How Did Lubitsch Do It?

Joseph McBride

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231546645
• Categoría: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Categoría: Storia e critica del cinema

Orson Welles called Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947) "a giant" whose "talent and originality are stupefying." Jean Renoir said, "He invented the modern Hollywood." Celebrated for his distinct style and credited with inventing the classic genre of the Hollywood romantic comedy and helping to create the musical, Lubitsch won the admiration of his fellow directors, including Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder, whose office featured a sign on the wall asking, " How would Lubitsch do it? " Despite the high esteem in which Lubitsch is held, as well as his unique status as a leading filmmaker in both Germany and the United States, today he seldom receives the critical attention accorded other major directors of his era.

How Did Lubitsch Do It? restores Lubitsch to his former stature in the world of cinema. Joseph McBride analyzes Lubitsch's films in rich detail in the first in-depth critical study to consider the full scope of his work and its evolution in both his native and adopted lands. McBride explains the "Lubitsch Touch" and shows how the director challenged American attitudes toward romance and sex. Expressed obliquely, through sly innuendo, Lubitsch's risqué, sophisticated, continental humor engaged the viewer's intelligence while circumventing the strictures of censorship in such masterworks as The Marriage Circle, Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living, Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, and To Be or Not to Be. McBride's analysis of these films brings to life Lubitsch's wit and inventiveness and offers revealing insights into his working methods.

1.1 The popular comedian Ossi Oswalda as the spoiled American rich girl in The Oyster Princess, the 1919 film in which Lubitsch found his style (frame enlargement). (Projektions-AG Union [PAGU]/Universum Film.)

1.2 Ossi in Lubitsch’s fantastical The Doll (1919), with Gerhard Ritterband as the mischievous apprentice of the creator of a sex doll modeled on her (frame enlargement). (Projektions-AG Union [PAGU]/Universum Film/Photofest.)

1

“HERR ERNST LUBITSCH”

Lubitsch’s German period tends to be eclipsed, not without reason, by his more masterly American period. But knowledge of Lubitsch’s creative development in his native land during the years just before, during, and immediately following the Great War is indispensable to understanding his overall career path. Despite the fact that many of his early films are lost or exist only in fragments, enough survive to give a good sense of his development as an artist. His German career is extensive and ambitious and features a number of marvelous achievements in different genres. In studying that phase of his work, we can trace his circuitous journey from a maker of rough-hewn knockabout comedies, wildly grotesque farces, and lavish historical spectacles to the more understated and subtle Lubitsch we know from the films of his American period.

Although some of his apprentice work in Germany was crudely executed, both as a director and as an actor, he learned quickly, and by the time he made his audacious cross-dressing satire, I Don’t Want to Be a Man, in 1918, he had developed into an important filmmaker. That and many of Lubitsch’s other German films—especially such varied and ambitious comedies as The Oyster Princess, The Doll, Kohlhiesels Töchter (Kohlhiesel’s Daughters), and Die Bergkatze (The Wildcat)—stand the test of time with their delightfully stylized satire and sharp observations of character and milieu. Lubitsch had become a star with the 1914 film Der Stolz der Firma: Die Geschichte einer Lehrlings (The Pride of the Firm: The Story of an Apprentice), directed by Carl Wilhelm, and followed it in 1916 with a similar comedy that he directed himself, Schuhpalast Pinkus (Shoe Palace Pinkus), both of which have him playing klutzy but ambitious Jewish shop clerks. While playing a string of buffoonish Jewish characters as well as other kinds of comedic roles for both himself and other directors, he was expanding his directorial horizons with more sophisticated social comedies of Berlin life, broad rustic farces, and zany stylized comic fantasies. Lubitsch also ventured into stark drama with Kammerspielfilme—a type of intimate theater on film—in Rausch (Intoxication) and Die Flamme (Montmartre). Rausch (1919, a lost film) starred Asta Nielsen and was adapted from Strindberg’s 1899 play Brott och brott (There Are Crimes and Crimes) about a playwright whose life is disrupted by drink and sexual temptations. Die Flamme, a 1923 period tragedy with Pola Negri as a Parisian demimondaine, marked the end of his German career and exists only in part today.

Lubitsch made his name internationally not with his increasingly inventive comedies or those modestly scaled dramas, however, but with the historical spectacles he made during the first years of the Weimar Republic. He took advantage of the cheap costs of labor in early 1920s Germany, when many people were unemployed due to the financial and political turmoil, to create impressive visual spectacles with grandiose sets and literally thousands of extras. Although they don’t hold up as well as the comedies, those richly textured spectacles, including Madame DuBarry, Anna Boleyn, and The Wife of Pharaoh, bring a welcome dimension of human frailty to their historical characters.

