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I've been on another silent movie binge in the past couple of months, and part of it has been seeing more of Ernst Lubitsch's German movies. Lubitsch was one of the first big name German film directors to come to Hollywood, coming over in 1923 and going on to direct such classics at Paramount as Trouble in Paradise (1932), Ninotchka (1939), and The Shop Around the Corner (1940). Kino has in the past year released several of the movies he made in Berlin before that. Last year I saw two with Pola Negri, The Wildcat (Die Bergkatze, 1921) and Sumurun (1920). I completely loved The Wildcat (described on the linked blog as "German Expressionist Slapstick Romantic Comedy") and don't remember a thing about Sumurun.

Just last month, Kino released another one, The Doll (Die Puppe, 1919), which introduced me to one of Lubitsch's early muses, Ossi Oswalda. She is a complete kick in the pants! A very physical, rambunctious performer, full of wild, winning energy. The Doll is about a misogynist who has to get married in order to collect his inheritance from a dying uncle. He decides to marry a life-sized doll as a way of fooling his uncle, but the doll ends up being a real woman (played by Oswalda) pretending to be a doll. Hilarity ensues. I was convinced by this one to pick up another Kino disk with two other Oswalda/Lubitsch films, The Oyster Princess (Die Austernprinzessin, 1919) and I Don't Want to Be a Man (Ich möchte kein Mann sein, 1918).

I Don't Want to Be a Man is apparently popular with the lavender crowd for its flirtation with cross-dressing and same-sex attractions, although it ends up in conventional territory for all that. Still, that whiff of Weimar broad-mindedness is played for some very knowing laughs, and Oswalda is terrific as a spoiled rich girl who wants to taste the social freedom allowed to men. It's only 45 minutes long and in many ways feels like a modern sitcom.

But the real gem of the three Oswalda movies I've seen is The Oyster Princess, which is an anarchic masterpiece every bit as good as The Wildcat. Oswalda plays another spoiled rich girl -- the heiress to an American oyster tycoon. When she sees that her rival -- the heiress to a shoe cream tycoon -- has married a European count, she demands an aristocratic husband of her own. Her father agrees to buy her a prince. One is selected for them by an agency. Little do they know that this prince is in fact a penniless derelict in this new capitalist world. He sends his manservant to check out the girl, and the manservant is mistaken for the prince. Hilarity ensues.

This is a farce on class that upends the hierarchy, laughs at the foolishness of it all, then ends up back in pretty conventional territory. In the meantime, we are subject to Oswalda's whirlwind, nearly slapstick performance. When we first see her, she is trashing her (rather ornate) room in a fury. When her father enters the room to try to calm her down, she throws a newspaper at him.

"Why did you throw that newspaper?" he demands.

"Because all the vases were broken!" she explains.

When he agrees to buy her a prince, she leaps on him repeatedly in ecstasy. "I could smash the whole house with joy!" she cries with her arms thrown high.

Her anarchic energy is reflected in a couple of major set pieces -- one when she and her rich heiress girlfriends agree to box each other for the right to cure the prince of his dypsomania. The other comes during her marriage to the manservant, when out of nowhere we get the title card, "A foxtrot epidemic suddenly breaks out during the wedding." Sure enough, everybody, including the servants in the kitchen, is soon engaged in a massive outbreak of the foxtrot. Throughout this sequence we are regularly shown the band playing the wild American dance music, and the instruments used get stranger and stranger. First there's a saw and a large chunk of wood, then one musician slapping the face of another on the beat, and finally a gunshot. How American!

Lubitsch eventually became known for a sophisticated, continental approach to film-making that was called the Lubitsch Touch, but these movies, while very sly and worldly, are not exactly subtle. They are romps. According to the documentary, "Lubitsch in Berlin," which is included with The Doll, Lubitsch himself did not care for The Wildcat, which is the one film where he allowed himself to be influenced by the wave of Expressionism that began sweeping through German film with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). Nonetheless, I would strongly recommend it, along with The Oyster Princess. Negri and Oswalda are brilliant as strong-willed women getting their way in a man's world, and the sheer joy and good humor of these movies is guaranteed to blow the blues away.
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So everybody knows that film in Weimar Germany is one of the jewels in the cinematic crown, right? The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Wildcat, The Golem, Nosferatu, Warning Shadows, Waxworks, Variety, The Student of Prague, Metropolis, Berlin, the Symphony of a Great City, Sex in Chains, Pandora's Box, Asphalt, The White Hell of Pitz Palu, People on Sunday, The Blue Angel -- the list of great or innovative or provocative Weimar films goes on and on. Well, until 1933, of course, by which time most of the great film-makers had fled the country for Paris or London or Hollywood.

Berlin was a hotbed of great artistry and decadence in many forms, and one of the big theatrical hits of 1928 was the musical The Threepenny Opera, written by Bertolt Brecht, with music by Kurt Weill. Amongst the early fans of the show was the film director G.W. Pabst and the producer Seymour Nebenzal (who amongst other great movies produced Pabst's Pandora's Box and Fritz Lang's M). Nebenzal bought the rights to the movie, and Brecht began to work on a treatment. However, Brecht was becoming more of a Marxist in this period, and he wanted to change the story to reflect his new ideas. Nebenzal took him to court for breech of contract and won. The credits in the final film read "frei nach Brecht," which I believe means "freely from [or after] Brecht" -- that is, based on, but not by.

The film apparently changes the story pretty freely indeed, particularly in the third act. It also uses only half of Weill's music. Nonetheless, it is marvellous. It all takes place in a London of the imagination -- a London set that is a work of art in itself, which the camera of Fritz Arno Wagner explores restlessly, making it seem huge and full of new corners and alleys. It is a story of the underworld, full of thieves, murderers, prostitutes, beggars, dance halls, warehouses, and docks. It is cynical of propriety -- and in a Germany being taken over by monsters in fancy uniforms, how could it not be? For all that they rejected Brecht's new Marxist ideas, the film still equates thieves and bankers in the most direct manner. Its sympathies lie with the beggars, who are used by everybody, even by the thieves. Mack the Knife may be softened from his portrayal in the stage show, but he still cheats on his wife Polly and lies about it.

This is Weimar film-making at its pinnacle, right up there with The Blue Angel and M in sheer beauty and painstaking craftsmanship. It's a wonder to look at, with reflections on every surface -- on shop windows, puddles in the street, oily dockside water, mirrors, and eyes. It is dark with shadows and cynicism. Lotte Lenya knocks the song "Pirate Jenny" out of the park.

And hundreds will come ashore around noon
And will step into the shadows
And will catch anyone in any door
And lay him in chains and bring him before me
And ask: Which one should we kill?
And at that midday it will be quiet at the harbor
When they ask, who has to die.
And then they'll hear me say: All of them!
And when the heads roll, I'll say: Hurray!

And the ship with eight sails
And with fifty cannons
Will disappear with me.

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