The
title is nearly As I Lay Dying, rather
more as a matter of fact, As I Lay Dead.
Lubitsch portrays Ernst,
Ernst Lubitsch, it’s a custom of the silents to be
oneself on occasion, or nearly.
A game at the chess club
calls him away, his mother-in-law locks him out.
They think he’s dead, he answers an ad for a valet, in disguise.
Who falls for him but
the mother-in-law and is sent packing?
Three-quarters of the
film remains at present, intermittently.
“I wear the pants in
this house,” he says.
“You mean the
underpants,” the mother-in-law says, regarding him.
Schuhpalast Pinkus
A Mozart
of the shoe trade, whose expulsion from school and dismissal from one shoe shop
leads to his hiring at another, where the art of selling shoes to women begins
to dawn, and that prepares the great revelation.
The beautiful footwear
is credited right after the stars to Emil Jacobi’s Berlin firm, Friedrichstr., Taubenstr.
Das fidele Gefängnis
A fast
three acts of Straussian comedy on married life in half the time, five reels.
The
wife’s suitor goes to jail for a kiss, the roving husband is unmasked at a
costume ball, the drunken perspective gives the maid
away at last.
The
German titles, the charm of its realism, the bravura enjoyment of the players,
make The Jolly Jail enchanting.
The Eyes of the
Mummy
Die Augen
der Mumie Ma is clearly inspired by one of those tourist
paintings (John Singer Sargent, even) depicting a dancing girl in Egyptian
garb, the rest can be deduced.
Variety was not alone
in its infamous condemnation, such things were fashionable.
Ma (Pola Negri) works the eyes in a tomb, the painter Albert Wendland (Harry Liedtke) rescues
her and smites her keeper Radu (Emil Jannings).
She’s a hit at the Alhambra à la Scheherazade, Radu
is brought to Europe by Prince Hohenfels, stabs Wendland’s painting of Ma, then kills her and himself.
“Too late!”, Wendland
says, finding her body.
Gypsy Blood
The remarks in Picture
Play are rather perceptive and deserve to be cited extensively.
“...until you see Pola Negri, you never have seen a
real, honest-to-badness Carmen. Ernest Lubitsch, who also directed Passion, has drawn the screen story from
the novel by Prosper Mérimée and not from the ‘doctored’ libretto of Bizet’s
opera.
“Carmen, as she is depicted on the operatic stage,
is a beautiful, elegantly gowned and high-spirited gypsy girl who is just a bit
of a flirt. Triana, the gypsy quarter of Seville, is a colorful but clean
place. The cabaret, conducted by Lillas Pastia, looks like a modern Palais de
Danse and the smugglers are like irreproachable gentlemen garbed for a fancy
dress ball.
“Lubitsch and Pola Negri have discarded all the
tinsel and trappings. La Carmencita, as played by Miss Negri, is a
disreputable, low-down and rowdy gypsy girl. Her clothes are in atrocious
taste, her finery is shabby, and her morals are unquestionable. That is to say,
they are unquestionably bad. Miss Negri doesn’t try to look pretty, play to the
camera, or attempt to be alluring. She simply gives a marvelously faithful
picture of a vulgar, ignorant and wanton gypsy girl.
“Triana is shown as a down-at-the-heels and filthy
slum. The cabaret of Lillas Pastia is transformed into an ugly saloon, and the
smugglers are a set of regular crooks. Even Don José is no hero. He is merely a
Spanish peasant who is foolish enough to be taken in by the wiles of an
elemental and primitive girl.”
Lubitsch’s dramatic analysis is very useful and
deserves, in its turn, the rememoration by Sternberg in The Devil Is a Woman, Wilder in A
Foreign Affair, Lang in Moonfleet,
and himself as the basis in a roundabout way of The Love Parade.
A key film for Lubitsch, enchantingly realized with
great precision, typically.
Meyer aus Berlin
Upon doctor’s orders, earnestly entreated by
himself, he must into free Nature go, even leaving behind the maid, away from
his wife, to the Tyrol.
Garbed for this, bergstock
and all, Meyer from Berlin takes the No. 11, eventually reaching the hotel and
a young affianced beauty, rather mountainous, who writes of him to her
betrothed as “harmless”.
They climb the Watzmann and spend the night in the berghütte, joined unbeknownst by wife and fiancé.
“Have you ever been up the Watzmann,” Meyer asks
the fiancé next morning. The answer is negative. “Then you can’t really discuss
it, can you?”
The title role is played by Lubitsch.
Madame DuBarry
The original of Rosita.
“One of the pre-eminent motion pictures of the
present cinematographic age” (New York
Times).
According to Film4,
“it lacks the sparkle this material needs.”
Melbourne Cinematheque,
“one of the milestones of silent cinema.”
Cp. The Eyes of the Mummy, with the same
leading players.
The Doll
Being an English version by Kino
of Die Puppe, with amateur titles and piano music replacing the
originals.
Which is very funny, because it’s
about a shy young man who marries a mechanical doll to give his dowry to a
monastery that hides him from forty count ‘em forty women after his
knee-shaking self, nephew to the Baron.
The director personally erects the set out of a
toybox.
Kohlhiesels
Töchter
The innkeeper Kohlhiesel’s daughters are an ox, the
elder who tends cow and bar with the very same hands, and the younger, a
feminine version of this who brings in trade and breaks a phallic object from
her vanity table over her piggy-bank to buy a brummagem brooch for showing off
with (no-one cares), leaving the piggy-bank unscathed.
This is sometimes called a village Taming of the
Shrew but it’s something different, one of the funniest films ever made and
one of the best, with rustic titles always amusing, Emil Jannings as the suitor
going from Wallace Beery to Zero Mostel, snow scenery around the high village,
and both girls played by Henny Porten.
Romeo und Julia
im Schnee
An intensely funny homegrown
version of the play in the style of Kohlhiesels Töchter.
The Montekugerls and the Capulethofers seek justice
in the prelude, “nothing, neither way.”
Juliet has an idiot suitor, who is last seen when
all the fuss is done eating fruitcake unconcernedly.
Sumurun
The slave trader and the
merchant, the dancing girl and the clown, the harem and the eunuchs, the sheik
and the prince.
The girls torture their guardians by dropping balls
from a balcony, or fruit.
The world lost a great actor when Lubitsch went
behind the camera.
A passionate tale of love and prerogatives out of
the Arabian Nights, old Baghdad is a paradise of sorts, the lovers depart from
the fountain in its midst like Adam and Eve.
Anna Boleyn
The striking effect of the drama is to see Tudor
portraiture come to life or made into a film.
Anne loves Sir Henry Norris, marries the King,
repulses Smeaton’s advances, bears a daughter, is denounced and sent to the
axe.
A badly-cropped transfer gives no idea of the
pictures and is practically useless.
Die Bergkatze
The Catamount shows why
“you have to have a circus inside you to play comedy.”
The robber chieftain’s daughter,
the original smiling lieutenant, the fortress commander’s daughter, the tearful
brigand.
Das Weib des Pharao
The slave girl Theonis, beloved
of Ramphis, whose life is spared to work at the quarry.
King Amenes has contracted a political alliance
with King Samlak of Ethiopia, whose daughter was to be Queen of Egypt.
And so, there is war with Ethiopia, the slaves revolt, Amenes lies on the battlefield. Theonis
rules, with Ramphis as King.
Amenes returns, the two are stoned to death by the
crowd, Pharaoh crowned again dies on the spot.
Half the film is missing here or there, replaced by
title legends.
The monumentality of the great scenes rivals anything, the wit is in the construction of the story,
Ariadne’s thread amid labyrinthine splendors.
Rosita
The opening swift gag is one of the best by
anybody.
It was filmed with the greatest skill in Hollywood,
Leisen and Menzies for costumes and sets.
Motion Picture Classics saw that Pola
Negri was facing “oblivion” in the same story (The Spanish Dancer, dir.
Herbert Brenon) after Lubitsch and Pickford. The New York Times writer
did not sign his review, probably carried away, “not a dull moment from
beginning to end.”
The King takes to his mistress a beggarly
street-singer who has razzed him for spoiling her trade with processions. He
sets her up in a grand establishment, her and her dirt-floor family.
An officer has been killed arresting her, the captain who fought him is due to be hanged. Rosita
is to have a title by marriage (the servants are laughing) or she leaves, the
King is informed. He marries her to the captain, then
has him executed.
The Queen, who knows her King, takes a hand at this
point. Bergman is decades away, Renoir very soon.
The Marriage
Circle
Three couples, unhappily-married,
blissfully-married and just-met, comprising five persons in all. A sixth merely
figures as a momentary stand-in.
The interplay of characters calls for the Lubitsch
deadpan, a flat response to invidious circumstances that covers an armed
retreat of the mind to a field of vantage. He is also very good at slow
apperception and quick sleights. The dapper sleight-of-hand is from the
immemorial stage.
The first husband seeks to shed himself of a
loveless wife, who pursues the devoted husband of a jewel beset by a suitor,
who in the end discovers the divorcée.
This was not thought to be profound, by Photoplay.
Lady Windermere’s
Fan
“Lubitsch’s best silent film,” says the most
observant critic, “full of incisive details, discreet touches, nuances of gestures, where behavior betrays the character
and discloses the sentiment of the personages.” (George Sadoul)
Variety and The American Cinema criticize the film
in terms that suggest the play is not The
Importance of Being Earnest, Sarris making it a point to say that Lubitsch
has improved Wilde.
The only compliment more magnificent than Shaw’s
envy and deprecation and emulation of Wilde (he did not like The Importance of Being Earnest) is the
one paid by Lubitsch and then John Gielgud, that of taking him seriously.
A double faux pas, the second averted through
cognizance of the first, and all the machinery of the play is brought to bear
on either one.
The secret of the Lubitsch touch in this instance
is a complete preparation in The Marriage
Circle freeing the director for the most minutely exacting work day by day
in the studio, or else his analysis of the play, or else there is no such thing
as a Lubitsch touch.
So This Is Paris
The Lubitsch equation,
Einsteinian logic. If Mme. Giraud falls for the Sheik, M. Giraud knew
the Sheik’s wife in a former marriage.
Das fidele Gefängnis. “I am amused
to meet you.”
Monsieur’s stick is abandoned, flittered, reformed,
purloined, twirled, dreamed, swallowed, and flung into a fireplace.
Old Heidelberg
It does very well until the student prince at the
“ordinary” gasthof
is regaled with the virtues of an “impossible” room. “You can sit on it! You can
lie down on it! You can’t ask any more from a couch!” By which point, a third
into the picture, Lubitsch is in full sway.
Penn’s great lovemaking scene in Bonnie and Clyde here takes place on a
flowery hill at night, Lubitsch adds a meteor (the one
on little Prince Karl Heinrich’s cap at the bahnhof).
The lovers’ adieu is on this hill, bare of flowers.
King Karl VIII of Karlsburg weds Princess Ilse of
Altenburg, and there’s an end.
Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times noted the pleasure taken
by an audience at the Astor, admired Hersholt and Seyffertitz but not Shearer
or Novarro, and to have missed Shearer is to have missed it all (“like Mr.
Novarro, she does not respond, as other players have done, to Mr. Lubitsch’s
direction”). Hall noted further “his exteriors in Heidelberg, which was a happy
idea”.
The Love Parade
The beauty of the plot construction is a figure
eight with the marriage of Count Alfred to Queen Louise at its intersection. Paris
takes the first half, Sylvania the second (“Pennsylvania”, Alfred’s valet calls
it).
The Love
Parade is every girl in one, the Queen. “It can be said
that this is the first true screen musical,” said Variety.
Truffaut admired the charm, the hard work, the
princeliness of Lubitsch, but what he couldn’t believe was Lubitsch’s plots,
that they existed. “Everything happens while
we are looking at the film.” So far was he beguiled by the Lubitsch touch.
There never was a film better-made in this way,
it’s absolutely perfect.
The Count is rebuked for his Parisian imbroglios,
the Queen in her turn for wasting the country’s economy.
In that sense, The
Love Parade arrives just in time for the stock market crash, to redeem the
Lost Generation.
Monte Carlo
Lubitsch’s greatest and funniest satire, in a way,
coming as it does on the heels of the stock market crash.
The Countess won’t marry the rich and quite idle
Duke, she’s off to Monte Carlo with one maid and ten thousand francs, planning
to acquire a fortune.
Perfectly foolish, but the Count is smitten and
even submits to being her hairdresser (added to a staff hired on spec), all his
ministrations add up to The Rape of the
Lock (cf. Tashlin’s Caprice).
The film was much and intelligently praised on its
release, particularly for Lubitsch’s use of sound (including the love song
famously delivered over the telephone).
The common point with Ashby’s Shampoo is likely Monsieur
Beaucaire, the opera seen onstage for the classic revelation, which sets up
the final curious analogy to L’Année
dernière à Marienbad.
The Smiling
Lieutenant
A variant of The
Love Parade, here the emphasis is richly on the princess’s dowdiness.
The plot mechanism that gives the title has to be
considered a bolt from the blue.
Flausenthurm is a ludicrous pile next to Vienna,
but the girl who intercepts that grin makes it welcome after all.
One hour with you
The great pianist Alfred Brendel is a writer of
excellent German verses as well, he was asked once why the English versions he
oversees are so much terser. “The sounds,” he said, with his round blue eyes
and profoundly musical face, Viennese.
That’s just the sort of anecdote that begins a London Review of Books article, thank
God this isn’t one, otherwise it should go on and on and never surpass its incipit. And what, then, is the point?
That has nothing whatever to do with Lubitsch’s
remake of The Marriage Circle, but
it’s just as well to broach the argument, so as to be done with it.
What matters is that one’s tie is absolutely
correct. Fellini’s private eye (Giulietta
degli spiriti), Edwards’ dinner (The
Party), Pinter’s confrontation (The
Collection), Lewis in The Big Mouth
attired as Prof. Kelp to pass through a Rolls-Royce and gain entrance at the
hotel. The Pumpkin Eater (“Well,
you’re not the bloody Duke anyway”).
Trouble in
Paradise
If there is a Lubitsch touch, it is here in spades,
so that there is no mistake about it.
You will note that even after the crash there is
aplomb and larceny and gossip.
Truffaut was busy following the plot. Blake Edwards
was not.
Lubitsch couldn’t care less, even the jokemeisters
at RKO have nothing on him, nobody has.
Chaplin (Monsieur Verdoux) and Elaine May (A
New Leaf) are onto it also, among many others.
“Not good cinema,” said Variety. Mordaunt
Hall insisted, positively insisted, “surely” after all it “points no moral and
the tale it tells is scant and innocuous” and etc.
If I Had a
Million
“It is better to give than to receive.”
Eighty minutes of genius on the subject, supervised
and partly directed by Lubitsch.
Design for Living
It’s all a question of artistic economy. Our girl,
the advertising artiste, shows our boys how to triumph in the West End and the
Louvre, or something quite like it, but she marries the boss and China receives
their exile.
The boss is too dull for words and pictures, she
lights out with the boys.
Coward, Hecht, Lubitsch, any one of these is
sufficient, two impossible, all of them entirely too much.
The Merry Widow
Lubitsch at M-G-M, gloriously rich beyond his
wildest dreams, exercises it all for that last scene in the jail cell, the
widow and Count Danilo in the same boat.
Here again is the variant of The Love Parade and a central film in itself.
Much has been written on the waltz scenes, less on
the paroxysm at Maxim’s.
The influence is profound on Richard Lester (Finders Keepers), Terence Young (Black Tights, Petit’s “Deuil en 24 heures”, also Triple Cross for the women’s ward),
Gordon Flemyng (Great Catherine, with
several Lubitsch themes), Roman Polanski (the flock in Chinatown), and many others.
Angel
The structure is deceptive, an armature of Lubitsch
jokes that must be carefully analyzed to reveal the actual workings, and that
is another of the best jokes.
The material is gone over later and definitively in
That Uncertain Feeling, here the
maximum of mirror-play and ambiguity makes for an appearance of carelessness,
even.
The diplomat is a bore with his telegrams and
subcommittees, but the world is headed for war. The lover is a fool for his
Angel, but she is a gift from the gods.
The world can go hang, in the end.
Paroxysms of the Lubitsch touch (Truffaut admired
the dinner scene greatly) lead to the exact opposite, a pie in the face (the
chartered plane).
Bluebeard’s
Eighth Wife
Even American critics had a hard time understanding
this, what with pajama tops and bottoms, Czechoslovakia spelled backwards to
induce sleep, the penurious nobleman yet to appear in Neame’s The Million
Pound Note, the bathing harbor at Nice not yet in Hitchcock’s To Catch a
Thief, the Museum of Fine Arts in Hannibal, Michigan (“my home town”, says
Cooper), Louis XIV’s washbasin and Madame Du Barry, the League of Nations, the
boxing beard, Colbert’s gold lamé gown (an impossibility for Gehry, a snap for
Wright), America in for France, generations of it, six months before the Munich
Pact.
“I have no gift of prophecy, but I see you ending
up with a library.”
Truffaut’s analysis applies here above all. “His
cinema is the opposite of the vague, the imprecise, the unformulated, the
incommunicable. There’s not a single shot just for decoration; nothing is
included just because it looks good. From beginning to end, we are involved
only in what’s essential.”
Ninotchka
Baudelaire’s “Landscape” is indicated for the
source and center of the movie. “We have the high ideals, and they have the
climate.”
Some qualities of the theme are further considered
in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Sweet Bird of Youth, others in To Be or Not to Be and Doctor Zhivago (Halliwell’s notion that
the last half-hour “certainly sags” is a particularly giddy view).
Nowadays she dresses in corporate fashion, which means a suit that doesn’t fit
or Sessue Hayakawa’s Kwai uniform and hair that hides, but she says the
same things, and she’s an American, or even a European.
The Shop Around the Corner
The simplicity of
construction has fooled nearly all the critics, after all there is only the
shop clerk grown rich and gaudy on handouts from his mistress, the proprietor’s
wife, and a second theme of two clerks with intellectual passions who meet as
pen pals.
If this doesn’t
constitute a defense of The Shop Around
the Corner, it has no defense and is only the bit of charm Lubitsch said it
was, rather than the centrally important figure of his very “best” film, as he
put it also.
James Joyce’s Dubliners has an almost related story,
and Marshall’s Goldwyn Follies is
almost parodied. Arthur Miller’s A Memory
of Two Mondays, memorably filmed, is almost adjacent, and the proprietor is
almost Dickens’ Fezziwig.
That Uncertain Feeling
You have seen
them at cocktail parties and art openings and concert evenings, you may have
been one yourself on occasion, they just don’t know what to make of it.
Critics, of
course, hated this film.
Homage to Charles
Ives, rejection of æstheticism.
The degree to
which Lubitsch remade his own Kiss Me
Again (1925, Warner Brothers, inexplicably lost) may be gauged from the New York Times review.
“Here we have
Loulou Fleury (Marie Prevost), a vivacious but susceptible young wife who finds
that the music as played by Maurice Ferriere (John Roche) interests her far
more than the affectionate glances and loving expressions of her husband,
Gaston, impersonated by Monte Blue. Really, this flighty young person can’t
tell the difference when the waltz, “Kiss Me Again”, is played by the
impecunious musician and when it is rendered through the medium of the pianola.
“Gaston is more
cunning than his wife believes him to be. He agrees to help her get a divorce,
and the question is on what grounds. Dr. Dubois, the lawyer played by Willard
Louis, suggests after a conference at which the wife is not present that Gaston
slap his wife just as a stenographer enters the office. The latter, the lawyer
points out, can be an impartial witness. Thereupon Gaston prepares himself for
the stroke of cruelty toward his wife. He is to slap Loulou just as Grizette
(Clara Bow) opens the door, but finds it is not as easy to do as he imagined.
He lifts his hand but he can’t get up enough courage to go through with the
deed. His hand always falls harmlessly by his side. He tries again and again
and finally goes behind a screen and resorts to a little stimulating drink.
This causes him to feel still less like chastising his wife. They have to seek
other causes for divorce, neither being willing to be the defendant.
“One of the
amusing chapters in this picture reminds one of Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest, as
Gaston pretends to carry on a conversation with Grizette through a door when
the girl is not in the room. He tells his wife that Grizette will not release
him for less than 100,000 francs and when Loulou hands over her jewels to her
husband to satisfy Grizette, the latter, while Gaston is pretending to be dickering
with her in the other room, suddenly appears, with the result that Loulou finds
herself in the happy position of being able to pretend she believes Gaston,
while she has Grizette hidden behind a screen.”
To Be or Not to Be
The compulsion of
plot could not perhaps be understood by Truffaut even twenty-five years later
(“An hour later, or even if you’ve just seen it for the sixth time, I defy you
to tell me the plot of To Be or Not to Be.
It’s absolutely impossible”).
Truffaut cannot
mean to say that the events of the film do not make sense, but the inner logic
was not evident.
It’s about a
Hitler Youth given a toy tank to cajole him into betraying his father to the
Nazis, and a Polish aviator who walks out on the nation’s greatest actor in Hamlet to fly the troupe ultimately into
London exile.
Some of the flap
stems from a critical oversight. Although Joseph Tura (Jack Benny) is hardly
seen onstage at all, and Maria Tura (Carole Lombard) never, they give performances
on behalf of the Polish underground that amply justify their reputation. This
oversight is pointedly corrected in the Brooksfilms version directed by Alan
Johnson.
Truffaut made use
of the material in Le Dernier métro.
In this latter
day, Hogan’s Heroes has been censured by TV Guide (under new
management) as one of the worst shows ever on television, in view of its
morally objectionable subject. This (with the East Side Kids, Stalag 17, and The Great Escape)
was the model.
Heaven Can Wait
Henry King’s David and Bathsheba gets the joke,
Powell & Pressburger don’t waste any time putting together A Matter of Life and Death.
Lubitsch’s King
David pleads before the lord of hell, for entrance.
It should not be presumed
that any answer to his critics was meant, but Crowther had said “Nero fiddling”
of To Be or Not to Be. “If I’m called
a bad poet,” Nabokov says, “I smile. If I’m called a bad scholar, I reach for
my heaviest dictionary.”
Cluny Brown
You will appreciate
the “negative capability” in Russell’s Mahler.
Lubitsch’s
insouciance toward the Nazis is even more pronounced than in To Be or Not to Be. Lubitsch’s
insouciance toward everything that is unworthy of his care is utterly
remarkable.
So we shall ignore
the British critics who savaged it in their day, and those who pay it
backhanded compliments now. Chaplin is the British director Lubitsch most
admires, The Great Dictator above
all.
That Lady in Ermine
Lubitsch’s last
laugh is fairly obscure, which accounts for its weaker reputation, and utterly
refined.
The Biblical
precedents are evident in the setup, which builds to a dream of exaltation
granted by the title character, barefoot as Char’s poesy.
The present-day
(nineteenth-century) descendant marries the jerk, quenching him.
Preminger’s role
in the production is uncredited, the technical mastery of effects like the
centuries-old paintings come to life is the sign of an exquisite consideration.
“Some demand for
it the reprieve of armor...”