Export restrictions during the war kept German films from being seen by international audiences, and immediately after the war, their distribution was limited by anti-German prejudice in the United States and elsewhere and by the belief that foreign audiences would find them too localized in their comic appeal. Lubitsch’s frank emphasis in his spectacles on the sexual aspects of history, as well as their increasingly grand production values on a scale rivaling D. W. Griffith’s epics, helped revolutionize the film industry and led to his being summoned to Hollywood in the Roaring Twenties. Yet his German comedies, though little-seen in the United States even now, are more imaginative than his spectacles in their depictions of social mores, making them remarkably modern in their attitudes today. Paradoxically, they maintain that timelessness while capturing the frenzied topsy-turvy mood of Berlin and other parts of Germany, such as the Bavarian mountain communities, during those years of upheaval that encompassed the privations of a ruinous war and the political unrest that followed. The spectacles, though set in earlier times and other countries, also reflect the zeitgeist in their depictions of violent social unrest and the warped psychology of mobs and tyrants. Even though those films don’t confront Germany’s contemporary political turmoil directly, Lubitsch’s work from that early period of his career stands as a fascinating record of those times of turbulent social change and enables us to trace his ongoing artistic experimentation and development before his departure for America.

The Great War itself is mostly unreferenced in Lubitsch’s existing German work, although it does become the subject of his uncharacteristically grim 1932 Hollywood film The Man I Killed. But he dealt with the war in the comedy Fräulein Seifenschaum (Miss Soapsuds), which was the first film that has been definitely established and confirmed (by Lubitsch himself) that he directed. It was filmed in the summer of 1914 and released on June 25, 1915. Somewhat unusually for Lubitsch, that film made direct reference to the current political situation: women have taken over as barbers because the men are off fighting. Lubitsch, playing a young man named Ernst, falls in love with the daughter of a woman barber, a girl nicknamed Miss Soapsuds, while getting the mother in a lather. Unfortunately, the film is lost, so we cannot see how Lubitsch went about drawing comedy from the war at that early stage as he would do with the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War II in To Be or Not to Be.

Before Miss Soapsuds, Lubitsch had made his film debut as an actor in a 1913 comedy called Die ideale Gattin (The Ideal Wife). Little is known about it, not even who directed it, but a fragment turned up at the 2000 Berlinale (the Berlin International Film Festival). In it, Lubitsch plays the supporting role of a “matchmaker for fastidious gentlemen.” He was billed as “Karl Lubitsch,” which is perhaps a reflection of the wariness stage actors initially had about being seen in films. The German Lubitsch scholar Michael Hanisch reports that Lubitsch performs “crudely” in the fragment, rolling his eyes and “grimacing horribly.”

Some sources claim that Lubitsch followed Miss Soapsuds with a 1914 film called Meyer als Soldat (Meyer as a Soldier), but intriguing though that sounds as a possible satire of jingoism, no records can be found that it was actually made. Lubitsch believed that comedy could convey the essence of war more meaningfully than the usual gory battle films; he once said he thought the best filmic depiction of World War I was Charles Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms (1918). Lubitsch tried his hand at an antiwar comedy with The Wildcat in 1921 even if it is carefully distanced from reality by its fantastical mountain setting. The film was a flop, and he later blamed its rejection on “German audiences [being] in no mood to accept a picture which satirized militarism and war.”

Lubitsch’s German comedies, lighthearted though they may be, are no less political than his historical spectacles. The timeless quality of his comedies and the freshness they maintain today stem from their artificiality, their careful distancing from the mundane reality on the streets, and their concentration on human emotions rather than ideology. But their acute social satire is also firmly rooted in the social context of a rapidly changing world. Lubitsch is able to observe that world clearly with his characteristic duality of perspective, that of someone who did not quite belong yet yearned for social acceptance. Andrew Sarris wrote of Lubitsch in The American Cinema, “We shall never see his like again because the world he celebrated had died—even before he did—everywhere except in his own memory.” Sarris was referring, in part, to Lubitsch’s many cinematic evocations of the old Europe, the periods from before and during his youth that he depicts affectionately but also critically. Lubitsch’s historical spectacles do not “celebrate” older times, which he tends to depict with a harsher perspective than he uses in his comedies. But the way the spectacles sweep us back in time is due to his ability to vividly reimagine the past through his highly personal lens. These films fulfill the audience’s need to escape their unsettled present into a past that is equally unsettled yet nevertheless represented with some longing for the grandiose trappings of those civilizations shown in the process of collapse.

The lighter world Lubitsch celebrates on-screen in his comedies and musicals often encompasses the dying days of the Wilhelmine and Austro-Hungarian Empires. The prewar Kaiserreich of Wilhelm II provided an incongruously grand and old-fashioned architectural backdrop, with its stately stone buildings and broad tree-lined boulevards, for his early slapstick comedies filmed in Berlin. Architecturally, as Barbara Tuchman notes, Berlin in that era was “new and not beautiful. It belonged in style to what in America was called the Gilded Age. Its main public buildings, streets and squares, built or rebuilt since 1870 to house suitably the new national grandeur, were heavily pretentious and florid with gilding.… Society, owing to the lack of intercourse between its rigidly maintained categories, was stiff and dull.” Lubitsch’s irreverent comedies in both Germany and Hollywood mock, sometimes gently, sometimes not, the institutions and traditions of the world that some Germans would refer to after the war as die gute alte Zeit (the good old days).

