virtually invisible. Though he projected an air of affable jokiness, Lubitsch was a man of considerable cultivation. He was interested in new ideas, followed important developments in the arts and in politics, and included among his friends some of the most intellectually stimulating residents of Hollywood––of which there were many, especially during the 1930s, when the community was swelled with well-educated refugees from Hitler's Europe.

Critic Robert E. Sherwood was among the first to point out that Lubitsch's standing within the industry contrasted sharply with the stereotyped image of the Hollywood dream factory: “The veneration that it lavished upon Lubitsch has been out of all proportion to the size of his grosses." He worked for five of the major studios in Hollywood and seldom complained of his treatment, for he was almost always left free from interference. Within the trade, it was clear he was a special case. Several of his movies, including Trouble in Paradise and The Shop Around the Corner (1940), he produced as well as directed. Among his peers, he was considered a director's director, too subtle perhaps for general audiences, but champagne for the cognoscenti.

Much of his mature work was done at Paramount Pictures, widely regarded as the most sophisticated studio in Hollywood and particularly receptive to comedy. In addition to the films of Lubitsch, Paramount could also boast the comedies of De Mille, the movies of Mae West, much of W. C. Fields, the early (and best) Marx Brothers, the screwball comedies of Mitchell Leisen and Preston Sturges, the popular Bing Crosby-Bob Hope vehicles, and the early works of Billy Wilder. Throughout the 1930s, the studio was often in financial difficulties, but it nonetheless refused to skimp on production values. Paramount movies were usually handsomely mounted: Polished but seldom vulgar or overproduced, they emphasized a simple elegance in their design, thanks largely to their gifted art director, Hans Dreier. UFA was Paramount's sister studio, and Dreier, like many Paramount regulars, was German-trained. Lubitsch signed with the studio in 1926, and in 1935 he served as production chief for two years, a job he apparently disliked. His contract expired in 1938, at which time he free-lanced with several other studios. He ended his career as a producer-director at 20th Century-Fox.

Of all the American silent directors, Lubitsch was the most graceful in his sound debut. A gifted amateur musician (like Chaplin he was self-taught), he decided in 1929 to make the transition to talkies with a musical, The Love Parade, which critic Theodore Huff described as "the first truly cinematic screen musical." Like his French counterpart René Clair, Lubitsch refused to anchor his camera in deference to the microphone. Many of his most clever effects were shot silent, with sound dubbed in later. His editing retained all its pre-talkie fluidity. He saw no reason why sound had to be synchronous with the visuals except in important dialogue scenes, and not always even then. Often he used sound in ironic contrast with his images. In short, the Lubitsch touch could be aural as well as visual.

More indebted to the traditions of the Viennese comic operetta than to the jazz and Tin Pan Alley idioms of most American musicals, Lubitsch's works in this genre are light, delicate, and incorrigibly parodic. Even while he's exploiting the conventions of the operetta form, he simultaneously zaps their patent silliness. The self-parody of such early musicals as Monte Carlo and The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) is part of their loony charm. The justly famous "Beyond the Blue Horizon" sequence from Monte Carlo is a good example of Lubitsch's mastery of the new mixed medium. While the heroine (Jeanette MacDonald) sings cheerily of her optimistic expectations, Lubitsch provides us with a display of technical bravura. Shots of the speeding train which carries the heroine to her destiny are choreographed with close-ups of the whirring locomotive wheels in rhythmical syncopation with the huffing and the tooting and the chugging of the train. Unable to resist a malicious fillip, Lubitsch even has a chorus of suitably obsequious peasants chime in with the heroine in a triumphant reprise as the train plunges past their fields in the countryside. The sequence is both exhilarating and outrageously funny. Observed critic Gerald Mast, "This visual-aural symphony of music, natural sound, composition, and cutting is as complex and perfect an example of montage-in-sound as Eisenstein's editing devices in Potemkin were of montage in silents."

Only Hitchcock exceeded Lubitsch in the thoroughness with which his scripts were prepared. He collaborated on the screenplays of all his movies and wanted every detail worked out in advance. "In my mind's eye I can see exactly how that film will appear on the screen," the director once wrote of his working methods, "down to the very last raising of an eyelid." Samson Raphaelson referred to Lubitsch as "the most literary of directors," one who profoundly respected and understood the art of writing. To a great extent, Raphaelson pointed out, the movie was in the screenplay: "Lubitsch prepared a foolproof script that you'd say almost any director could direct." A Broadway dramatist in his own right, Raphaelson wrote or coauthored the scripts to nine of Lubitsch's sound films, including One Hour with You and Trouble in Paradise. Critic Richard Corliss believes that Raphaelson "created the most highly polished and perfectly sustained comedy style of any Hollywood screenwriter."

Lubitsch's cinematic disciple, Billy Wilder, worked at Paramount as a writer early in his career, and on loan-out to MGM, he contributed substantially to the screenplay of Ninotchka. Though Lubitsch treated his writers with affection and professional courtesy, he prodded them constantly to refine the dialogue and make the action "more hilarious." Wilder recalled how Lubitsch would use his writers as catalysts: