Lubitsch in Berlin
Jan. 13th, 2008 11:20 amI'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.
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.