Lubitsch’s 1929–1934 Hollywood musicals, mostly set in the past or in mythical kingdoms, tend to portray a fantasy of Europe before the fall. More precisely, he goes outside time to depict an imaginary world of vanished Belle Epoque European royalty and luxury. His cinematic operettas employ his characteristic blend of mockery and nostalgia to ambivalently convey the notion of prewar nobility. The reality, of course, was messier and largely ignoble. The world of the prewar empire he had grown up in was an uneasy blend of decadence, rapidly evolving social mores, traditional social structures precipitously nearing collapse, and artistic innovation. It was a time when the social pressures of the new century were building up against the ancien régime and straining the rigidly stratified German class system. Those factors of change were compounded by the rising nationalistic fervor that would contribute to the breakout of war in 1914 and the social unrest and governmental upheavals that followed the 1918 armistice.

In the years leading up to the cataclysm, young people of Lubitsch’s generation were becoming even more restless and dissatisfied than youths naturally are. The right-wing historian Michael Stürmer, an admirer of the imperial regime, concedes,

When those customs and traditions that have governed people’s lives for centuries die, there is bound to be anxiety and fear of the future.… A new, lighter lifestyle was emerging.… A wave of alienation swept middle-class youths, who found official Germany, especially in its Prussian variety, both ridiculous and deplorable. A radical chic also emerged, idealistic more than hedonistic, among young men and women who loved themselves and the art world and who felt pity for the strict conventions of their parents. For them decadence was not a menace, but a new, soft and sensitive form of life.

The war accelerated those social changes, and their effects are felt in Lubitsch’s work; they helped spur his creativity and keep him artistically in tune with the times. His aesthetic distance from political issues has fooled some of his critics into thinking him apolitical. But the deep questioning of old sociopolitical traditions was bound to have a powerful effect on his life and art. Even if his artificial life in the theater and in film studios in the years before, during, and after the war helped insulate him to some extent from what was happening around him, he could not help being sensitive to the privations, violent social transformations, and jagged rhythms of the era. The effect of this social ferment on his forming personality was all the more pronounced because he was an outsider to that world of German tradition—someone on the other side of the window looking in, a Jewish member of the middle class and a Russian citizen raised in the garment district of Germany’s grand capital.

When the war finally broke out, Lubitsch found himself not only a member of a small ethnic minority group but also a citizen of an enemy power, although he and his family do not seem to have suffered for that particular reason. There was plenty of suffering to go around for all civilians in Germany from inflation, food shortages, and disease. Lubitsch had to have been acutely aware of the precariousness of his particular social position in Berlin during wartime. As both an actor and a director, he became known for an irreverence that reflected the ambiguities of that position and flaunted his outsider status even as he was gradually moving up in the cultural world of Berlin. His status was a curious combination of the popular but disreputable (as an actor and director in the new medium of the movies) and the more reputable (as a member, however humble, of the esteemed Reinhardt company).

With Lubitsch’s cultural background in mind, it is evident that the ambivalence his films retrospectively display toward the old-world European nobility and moneyed tradition is composed of equal parts wish-fulfillment and emotional detachment. This is true whether the films are set before the war or in mythical kingdoms existing in a sort of artistic universe parallel to the modern reality outside the borders of the film’s frame. Lubitsch satirizes the class distinctions of that bygone or mythical world while still depicting its customs and most of its people with affection, a blend that gives his films a rich complexity of tone. Indeed, his surrogate characters, such as the palace functionaries played by Maurice Chevalier, are often caught in class conflicts stemming from their own ambiguous situations vis-à-vis the world of nobility. Lubitsch’s complex cinematic nostalgia makes it clear that his artistic fascination with those opulent aristocratic settings stems from both his regretful recognition that he did not belong to such a society and a resentment of his exclusion.

Even in Lubitsch’s romantic musical comedies, we can discern a certain manic need to amuse and be amused, a need for acceptance. Lubitsch’s continual return to the closed world of nobility that he, as a doubly exiled Jew, could not enter can be seen as the sign of a blocked attempt to keep repeating an act of fealty in the vain hope that the kings and princes, the uniformed nobles, and their grandly gowned women would eventually allow him entrance, that they would welcome this brash upstart as an equal. He knew that such a thing could not happen in reality, but his artificial world was something he could access at will. By conjuring up his mythical-kingdom fantasies and other glamorous European comic idylls, he invites us into a world that he, the banished Jew, actually, if covertly, rules. His cinematic vision in these regions of his richly varied body of work is that of a society that is basically petty but amusing, one he can manipulate and mock or indulge because he is social director of its ridiculous ritualized extravaganzas. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who killed himself in 1940 while attempting to escape from the Nazis, believed that we can reshape the past to some extent, that nostalgia can be revolutionary. Works of art, Benjamin proposed, can give new meaning to history, even if they cannot reverse it. That is a partially triumphal, partially melancholy response to the problem of the dominance of the past. Lubitsch’s reshaping and immortalizing of prewar European history exemplifies that dual notion.

His delightfully ...