Lubitsch, Ernst

Classic Comedies Collection (Bringing Up Baby / The Philadelphia Story Two-Disc Special Edition / Dinner at Eight / Libeled Lady / Stage Door / To Be or Not to Be)

"The love impulse in man," says a psychiatrist in Bringing Up Baby, "frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict." That's for sure. For a primer on the rules and regulations of the classic screwball comedy, which throws love and conflict into close proximity, look no further. A straight-laced paleontologist (Cary Grant) loses a dinosaur bone to a dog belonging to free-spirited heiress Katharine Hepburn. In trying to retrieve said bone, Grant is drawn into the vortex surrounding the delicious Hepburn, which becomes a flirtatious pas de deux that will transform both of them. Director Howard Hawks plays the complications as a breathless escalation of their "love impulse," yet the movie is nonetheless romantic for all its speed. (Hawks's His Girl Friday, also with Grant, goes even faster.) Grant and Hepburn are a match made in movie heaven, in sync with each other throughout. Not a great box-office success when first released, Bringing Up Baby has since taken its place as a high-water mark of the screwball form, and it was used as a model for Peter Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc?

Re-creating the role she originated in Philip Barry's wickedly witty Broadway play, Katharine Hepburn stars as the spoiled and snobby socialite Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, one of the great romantic comedies from the golden age of MGM studios. Applying her impossibly high ideals to everyone but herself, Tracy is about to marry a stuffy executive when her congenial ex-husband (Cary Grant), arrives to protect his former father-in-law from a potentially scandalous tabloid exposé. In an Oscar-winning role, James Stewart is the scandal reporter who falls for Tracy as her wedding day arrives, throwing her into a dizzying state of premarital jitters. Who will join Tracy at the altar? Snappy dialogue flows like sparkling wine under the sophisticated direction of George Cukor in this film that turned the tide of Hepburn's career from "box-office poison" to glamorous Hollywood star.

MGM originally promoted Dinner at Eight by touting the "all-star cast," but this is no run-of-the-mill omnibus picture. On the contrary, rather than cramming as many big names as possible into a lumbering vehicle, the movie's impeccably crafted script (by Edna Ferber and Herman J. Mankiewicz) and direction (by George Cukor) gave some immortal screen luminaries a chance to shine. For sheer bravery, John Barrymore's achingly poignant performance as Larry Renault, a washed-up matinee idol who has "outlived everything but his vanity," is unmatched. Barrymore's brother, Lionel, is equally touching as shipping magnate Oliver Jordan. Oliver vainly tries to save his family's century-old firm, at the same time hiding his financial and health troubles from his wife, Millicent, played to hysterical perfection by Billie Burke. The Great Depression is presented in microcosm as Millicent frets about throwing the ultimate society dinner, oblivious to the world tumbling down around her. She is forced to invite to her precious party such undesirables as crass financier Dan Packard ("He smells Oklahoma!"). Even worse in Millicent's eyes than Packard (Wallace Beery, doing an impressive steamroller imitation) is his social-climbing wife, Kitty (Jean Harlow, never funnier). Be sure to watch for Harlow's brief encounter with Marie Dressler, who brings an extraordinary winking wisdom to the role of aging star Carlotta Vance. As the two enter the dining room in the film's final scene, Harlow makes an offhand remark that elicits from Dressler one of the great screen double takes of all time. Like so much of Dinner at Eight, the moment is priceless.

Newspaper comedy doesn't seem like an MGM genre--ink-stained wretches don't go with Adrian gowns and white deco furniture--but Jack Conway, the designated bull in the Metro china shop (Boom Town, Too Hot to Handle) does what he can to bring some dash and flair to Libeled Lady's wildly complicated script. Spencer Tracy is the tough city editor who goes to some spectacular extremes when socialite Myrna Loy files a $5 million libel suit against his paper for calling her a notorious home-wrecker; he hires celebrated ladies' man William Powell to seduce Loy and asks his long-suffering fiancée, Jean Harlow, to marry Powell temporarily so she can play the wronged wife when Loy and Powell are discovered together. The couples crisscross, with frenetic and not entirely unpredictable results, but much of the pleasure here lies in seeing these iconic stars being so thoroughly themselves. The dialogue strains for champagne wit, but the movie's most memorable moment is pure, rotgut slapstick--Powell's bout with an unruly fly-fishing rod.

This one's all about the ladies. In Stage Door, an absolutely terrific 1937 gem, a Manhattan boardinghouse for aspiring actresses houses an amazing roster of golden-era performers--some of whom, like their characters, were just breaking in. It's hard to say who's in best form here: Katharine Hepburn in blueblood mode, Ginger Rogers streetwise, Andrea Leeds suffering, Lucille Ball and Ann Miller impossibly young, and Eve Arden being, well, splendidly Eve Ardenish. The sassy comedy and sober life lessons are wonderfully mixed by the underrated director Gregory La Cava (My Man Godfrey), who captures the brashness of '30s female chatter in a much pleasanter way than the more famous The Women. Hepburn's sublime attempts to wrestle with the line about calla lilies being in bloom will make you smile long after the movie's over.

The Shop Around the Corner

One of the most charming and romantic films around, this 1940 comic romance finds James Stewart (Vertigo, It's A Wonderful Life) working in a small shop in Budapest and longing for a girl to call his own. His coworker, Margaret Sullavan, feels the same, and soon they are both corresponding and falling in love with their respective pen pals. What they don't realize is that they are writing to and falling in love with each other, but the problem is that they can't stand each other in person. The beguiling nature of the mistaken identity formula that influenced countless films is done to perfection here, and the wry combativeness and delightful banter between the two leads makes this a very special film. --Robert Lane

Eclipse Series 8 - Lubitsch Musicals (The Love Parade / The Smiling Lieutenant / One Hour with You / Monte Carlo) (Criterion Collection)

No Description Available.
Genre: Musicals
Rating: NR
Release Date: 12-FEB-2008
Media Type: DVD

Ernst Lubitsch enjoyed one of the brightest directorial careers of the 1920s and '30s, so much so that "the Lubitsch touch" became a household phrase--an ineffable meringue of visual wit and flawless timing, ribald humor and emotional delicacy, and a genius for planting all manner of naughty notions in his viewers' minds without doing or showing anything censorable. So much charm, style, and inventiveness, yet video distributors have largely neglected his films, especially the ones that helped establish Paramount Pictures as the most cosmopolitan studio in Hollywood. How much more gratifying, then, that the folks at Criterion who first made Trouble in Paradise (1932) available on DVD have bundled Lubitsch's four early-sound musicals in their admirable Eclipse series. This wonderful quartet of still-saucy and beguiling comedies provides bounteous entertainment while also defining a period in film history--and constituting a monument to a director who knew there should be more to "the talkies" than mere talking.

And more to screen musicals than mere "all-singing, all-dancing," which is what lured ticket-buyers at the dawn of movie sound. Instead of the clomping chorus lines and stagebound song-selling of The Broadway Melody and its ilk, Lubitsch created the film operetta, in which song numbers grew out of the characters' behavior and took place in "natural" spaces, and the rhythms and patterns of "normal" dialogue were themselves often musical in stylization. But that's only part of it. Lubitsch also composed a kind of visual music, building motifs through the rhythmic recurrence of staircases, doorways, windows--frames within frames. And then he syncopated it all through the editing, cutting for visual rhymes as well as comic surprise.

His first sound film, The Love Parade (1929), was a sensation with critics, audiences, and Hollywood itself, earning Academy Award nominations for picture, director, and actor Maurice Chevalier. Chevalier plays a nobleman recalled to his mythical Mittel-European land of Sylvania after his extracurricular activities in Paris while serving as a diplomatic envoy lead to scandal. The rake is soon joined in a marriage of convenience with Sylvania's queen, played by newcomer Jeanette MacDonald. Banish all thoughts of those treacly MGM musicals with Nelson Eddy that came half a decade later; this Jeanette MacDonald has spirit and sex appeal to burn, and Queen Louise's imperious manner toward a husband ill-made for the role of prince consort sets off a droll battle of the sexes. At a running time of 112 minutes there are some longueurs, but the stars are in splendid form, and they get yeoman backup from the sparkling Lillian Roth and astonishingly limber music-hall comic Lupino Lane as a couple of servants. Lubitsch, already established in silent films as the master of innuendo with closed boudoir doors, continues his censor-defying tricks with sound: among other things, allowing the punchline of a ribald joke to be heard, but not Chevalier's lead-up to it, seen in elaborate pantomime through a distant window. (Note: Victor Schertzinger's song "Dream Lover," introduced in this movie, would do evocative duty--mostly uncredited--on the soundtracks of numerous Paramount films of the '30s and '40s.)

Monte Carlo, unlike Sylvania, is a real place, but that's beside the point; all the films in this set unreel in a Europe of the Berlin-born Lubitsch's own imagining, adroitly realized by the Paramount art department under Hans Dreier. Monte Carlo also happens to be the title of Lubitsch's second musical (1930), which teams the director again with Jeanette MacDonald but not Chevalier (busy on other Paramount projects). She's a scatterbrained countess who's stepped out of her wedding gown to avoid marrying a silly-ass duke (Claude Allister) and hopped the first train handy--especially handy, given that she's in her lingerie. The Chevalier part is taken by Scottish-born musical comedy star Jack Buchanan, playing a count who decides to romance her in the guise of a hairdresser. As scripted by Ernest Vajda, this is very much not a romance of equals--the man always has the upper hand and the last laugh--yet the strapping MacDonald looks as if she could thrash the reedy Buchanan within an inch of his life. The film's greatest claim to fame is its bravura, still-exhilarating "Beyond the Blue Horizon" sequence, in which MacDonald sings that song out the window of her train compartment and everything in the known world, from the chug-chugging engine to the fringe quivering on the windowshade to entire sunny fields populated with farmworkers, joins in ecstatic support of the melody. A landmark sequence; and yet the movie's most magical instance of the Lubitsch touch is a quiet moment with the countess striding in profile through a Monte Carlo park one evening, a man stepping up to flirt with her, a cutaway to his friend as an offscreen slap is heard, and back to a shot of the countess still in profile, still striding, unperturbed, her rhythm unbroken. Sublime.

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) is an especially welcome element of the set, given that it was for many years thought to have been lost. It also marks a salutary advance over the previous films, as Lubitsch's first collaboration with writer Samson Raphaelson; Raphaelson became the director's most invaluable creative partner, the two working in such harmony that Raphaelson proposed some of the most "Lubitschean" visual ideas in their films and Lubitsch came up with some of the funniest lines. Raphaelson may also have been instrumental in nudging the director toward a more egalitarian sexual politics--something to be applauded not out of political correctness but because comedy between equally matched parties tends to be much richer and funnier than comedy at the expense of one person (or gender), as in Monte Carlo. The Smiling Lieutenant builds toward the unlikely but very satisfying collusion of the two women in playboy-officer Maurice Chevalier's life, played by Claudette Colbert at her most exquisite (in normally verboten left profile!) and Miriam Hopkins, who would go on to shine for Lubitsch in Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living (1933). (As an early promissory note on those great performances, savor her self-introduction as the daughter of the King of Flausenthurm: "I may be a princess, but I'm also a girl!")

