THE LUBITSCH TOUCH?
Lloyd Fonvielle
Lubitsch's German silent films. One can find much in them that
anticipates Lubitsch's later work in Hollywood -- the antic humor, the
bemusement at almost all human behavior, the social satire without even
a hint of malice. What one can't find, except in the most fleeting
moments, is the fabled Lubitsch Touch -- that tone of gossamer
indirection that defined his mature style. Lubitsch's tone in the
German years, at least on the evidence of these five films, was broad,
never too far from slapstick -- though it was, in its execution, an
elegant, lyrical kind of slapstick, closer to the pantomime of classical
ballet than to the rude hi-jinks of Sennett.
The case gets stronger and stronger for me that the Lubitsch Touch was
in fact invented by Charlie Chaplin in "A Woman Of Paris".
"The Doll" is thematically related to other of Lubitsch's German silent
comedies. One thing he found endlessly amusing in those years was the
image of people turned into automatons by social rituals. Set a gang of
servants to work servicing a party, set a bunch of swells in motion
dancing a fox trot and suddenly they become participants in a mechanical
ballet of supreme silliness.
In "The Doll", an effete young man is forced to marry to gain an
inheritance -- but, he says adamantly, "I will not marry a woman!"
Instead he marries what he thinks is an automaton, for whom he feels a
growing affection -- so that when he discovers his bride is a real woman
pretending to be an automaton, he's delighted.
The story is a variant of Hoffman's tale "The Sandman", the basis for
the ballet "Coppelia", in which a man falls in love with a doll and his
flesh-and-blood sweetheart impersonates the doll in order to give him
his comeuppance. Hoffman's is a cautionary tale about over-idealized
love -- Lubitsch turns it into a social satire about marriage. The
dollmaker's daughter refuses to behave like a proper marriageable girl
-- the rich uncle doesn't care who his nephew marries as long as the
family line is continued. In the marriage game, clearly, society
prefers dolls to real women.
So the dollmaker's daughter impersonates a doll, and then deconstructs
the image, exposing the whole social rite of marriage as a farce.
There's no edge to the satire, though -- Lubitsch is just blowing down a
house of cards, and no one appears terribly surprised to see it
collapse. Lubitsch's world is one which everyone seems to recognize as
theater, as a game -- and everyone seems to breathe something like a
sigh of relief when the cardboard scenery falls down.
Mar de Cortes Baja
www.mardecortesbaja.com <http://www.mardecortesbaja.com/blog>
xanth...@att.net
> Kino has now, with the appearance of "The Doll", released five of Ernst
> Lubitsch's German silent films. One can find much in them that
> anticipates Lubitsch's later work in Hollywood -- the antic humor, the
> bemusement at almost all human behavior, the social satire without even
> a hint of malice. What one can't find, except in the most fleeting
> moments, is the fabled Lubitsch Touch -- that tone of gossamer
> indirection that defined his mature style. Lubitsch's tone in the
> German years, at least on the evidence of these five films, was broad,
> never too far from slapstick -- though it was, in its execution, an
> elegant, lyrical kind of slapstick, closer to the pantomime of classical
> ballet than to the rude hi-jinks of Sennett.
>
> The case gets stronger and stronger for me that the Lubitsch Touch was
> in fact invented by Charlie Chaplin in "A Woman Of Paris".
>
<< LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN for one, is superior. Then there's The
MARRIAGE CIRCLE... >>
dr.giraud
> The case gets stronger and stronger for me that the Lubitsch Touch was
> in fact invented by Charlie Chaplin in "A Woman Of Paris".
<<snip>>
I think the dramas are where to find the genesis of the so-called
"Lubitsch touch." Especially the ones with Pola Negri, like GYPSY
BLOOD aka CARMEN, and PASSION aka MADAME DUBARRY. The latter seems the
most "Lubitschian" of his German films, full of sly touches--and
DUBARRY has the benefit of both Negri and Reinhold Schunzel.
Unfortunately, neither of these are in the Kino set, while the mostly
dreadful SUMURUN is. But you can find bits of what's to come here and
there in the slapstick comedies, too.
His last German film, 1922's DIE FLAMME (a small-scale drama with
Negri and Alfred Abel), might have helped with the puzzle, but it's
lost.
I just tend not to believe in "a-ha" moments--A WOMAN OF PARIS likely
focused Lubitsch's mind, but you can see the influence of the German
comedies in his American films too. SO THIS IS PARIS is a souped-up
mashup of a couple of German shorts, for example.
dr. giraud
Lloyd Fonvielle
I look forward to seeing "Carmen" and "Passion" someday, but it's very
frustrating that the arguments for the German origins of the Lubitsch
Touch always rest on films that are hard to see. (They used to rest on
some of the films that HAVE been released by Kino but in my opinion
can't any longer.)
I CAN imagine an "ah-ha" moment for Lubitsch when he saw "A Woman Of
Paris". This is because there's a conflict in his German comedies
between the sweetness and gentleness of Lubitch's view of the world and
the wildness of the physical comedy in which it's often expressed.
The wildness I guess derives in part from his own gifts as a rather
broad physical comedian or character player. "A Woman Of Paris" would
have shown him a way to make comedy more in line with his truest
sensibility as a storyteller, which was at bottom very mellow and intimate.
But I guess the jury is still out on this -- and will be until all of
Lubitsch's German films are readily available.
dr.giraud
>
> I look forward to seeing "Carmen" and "Passion" someday, but it's very
> frustrating that the arguments for the German origins of the Lubitsch
> Touch always rest on films that are hard to see. (They used to rest on
> some of the films that HAVE been released by Kino but in my opinion
> can't any longer.)
Grapevine (and a few other secondary sources) sold PASSION and GYPSY
BLOOD, the First National-ized US prints. They've been relatively--for
silent film--easy to access.
The point is that Lubitsch took a very adult, unsentimental view of
sexuality. Negri's DuBarry may love the hero, but it's clear that she
finds sex with his majesty Jannings more fun.
That view of sex is at the heart of the "Lubitsch touch," even more
than the camera moves and "door shots" and piquant subtleties so
celebrated. And Lubitsch had that before A WOMAN OF PARIS. It's what
set him apart from American cinematic morality; Negri's characters die
because of their own greed or obssession or whatever, not because
they're being punished for moral transgressions.
I tend to think that this attitude about sex is what made PASSION/
DUBARRY such a blockbuster when it opened in New York in 1920. It's
not like the film's spectacle is bigger or better than American-grown
product. It also might be that the spectacle is only in service of
sex, because none of the three main characters gives a damn about
France.
I guess I just don't think the "gossimer" Lubitsch you're talking
about fully emerged until the talkies. Of the surviving American
silent films, THREE WOMEN and LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN are essentially
dramas with comic elements; SO THIS IS PARIS is a toned-down
continuation of the slap-happy German comedies; ETERNAL LOVE and
STUDENT PRINCE are romantic melodramas.
I think that A WOMAN OF PARIS had its most direct impact on THE
MARRIAGE CIRCLE. That film is a hybrid of very good droll comedy and,
in the last act, some very tiresome conventional morality out of synch
with the rest of the picture. Compare the endings of MARRIAGE CIRCLE
and LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN, and you'll see what I'm getting at.
Lubitsch may have felt bound to uncharacteristically punish Marie
Prevost in the former, but not Irene Rich in the latter. Hell, compare
it to its remake, ONE HOUR WITH YOU, in which drama (and conventional
morality) is tossed aside with glee.
dr. giraud
Lloyd Fonvielle
> The point is that Lubitsch took a very adult, unsentimental view of
> sexuality. Negri's DuBarry may love the hero, but it's clear that she
> finds sex with his majesty Jannings more fun.
>
> That view of sex is at the heart of the "Lubitsch touch," even more
> than the camera moves and "door shots" and piquant subtleties so
> celebrated.
My impression is that when people talk about the Lubitsch Touch they
aren't referring so much to his subject matter as to his method of
storytelling, which does indeed have more to do with the accumulation of
piquant subtleties than with a particular view of sex. It's something
found in the sex comedies but also in a sentimental film like "The Shop
Around the Corner".
If you think that the Lubitsch Touch primarily concerns an adult,
unsentimental view of sexuality, then a case can be made that it
originated in his German films, but to me it has more to do with the
subtle, almost paradoxical tone of presentation, the gossamer
inflections, which I don't see much of in Lubitsch films prior to "A
Woman Of Paris".
Eric Stott
"Lloyd Fonvielle" <navigar...@cox.net> wrote in message
news:3kBdj.20515$yV5....@newsfe15.phx...
> If you think that the Lubitsch Touch primarily concerns an adult,
> unsentimental view of sexuality, then a case can be made that it
> originated in his German films, but to me it has more to do with the
> subtle, almost paradoxical tone of presentation, the gossamer inflections,
> which I don't see much of in Lubitsch films prior to "A Woman Of Paris".
Maybe I'm being superficial (and a little off topic) but I thinnk Lubitsch's
german films reflect the general tendency of german humor- not terribly
subtle- "Boisterous" would be a kind way of putting it. Yes, there ARE
doubtless subtle german jokes, but they're not common.
Typical Germanic joke:
Housewife to the grocer's little boy minding the shop: Do you have more
of that applesauce I bought from your father yesterday? My family loved it.
Grocer's boy (who is so young he forgets to lie) to housewife: No, that
was the only crock we had- We were going to eat it ourselves, but a rat fell
into it & papa said we might as well sell it.
Eric Stott
Lloyd Fonvielle
> Maybe I'm being superficial (and a little off topic) but I thinnk Lubitsch's
> german films reflect the general tendency of german humor- not terribly
> subtle- "Boisterous" would be a kind way of putting it. Yes, there ARE
> doubtless subtle german jokes, but they're not common.
I think that's a fair comment. Even Murnau, the most sublime of
cinematic poets, indulged in very crude humor at times.
What's interesting about Lubitch's humor in his German films is that it
has no meanness in it, no cynicism (unlike the example you give below.)
To Lubitch, the world is just silly, and it's no big deal. The
mellowness of his sensibility belies the boisterousness of his physical
comedy.
That's why "A Woman Of Paris" may have struck so deep with him -- it
showed a way of making comedy that was as mellow as his heart . . . all
the more strking since it was made by a slapstick clown who could be
crude enough in the comic films he acted in. It may have given Lubitsch
a kind of permission to try a lighter touch -- validating his deepest
instincts.
> Typical Germanic joke:
>
> Housewife to the grocer's little boy minding the shop: Do you have more
> of that applesauce I bought from your father yesterday? My family loved it.
>
> Grocer's boy (who is so young he forgets to lie) to housewife: No, that
> was the only crock we had- We were going to eat it ourselves, but a rat fell
> into it & papa said we might as well sell it.
xanth...@att.net
<< I believe WOMAN OF PARIS and The MARRIAGE CIRCLE came out within 2
months of each other. At least the Times Reviews were quite close
together. >>
constance...@ttu.edu
If you are suggesting that _A Woman of Paris_ couldn't have influenced
_The Marriage Circle_ (released in 1924), in fact it did. _Woman_
premiered in September 1923, but Lubitsch had seen it *before* it
premiered. As Jeffry Vance writes in his recent book on Chaplin,
'Lubitsch and Chaplin were friends, and Chaplin had shown him a rough
cut of _A Woman of Paris_. Unquestionably, the film influenced
Lubitsch to abandon directing the large historical dramas that had
made his reputation and return to the type of films he had been making
in Germany years before. . . . Lubitsch himself told an interviewer in
1923, "_A Woman of Paris_ is a great step forward . . . a picture
that, as you Americans say, left something to the imagination." Fresh
from Mary Pickford's elaborate production of _Rosita_ (1923), Lubitsch
must have found it liberating to adopt Chaplin's minimalist style and
direct a well-made film that discarded all but the essentials.'
Connie K.
sirmichaelcat
Lloyd Fonvielle
> As Jeffry Vance writes in his recent book on Chaplin,
> 'Lubitsch and Chaplin were friends, and Chaplin had shown him a rough
> cut of _A Woman of Paris_. Unquestionably, the film influenced
> Lubitsch to abandon directing the large historical dramas that had
> made his reputation and return to the type of films he had been making
> in Germany years before. . . . Lubitsch himself told an interviewer in
> 1923, "_A Woman of Paris_ is a great step forward . . . a picture
> that, as you Americans say, left something to the imagination."
I think the fact that there was some kind of influence is clear, but I
don't think Vance gets to the heart of it. "The Marriage Circle" is
not, by a long shot, the type of film Lubitsch had been making in
Germany prior to his flirtation with the historical epic. These were
broad farces, not the delicate, indirect romantic comedies that Lubitsch
specialized in in Hollywood.
"A Woman Of Paris" may have played a role in Lubitsch's abandonment of
the epic form, but it played a far greater role in suggesting a new way
of making comedies.
constance...@ttu.edu
As I read Jeff's passage, all he means by "the same kind of film" is
comedy rather than historical epic, and his quote from Lubitsch
indicates
that Lubitsch thought _Woman_ was "a step forward" in subtlety. I
believe you and Vance are saying pretty much the same thing.
I'll be watching some of the German films in the next day or so, and
also
revisiting _du Barry_, which I have in a very poor VHS print.
Connie K.