An Ernst Lubitsch comedy from 100 years ago.

Ernst Lubitsch is among the most influential comic voices of early sound cinema. He set the standard for musical comedies with The Love Parade (1929), The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), and The Merry Widow (1934). He did the same for romantic comedies with Trouble in Paradise (1932), Design for Living (1933), and Ninotchka (1939). His movies are both smart and sophisticated, though he wasn’t above literal bathroom humor.

He perfected his style in those early sound years but really developed as a filmmaker in his native Germany during the ‘10s and early ‘20s. From 1914-1922 he made 32 films, alternating between the comedy styles he’s known for today and the historical epics that first became his calling card.

He’s probably best known for “the Lubitsch touch,” the term given to the way he’d imply action without ever showing, leaving the audience to figure out what happened. Although often attributed to Andrew Stanton, it was Lubitsch who first said not to give the audience 4, but give them 2+2 and have them put it together. He didn’t do this to be ambiguous or leave things open-ended. He did it to streamline his stories and to tell jokes about sex.

This was the early 20th century, and even in Europe you couldn’t be that explicit when talking about sex. Part of the fun of watching his films is watching the subtle (and unsubtle) ways he’d get around this.

His 1919 film The Doll, very loosely based on an ETA Hoffman story, has many great moments like this. The film opens with Lubitsch himself – a well-known face due to his acting career – assembling the set, which often looks like an amateur theater production. This was meant to poke fun at the rise of German Expressionism but also sets us up for the fantastical and absurd nature of the story. Jean Cocteau would take a similar approach in the opening of his 1946 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast.

Once we’re in the film world, we learn that the wealthy Baron of Chanterelle (the crotchety Max Kronert) has one remaining heir in his sex and love-averse nephew Lancelot (a fun but extremely broad Hermann Thimig). He asks for all the women in the town to gather so Lancelot can choose a wife. The women in the town are fond of the idea of marrying a rich man, but Lancelot nearly bursts into tears. His mother gives the Baron another solution, “You get married.” The Baron goes wide-eyed and looks to his male caretaker, his only companion. Implying a relationship between the unmarried Baron and the very hands-on caretaker may be a stretch, but our suspicions might be confirmed when the caretaker responds “Don’t let yourself get talked into anything.”

Lancelot runs away and goes to the one place women can’t touch him – a monastery. With this sequence Lubitsch savagely satirizes the greediness of the Catholic church. The monks, all fat bald men, are introduced eating a hearty meal complaining about how they need more money. When Lancelot knocks at their door they hide their plates.

After learning of the great fortune he’s set to inherit, they convince Lancelot to visit a lifelike doll-maker, marry one of the dolls, and donate his inheritance to the monastery (remember when I said this thing gets absurd?). The dolls are essentially sex robots. In one of the movie’s best jokes here’s the doll-maker’s advertisement:

The doll-maker (Victor Janson), whose name and appearance you really have to see for yourself, models his newest doll on his daughter Ossi (the joyous Ossi Oswalda). With some trick photography, both the doll and Ossi are able to share the screen at the same time.

While Lancelot and the doll-maker discuss the arrangement, his assistant accidentally breaks the doll, so the real Ossi pretends to be the fake Ossi and then Lancelot, thinking the real Ossi is the fake Ossi, marries the real Ossi. Oswalda shines here as she tries her best to be a robot.

Meanwhile, the Baron’s extended family argue over the inheritance. One of the challenges for silent directors was figuring out how to convey sound solely through visuals. For example, how do you show an argument with many people yelling at once? If you’re Lubitsch, you do this:

And then almost 50 years later this is how Mike Nichols would show a similar moment in The Graduate:

The Doll is written by Lubitsch and Hanns Kraly, Lubitsch’s closest collaborator of the silent era. While not well-remembered today, he was the secret to Lubtisch’s early success. He wrote or co-wrote 20 of Lubitsch’s German films. He was so tied to the director that when Warner Bros shipped Lubitsch to America in 1923, he came along for the ride. They’d spend the rest of their lives in America. Kraly wrote eight of Lubitsch’s American films, winning an Oscar for his work on The Patriot (1928). Their 13-year partnership ended rather abruptly when Lubitsch discovered Kraly and his wife were having an affair. Their final film together is titled Eternal Love and his first without Lubitsch is titled Betrayal, which is considered lost but God do I want to see it.

The divorce was long and ugly. Leni, Lubitsch’s now ex-wife, took custody of the kids (they were her’s from a previous marriage but Lubitsch helped raise them), and when his stepson Eddie graduated from elementary school that year, Lubtisch sent him a letter of congratulations saying they’d be best friends “forever,” signing it as “Papa.” Leni intercepted the letter and Eddie wouldn’t discover it until 1990. Kraly and Leni went public with the affair but broke up shortly after the divorce was finalized. She remarried in 1932 and remained married until her death in 1960. She was happy to be with a man who didn’t prioritize his work over her and her children. Outside of public scuffles in the immediate aftermath, Lubitsch and Kraly never spoke again. He struggled to find work as a writer and there’s a rumor Lubitsch had him blackballed from the industry. According to director Henry Koster, a mutual friend of the two, Kraly attended Lubitsch’s funeral in 1947. He stood in the distance, crying to himself. He died three years later.

7/10

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Here’s a 1934 song by Jewish singing group The Yacht Club Boys about Ernst Lubitsch: