"The Oyster Princess"
Lloyd Fonvielle
of the films recently released in Kino's "Lubitsch In Berlin" series, is
that there's little evidence in it of "the Lubitsch touch" -- that
gossamer comedy of suggestion and indirection that came to characterize
the director's mature style.
"The Oyster Princess" is VERY broad farce, verging on slapstick at
times. That said, though, the film, for all its aggressive silliness,
has remarkable stylistic assurance and consistency -- it's witty,
charming and often very funny. What it resembles most closely are the
operettas of Offenbach, or rather of his librettists Henri Meilhac and
Ludovic Halevy, which manage to combine delirious frivolity with an edgy
satire of aristocratic pretensions. The style is frothy and subversive
at the same time.
"The Oyster Princess" has a preposterous plot, involving a marriage
under false pretenses, and equally preposterous depictions of
aristocratic dementia that often veer into the realms of the surreal.
(In some ways they are lighter-hearted versions of Von Stroheim's dark
and grotesque portrayals of these same aristocratic circles.) But
there's more to it than that, just as there's more to Offenbach than his
farcical plots -- there's Lubitsch's extraordinary cinematic
imagination, which at times causes the film to soar into the same
ethereal realms that Offenbach's music inhabits.
The wedding scene, for example, involves the sublime choreography of an
army of servants in action, and an even more delirious set-piece in
which the guests, and even the servants, break out in an hysterical
episode of fox-trotting -- travesties of actual behavior organized with
exhilarating plastic grace. The film transcends itself in these
moments, just as Offenbach's melodies transcend their dramatic vehicles.
So if "the Lubitsch touch" isn't on display here, except in a few stray
scenes, the Lubitsch genius explodes often enough to make us realize we
are in the company of a master of the medium, even if he's a master
still in search of a distinctive personal style.
Mar de Cortes Baja
www.mardecortesbaja.com <http://www.mardecortesbaja.com/blog>
mikeg...@gmail.com
Yet my wife, passing by the TV as I watched The Wildcat, mentioned the
same movie that had been on my mind-- that strange lone Seuss
live-action film from 1953, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T.
The comedies in Kino's "Lubitsch in Berlin" set are more funny-strange
than funny haha, but the strange is so unique and striking that you may
not mind that the humor tends to be on the goofy level of The Monkees
tv show. The mature Lubitsch style is so consistent-- from silents
like The Marriage Circle to talkies like Trouble in Paradise to the
posthumous Lubitsch movies made by Billy Wilder with a brasher American
note mixed in-- that you'd never guess the same hand had been behind
these wild, chaotic, lavishly cartoonish films, which look more like
something made by a Tashlin or Jerry Lewis let utterly loose than a
wry, sophisticated comedy of manners like Heaven Can Wait or Ninotchka.
The earliest films are the pair of short features starring one Ossi
Oswalda, apparently known as the German Mary Pickford, though her
knockdown comedic persona suggests Mabel Normand or other gals who
blended right in with the boys at Keystone, and her rounded figure is
somewhere west of Mabel and east of Fatty. The tone of the comedy is
very much like Keystone or other American film comedy of the time--
aimed at mischievous 12-year-old boys of all ages, with comics going
through the motions of dramatic situations, but not really investing
any dramatic weight in sex, marriage, money, class or anything else
grownup. But it's Keystone with sets by Max Reinhardt's theater, a
level of rococo visual elaborateness utterly unlike any American film
comedy.
In The Oyster Princess Oswalda's a spoiled American brat first seen
smashing all the furniture in the room with great gusto. Her indulgent
tycoon papa decides that what she needs is a titled European husband,
and so they are led to a candidate in an impoverished prince living in
a coldwater flat in New York. (The irony is that Lubitsch would
shortly become professionally involved with an actress, Pola Negri, who
was one of those who made marrying a prince standard silent diva
behavior.)
The prince's valet is sent to check out the American heiress, but
annoyed at his reception, eventually decides to play the part of prince
himself. You can imagine this as the premise of a 30s Lubitsch comedy,
sophisticated and delicately risque about sexual attraction across
class lines, but that would be nothing like the slapstick romp that
follows, which is more like letting a manic four-year-old loose in a
mansion. There's a great deal of running around to relatively little
comic end, though frequently it's quite beautiful when, say, masses of
servants march in lockstep through the fanciful sets. This visual
invention-- which again calls up comparisons to graphic artists (Seuss,
Cliff Sterett's abstract Sunday comics for Polly And Her Pals) more
than any other filmmaker-- makes The Oyster Princess far more of a
treat than its goofy clowning would be in a plainer-shot comedy.
Interestingly, like Ford's Straight Shooting (which contains things
repeated in The Searchers 40 years later), the movie ends with one of
those perfect examples of a director first exploring a situation he
would return to in his mature style. The father (happy to peek through
the keyhole on our behalf on his daughter's wedding night) was
initially frustrated that daughter and (false) prince weren't getting
to the business at hand, then was disturbed that daughter and more
attractive stranger (the real prince) seemed more ready to do so, and
finally wants to make sure that daughter and the real prince, finally
married, seal the deal.
This use of consummation as the motor of a movie's climax recurs in
Lubitsch's The Smiling Lieutenant-- Chevalier, whose princess bride
(Miriam Hopkins) has been a cold fish, has turned his interest
elsewhere; while the frigid princess has finally warmed up (in fact
she's rarin' to go) but can't seem to make him realize the fact. There
the dramatic climax comes out of marital miscommunication, shyness
versus worldliness, distinctly human emotions-- and it's one of the
most touching examples of the Lubitsch Touch in action. Here's it's
just an occasion for sniggering-- and the father ends the movie with a
wink big enough for Beavis and Butthead to have gotten it seven blocks
away. They're gonna do it, hehehe.
* * *
Less visually extravagant, but a little more realistic and solid, is
the second shorter feature on the same DVD, I Don't Want To Be a Man.
Ossi is bored and petulant, a very strict tutor has been sent to watch
her, she dresses like a man to escape and go on the town, and winds up
spending the evening at a jazz club with her tutor.
There's a germ of a Victor/Victoria-type comedy here, but it's somewhat
flubbed by the fact that it's so hard to read the sexual politics
here-- Ossi dressed as a man and the tutor wind up cuddling and
kissing, yet the movie doesn't seem to be saying that he's homosexual
(since they wind up together-- female Ossi and the tutor) at the fade
out. So was that normal behavior of two guys hanging out in 1918
Germany? (Try to imagine, say, Mabuse and one of his underlings
cuddling.) Did he see her as a person for the first time because he
didn't see her as a girl and his pupil? No particular evidence of that
dramatic situation on screen.
I Don't Want To Be a Man shows Lubitsch coming closer to the real
world, but as would have been the case if Keystone had tried to adapt
Edith Wharton, say, he doesn't yet know what to do with it. And, most
crucially, he doesn't yet have the actress capable of being more,
dramatically and sexually, than a hyperactive tomboy. With his next
film, the preposterous and Count Floyd-worthy Eyes of the Mummy ("What
do you mean there's no mummy in it?"), he would meet that actress--
Pola Negri.
to be continued...
Bob Lipton
> Who knew that before Lubitsch was Lubitsch... he was Doctor Seuss?
>
> Yet my wife, passing by the TV as I watched The Wildcat, mentioned the
> same movie that had been on my mind-- that strange lone Seuss
> live-action film from 1953, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T.
Mike, if you think that THE WILDCAT makes him Dr. Seuss, wait until you
see DIE PUPPE!
However, to look at someone with clkear comedy chops, look at TO BE OR
NOT TO BE
Bob
Lloyd Fonvielle
> I Don't Want To Be a Man shows Lubitsch coming closer to the real
> world, but as would have been the case if Keystone had tried to adapt
> Edith Wharton, say, he doesn't yet know what to do with it. And, most
> crucially, he doesn't yet have the actress capable of being more,
> dramatically and sexually, than a hyperactive tomboy. With his next
> film, the preposterous and Count Floyd-worthy Eyes of the Mummy ("What
> do you mean there's no mummy in it?"), he would meet that actress--
> Pola Negri.
"I Don't Want To Be A Man" is very labored stuff, and without the
outright zaniness found in "The Oyster Princess" it falls very flat
indeed. One could readily believe that it was made years before "The
Oyster Princess". On the other hand, Lubitsch was churning out three or
four films a year at this point, and can't be blamed for not having the
creative energy to make them all winners.
There's just one lovely visual passage in the film, very slight but very
sweet -- it begins with a shot looking over the open passenger seats in
a waiting horse-drawn cab towards the door of the townhouse the
passenger will emerge from, along with the two ladies bidding him
farewell. At one point the off-screen horse takes a step forward and
then back into place, momentarily disrupting the perfect framing of the
shot. For some reason this seems magical, feeling the horse's presence
without seeing it, and looks forward to Lubitsch's wittier explorations
of off-screen effects in the films of his mature style.
Then when the passenger gets into the cab we cut to a beautiful moving
shot following the vehicle heading down a wide boulevard as the
passenger turns back and waves.
For a brief moment we are swept back viscerally into the Berlin of 1920,
and into the age of horsedrawn transportation -- we seem to be
experiencing them from the inside rather than just looking at them.
> to be continued...
Can't wait -- excellent reports . . .
mikeg...@gmail.com
is-- how did Lubitsch come to have such an extravagant visual style,
only to give it up a few years later? The later Lubitsch movies are
certainly handsome, coming as they mostly do from Paramount and MGM,
the chicest of the Hollywood studios, and Lubitsch undoubtedly has a
mastery of an unobtrusive style, finely attuned to his actors and to
capturing the subtleties of their performances.
But for all the exotic places depicted in his films-- Monte Carlo,
Venice, the mittel-European settings of The Student Prince in Old
Heidelberg or The Shop Around the Corner, Stalin's Russia,
Hitler-occupied Poland-- it never occurs to him in later years to
depict them with wild curlicues of plaster, fortresses that look like
birthday cakes, staircases that descend a quarter-mile amid running
water, as he does the European fantasy-land in The Wildcat. It's hard
to think of another filmmaker who so completely changed style and tone
in a short period-- Richard Lester going from Help! to Petulia is the
closest one that comes to mind. (It's also getting harder to see what
was so revolutionary about The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari when Lubitsch
was apparently cranking out two or three psychedelic fantasies like
this each year.)
Yet if The Wildcat still looks a lot like The Oyster Princess, you can
definitely sense some changes in Lubitsch's depiction of human beings--
and in the use of character to drive plot, rather than the reverse. If
The Oyster Princess was Keystone, The Wildcat is at least starting to
be Roach in terms of making the comedian more important than the gag.
The Wildcat is a sort of burlesque on a genre of military romances
buried so deeply in the mists of memory that they still seem familiar
even when it's hard to think of an actual example of what's being
parodied (The Desert Song?). There's a fortress on the edge of
mountainous wilds, and there's a handsome young officer who's been
exiled there because of his love life. And then there's a tribe of
wild mountain people including a tempestuous daughter, played by Pola
Negri, with whom the officer will fall in love.
As I said about The Oyster Princess, you can imagine the 30s comedy
this would be the setup for, and it's nothing like this-- which mainly
consists of running around and clowning broadly. Only a few bits here
and there-- a hilariously exaggerated depiction of the results of the
officer's Casanova-like behavior, a delightful bit of comedy on the
quarter-mile staircase that plays out with the purity and visual grace
of Buster Keaton's single-take descent down six flights of stairs in
The Cameraman-- are actually especially funny. (There's also a quite
racy "Lubitsch Touch" moment involving his photo, a pair of pants, and
where she happens to kiss.)
You wish in vain for Negri and her inamorato to sit down and actually
share a scene, heat up the chemistry set, show us some real one-on-one
Lubitsch Touch worthy of Billy Wilder's line that "Lubitsch could do
more with a closed door than most directors could do with an open fly,"
but at least in Negri you have a recognizable comic human being, full
of life and randiness-- and the ending, though still half-cartoon, has
an emotional effect well beyond anything in The Oyster Princess just
three years earlier.
* * *
So how did Lubitsch go from these wild and wildly visual farces to the
bittersweet delicacy of The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, the
smartness of Lady Windemere's Fan and Trouble in Paradise, the
oh-so-modern frankness of Design For Living? Why, given a chance to
revert to broad caricature at last in To Be Or Not To Be, did he still
keep it reined in, rooted in realism?
I have two guesses. One is the fact that at the same time he was
making these frothy and, to our eyes, quite original and unusual
comedies, he was enjoying far greater international success with a
genre which he had basically invented-- the "private life of royalty"
movie, in which the camera takes us inside the castles to show us the
wild lives led by those untouchably distant royals. (Interestingly, in
theaters at the moment we have the very last gasp of the genre-- a
movie about how the last royals anyone knows about are the last people
in England NOT living lives of ordinary excess and constant publicity.
The last perversion left to the monarchy is dignity.)
It was one thing to invent a general, give him enormous mustaches, and
set him in a birthday-cake fortress-- but if you're depicting Henry
VIII, there's no need to caricature, and historical fact (or at least
legend) will drive your plot. The audience is expecting what it can
believe as the inside scoop on the king's boudoir, madcap Keystone
antics will spoil the illusion that truth is being dished. It's a bit
odd for a filmmaker to have gotten to psychological realism by way of
Anne Boleyn, Madame duBarry, and a Pharoah, but when you're starting at
The Oyster Princess, it makes sense.
The other answer is the movie which ought to be the companion piece to
Kino's "Lubitsch in Berlin" set, and fortuitously, was released by them
this year as well: Mauritz Stiller's Erotikon. To be frank, the
resemblance to a Lubitsch film is not that apparent to us today-- the
more obvious comparison is something like The Rules of the Game or
Smiles of a Summer Night-- but it's not so much that Erotikon was a
precise model for Lubitsch as that, by his own report, he seemed to
take a lot away from it that changed how he approached his own stories.
Everything in Erotikon is character-driven-- indeed it's basically the
story of a manic-depressive woman who starts messing with the lives of
those around her out of boredom, and watches what happens as they sort
it out-- and the brighter characters, at least, have two or three
thoughts going on in their heads at the same time, desire, repression,
confusion at why they feel the way they do. Seeing a film capturing
all that going on just under the surface of performers seems to have
had a great effect on Lubitsch, and to have inspired him to abandon the
knockabout comedy and the unfolding of burlesque plots for movies in
which people have real feelings and act or don't act on them for
psychologically recognizable reasons. In a very short time, the
imaginative, undisciplined maker of baroque comedies became a master of
the clever, precise cinematic bon mot we call the "Lubitsch Touch."
kino eye
> imaginative, undisciplined maker of baroque comedies became a master of
> the clever, precise cinematic bon mot we call the "Lubitsch Touch."
Some very interesting points, Mike. Too bad the number of people in the
universe who really care about such things probably is about 3000 or
so. But hey, 3000 Lubitsch fans can't be wrong.
When I was reviewing his early films, the way I phrased it was: In his
early films, it wasn't as much the "Lubitsch touch," as the "Lubitsch
wallop."
Randy Byers
On Fri, 22 Dec 2006, mikeg...@gmail.com wrote:
> Only a few bits here and there-- a hilariously exaggerated depiction of
> the results of the officer's Casanova-like behavior, a delightful bit of
> comedy on the quarter-mile staircase that plays out with the purity and
> visual grace of Buster Keaton's single-take descent down six flights of
> stairs in The Cameraman-- are actually especially funny. (There's also
> a quite racy "Lubitsch Touch" moment involving his photo, a pair of
> pants, and where she happens to kiss.)
I pretty much howled all the way through Act Three, although you're right
that the staircase scene is the pinnacle. I kept thinking of the Marx
Brothers as I watched the barbarians invade the fortress and pile chaos on
top of confusion (amidst elaborate sets worthy of Paramount). The way the
staircase scene culminates in the "chase" around the pole seemed very
Marxian too, in the way that it carries the action to an absurd extreme of
silliness, but no doubt I'm grasping for comparisons from a limited
background. I mean, this is the first German silent comedy I've ever seen,
so what do I know? Maybe it's just that all the military uniforms reminded
me of DUCK SOUP.
Oh, and I also thought that the whipping scene was great
naughty-Continental fun. Don't see *that* in Keaton, as far as I know.
Also loved Negri's application of perfume.
> You wish in vain for Negri and her inamorato to sit down and actually
> share a scene, heat up the chemistry set, show us some real one-on-one
> Lubitsch Touch worthy of Billy Wilder's line that "Lubitsch could do
> more with a closed door than most directors could do with an open fly,"
> but at least in Negri you have a recognizable comic human being, full
> of life and randiness-- and the ending, though still half-cartoon, has
> an emotional effect well beyond anything in The Oyster Princess just
> three years earlier.
I did think that the movie suffered from the fact that none of the
relationships actually seem to mean anything. While there's something
bracing about treating love (and the noble military) as a farce, there was
something unfocused about the end result. Perhaps it's just that the movie
was composed as a string of gags and japes, but it also seemed the
unifying story lacked cohesion because, as you say, the characters don't
interact with each other in any meaningful way.
I really loved the sets in this movie. They reminded me of something out
of Dr. Seuss.
--
Randy Byers <rby...@u.washington.edu>
Lady Wakasa
"So This Is Paris" (both played the SF Film Festival in 1992). I've
seen most of his films since (thanks in large part to the 2003
Lubitschfest at Film Forum), and probably lucked out with the order -
chronological seems to be the best way to do it.
I *loved* the synchronized waiters and the Foxtrot Fever (which just
comes out of nowhere). There were just a critical mass of sight gags
that hit my funny bone. I spent several years looking for the video
(which eventually showed up through Grapevine) and talked the movie up
quite a bit (which I'm sure was another there-she-goes-again for my
friends).
I'm a little different 15 years later, given the tons of things I've
seen since - especially the later Lubitsches. I still have a soft spot
for "The Oyster Princess," but I now have some context to put it into
perspective, and look more for hints of where Lubitsch was going to go
in the next few decades. Even just going to Hollywood seems to have
changed his direction significantly, and I wonder if the "Paris,
Hollywood" remark isn't more because he found quite a bit of fodder for
his storylines all around him. None of this would have been in the
earlier work.
So I think watching him in chronological order worked best: no
comparisons to the later work meant fully enjoying the earlier for what
it was, period. And probably there are things in "The Oyster Princess"
that grab me in the way that something like "Romeo and Juliet in the
Snow" doesn't.
At any rate, it's still a great, fun movie, and... "I'm still
impressed!"
Lloyd Fonvielle
Speaking of chronological order, "I Don't Want To Be A Man", included on
the recent Kino edition of "The Oyster Princess", is misdated (actually
double-dated) on the DVD case. The spec line for the film gives its
date as 1920, while the blurb text says it's from 1918. According to
the filmography in Scott Eyman's Lubitsch biography, 1918 is the correct
date of release -- a year in which Lubitsch released six other films.
"The Oyster Princess" is correctly identified on the DVD case as coming
out in 1919 -- a year in which Lubitsch released seven other films!
The somewhat slapdash nature of both films has to be judged in the
context of Lubitsch's extraordinary work schedule and output during this
period.
Derek B Boothroyd
> "The Oyster Princess" is the first Lubitsch film I ever saw, along with
> "So This Is Paris" (both played the SF Film Festival in 1992). I've
> seen most of his films since (thanks in large part to the 2003
> Lubitschfest at Film Forum), and probably lucked out with the order -
> chronological seems to be the best way to do it.
(snip)
The Pacific Film Archive (in Berkeley, Cal.) has an upcoming Ernst
Lubitsch program Jan 12 through Feb 16
http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/pfa_programs/lubitsch/index.html
including LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN, MADAME DUBARRY, SUMURUN, DIE FLAMME,
THE OYSTER PRINCESS, THE WILDCAT, THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE, I DON'T WANT
TO BE A MAN and ROSITA as well as about a dozen of his sound films.
- Derek B.
Lloyd Fonvielle
himself might have cited "Erotikon" as a seminal influence, he made "The
Wildcat" -- which is perhaps the zaniest and most stylized of all the
Lubitsch silents recently released by Kino -- a year after Stiller's
film. If "Erotikon" got him thinking about a new approach to comedy, he
was still just thinking about it right to the end of his German period.
I think it's much more likely that the road from "The Wildcat" to "The
Marriage Circle" goes more directly by way of Chaplin's "A Woman Of Paris".
It's been suggested before that Chaplin's "A Woman Of Paris" had a major
influence on Ernst Lubitsch's later style -- that it contributed to the
development of the famous "touch". Partisans of Lubitsch have denied
this vehemently, arguing that the Lubitsch touch was plainly evident in
his German silents, years before the Chaplin film.
It's been hard for most of us to evaluate the relative merits of this
debate, since it's been hard to see any of Lubitsch's German silents --
until recently, with the release of the Kino titles.
Having now watched all of these I must say I don't see anything in any
of them which points directly to Lubitsch's later style. They are, for
the most part, very broad farces, approaching the surreal at times. They
have a wit and lightheartedness that foreshadow the "touch", but the
subtlety and wispy indirection of Lubitsch's mature style are rarely in
evidence.
As you suggest, "Anna Boleyn", which tries, somewhat unsuccessfully, to
combine wit with a serious drama, comes closest -- but it's a long way
from the stylish sophistication, the elegant naturalism, of "The
Marriage Circle", with its heartbreaking mixture of sweetness and
sadness, which in fact seems to echo and build on the tone of Chaplin's
film.
Perhaps there are other Lubitsch films from his German period which
would offer evidence to the contrary, but on the evidence of the Kino
releases, I'd say that Chaplin came up with a truly original approach in
"A Woman Of Paris", and that it affected Lubitsch's work profoundly.
Chaplin himself, like Lubitsch, may have been influenced to a degree by
Stiller's "Erotikon" -- but "A Woman Of Paris" strikes me as the
earliest example of the precise tone that Lubitsch would refine into the
celebrated "touch".
As I wrote earlier about "A Woman Of Paris":
"The story of the film is standard melodrama -- a good girl falls,
has fun on the descent, then pays a terrible price for her choice and
repents. Victorian morality is built into the tale, but from the very
first title card Chaplin announces that he's not going to tell it
judgmentally, but with charity towards all the characters, including the
cad who leads the good girl astray. The effect is a radical reinvention
of melodrama . . .
"What's [most] radical about Chaplin's approach . . . is the
freedom it gave him to establish a new tone for the storytelling -- this
film has an understated, sometimes even lighthearted feel, in
which casual bits of comic visual business are not out of place.
There's a calculated delicacy in this one might not expect from a great
slapstick clown, but Chaplin's touch, like Lubitsch's later, is very sure.
"The tone is particularly evident in the acting. Menjou and
Purviance give easy, nuanced, understated performances which are
nevertheless full of life and charm . . .
"Here is melodrama, then, relieved of bombast and moral caricature,
capable of subtlety, of wit, of wry comedy, of a wide range of tones and
a complex treatment of moral character. That adds up, in a general
sense, to the future of Hollywood melodrama as a whole, and opens a path
for the magical sensibility of Lubitsch at his peak."
I was assailed when I first posted this here, based on my ignorance of
Lubitsch's German silents, from which Chaplin supposedly derived his
approach in "A Woman In Paris" -- but now that I'm a bit less ignorant
of the Lubitsch films, I think my appreciation of "A Woman Of Paris" and
its importance was quite reasonable.
mikeg...@gmail.com wrote:
> One thing that strikes you as you watch these early Lubitsch comedies
> is-- how did Lubitsch come to have such an extravagant visual style,
> only to give it up a few years later? The later Lubitsch movies are
> certainly handsome, coming as they mostly do from Paramount and MGM,
> the chicest of the Hollywood studios, and Lubitsch undoubtedly has a
> mastery of an unobtrusive style, finely attuned to his actors and to
> capturing the subtleties of their performances.
>
> But for all the exotic places depicted in his films-- Monte Carlo,
> Venice, the mittel-European settings of The Student Prince in Old
> Heidelberg or The Shop Around the Corner, Stalin's Russia,
> Hitler-occupied Poland-- it never occurs to him in later years to
> depict them with wild curlicues of plaster, fortresses that look like
> birthday cakes, staircases that descend a quarter-mile amid running
> water, as he does the European fantasy-land in The Wildcat. It's hard
> to think of another filmmaker who so completely changed style and tone
> in a short period. . .
Lloyd Fonvielle
As a postscript to my remarks on the origins of the Lubitsch touch, I
should note that Scott Eyman, in his excellent biography of the
director, tries to make the case that Lubitsch anticipated the approach
of "A Woman Of Paris" in his last German film, "The Flame".
Conveniently for Lubitsch partisans, only a few fragments of this film
survive, and the scene Eyman cites as anticipating Chaplin's film is
known only through the report of a critic. It's a simple bit of
business in which the film's star, Pola Negri, handles some props in
such a way as to suggest, somewhat indirectly, her state of mind.
Indirection in and of itself does not define the Lubitsch touch, and
such bits of business were not original either with Chaplin or with
Lubitsch. The bit of business on which Eyman bases his argument in this
case is a mighty slender thread, and one which comes to us only through
hearsay evidence at that.
His experience with big costume epics may have given Lubitsch, as he
said, an appetite for smaller, more intimate comedies, but he'd already
made smaller, more intimate comedies in Germany, none of which showed
any evidence of his later style with such material.
Perhaps that style made its appearance suddenly in "The Flame" --
there's no way now to be sure -- but I strongly doubt it.
mikeg...@gmail.com
In one of my things about these Lubitsch comedies I suggested that the
historical films moved Lubitsch to a more serious and character-driven
style-- effectively, that Henry VIII is already so larger than life
that you naturally want to explore what made him that way, not simply
caricature him further.
Beyond that, who knows what really influenced him? To some extent
there were structural changes in the film industry that he was
following-- from The Oyster Princess to The Marriage Circle is not
that different than from When the Clouds Roll By to Robin Hood or The
Gaucho, many filmmakers who treated filmmaking as a sort of lark
around 1918 are making films much more soberly and carefully in 1924.
They're spending more money, they're making two films a year instead
of six, they're 100 minutes long instead of 60-- movies got more
serious and thoughtful (and ponderous and many other things) generally
during that time.
Still, few went as far from one extreme to the other as Lubitsch--
it's like Steve Martin's journey from guy with arrow in his head to
New Yorker intellectual. If he says Erotikon opened his eyes to
certain things, I think we ought to believe him, though do so
recognizing that the process may not be very obvious to us from the
outside, and that it may have been a depth charge that took some years
to go off.
As far as ascribing an equal role to A Woman of Paris... hey, could
be! Who knows? There's certainly a similarity of tone and effect,
and it absolutely falls in the right time period. Is it influence or
both Lubitsch and Chaplin picking up what's in the air? Did Monta
Bell have the greater tonal and artistic influence on A Woman of Paris
and he's the true missing link? What influence did Sven Nykvist have
on Woody Allen? Who knows? But if Eyman goes too far citing one
sequence, are we going too far in citing one movie as the influence?
Lubitsch got older, the industry changed, he saw things that
influenced him. Beyond that... good questions, good possible answers.
Lloyd Fonvielle
> As far as ascribing an equal role to A Woman of Paris... hey, could
> be! Who knows? There's certainly a similarity of tone and effect,
> and it absolutely falls in the right time period. Is it influence or
> both Lubitsch and Chaplin picking up what's in the air? Did Monta
> Bell have the greater tonal and artistic influence on A Woman of Paris
> and he's the true missing link? What influence did Sven Nykvist have
> on Woody Allen? Who knows? But if Eyman goes too far citing one
> sequence, are we going too far in citing one movie as the influence?
> Lubitsch got older, the industry changed, he saw things that
> influenced him. Beyond that... good questions, good possible answers.
Some other things suggest to me that Eyman and other Lubitsch partisans
are protesting too much about the relative unimportance of "A Woman Of
Paris" as an influence on Lubitsch's sudden change of style right after
it. Lubitsch and Chaplin were friends, and Lubitsch was one of the
first people Chaplin showed the film to, in a rough cut. Lubitsch
praised it extravagantly when it came out, and Henry Blanke, Lubitsch's
right hand man for many years, whom Lubitsch brought with him from
Germany, said that Lubitsch was never the same after he saw it -- that
it radically changed his approach to filmmaking. Eyman dismisses this
as "surely" an exaggeration, and says that Demille's domestic comedies
had just as much of an influence on Lubitsch's mature style, though
there's nothing about DeMille's approach in those films, beyond a
certain breeziness at times, which anticipates the Lubitsch "touch".
Having now see "Erotikon" and five of Lubitsch's German silents, I'm
more than ever convinced of how truly radical Chaplin's tone was in "A
Woman Of Paris" and more than ever inclined to credit Blanke's opinion
about its importance as an influence on Lubitsch's later style.
What's really amazing is how suddenly Lubitsch transformed Chaplin's
innovations into a mature style in "The Marriage Circle". Lubitsch's
German silents were clearly the work of a genius who felt totally at
home in the film medium and was capable of a wide range of effects and
tones, often all mixed up in the same film. Once Chaplin gave him a
coherent vision of a new form of chamber drama, in which serious and
even melancholy themes could be addressed in seemingly casual and
lighthearted terms, he instantly turned it into a viable and apparently
inevitable genre which he mined and refined for the rest of his career.
Very little in art happens without precedent. Stiller, DeMille and
Lubitsch's own experiments all foreshadow elements of "A Woman Of
Paris", but I think it's reasonable to assume that without "A Woman Of
Paris", "The Marriage Circle" would have been a very different film, and
Lubitsch a very different filmmaker.