Nineteen-thirty-two was a busy year for Lubitsch. Besides the antiwar film The Man I Killed, an episode in the omnibus film If I Had a Million, and his masterpiece Trouble in Paradise, he made the fourth film in the Eclipse set, One Hour With You. On this, his final Paramount musical, he cut himself some slack. First, it's a remake of his first truly Lubitschean film in Hollywood, the 1924 silent comedy of infidelity The Marriage Circle; for another thing, the initial plan was that George Cukor should direct following Lubitsch's detailed instructions. That didn't fly, and soon Lubitsch took over, completed the picture, and denied Cukor any credit (credit Cukor still felt he deserved decades later). However fraught the production may have been, One Hour With You emerged as a delightful musical comedy, with Chevalier and MacDonald together again as André and Colette, a high-society Parisian couple with a perfect marriage--till Colette's girlhood pal Mitzi (Genevieve Tobin) sets out to seduce André. The film boasts the catchiest song score of the bunch--especially when Chevalier is confiding his temptations directly to the audience, which happens frequently. Like The Love Parade and The Smiling Lieutenant, One Hour With You was nominated for the Academy Award as best picture of its year.

Each film in Lubitsch Musicals has been impeccably transferred to DVD. The prints are crisp and luminous (apart from some shots of MacDonald on the train in Monte Carlo), and in the case of the three earliest titles, something quite rare: the DVDs preserve the early-sound frame ratio of 1.20:1. Yes, it's momentarily startling to encounter this tall format--most of all in the hilariously iconic representation of "Paris" that opens The Love Parade--but distraction soon gives way to deep satisfaction at seeing the original design and composition of Lubitsch's shots. As usual with Eclipse offerings, there are no extras on the DVDs, but the liner notes are models of lucidity, critically and historically. --Richard T. Jameson

To Be or Not to Be

Just as Roberto Benigni found himself on the receiving end of some finger-wagging for making a comedy set during the Holocaust, so the great Ernst Lubitsch caught some heat for this extraordinary 1942 satire set behind enemy lines during World War II. In his best performance on film, Jack Benny stars as Joseph Tura, the lead actor and head of a Polish theater troupe that is suddenly enlisted as a Resistance organization when an American pilot (Robert Stack) requires protection. The twist is that the pilot has been having a series of trysts with Tura's wife (Carole Lombard), the hilarious evidence being the disruptive departure of Stack's character from a theater audience each night as the hammy Tura unknowingly cues the lovers by launching into Hamlet's famous soliloquy. The remarkable script by Edwin Justus Mayer ingeniously folds the tensions of a betrayed marriage into the comic suspense surrounding Tura and company's efforts to pull off a Mission: Impossible-like sting on the local Nazi command. Many unforgettable moments and lines of dialogue adorn this black comedy, and the performances--most memorably Sig Ruman's crisp volleys with Benny--are a dream. Above it all, however, is Lubitsch's unmistakable Continentalism, his accent on Old World manners especially in a dangerous situation, suggesting the Nazis' very vulgarity was a reflection of their profound evil. --Tom Keogh

Ninotchka

Garbo Talks! proclaimed ads when silent star Greta Garbo debuted in talkies. Nine years and 12 classic screen dramas later the gifted movie legend was ready for another change. Garbo Laughs! cheered the publicity for her first comedy a frothy tale of a dour Russian envoy sublimating her womanhood for Soviet brotherhood until she falls for a suave Parisian man-about-town (Melvyn Douglas). Working from a cleverly barbed script written in part by Billy Wilder director Ernst Lubitsch knew better than anyone how to marry refinement with sublime wit. "At least twice a day the most dignified human being is ridiculous" he explained about his acclaimed Lubitsch Touch. That's how we see Garbo's lovestruck Ninotchka: serenly dignified yet endearing ridiculous. Garbo laughs. So will you.Running Time: 110 min.System Requirements:Running Time 110 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY Rating: NR UPC: 012569566828

Ah, those fun-loving Communists! In Ninotchka three Soviets make their way to Paris to sell off imperial jewels to raise money to buy tractors for the USSR. When Grand Duchess Swana (Ina Claire), former owner of the jewels, discovers what's happening, she deploys her lover Leon (Melvyn Douglas) to recover her gems. He starts a court proceeding while seducing the three bumbling Soviets with the luxuries of capitalistic life. The delay of the sale is noticed in Moscow, and Comrade Ninotchka (Greta Garbo) is dispatched to Paris to settle the matter. Soon after arrival, she meets Leon, who is charmed by her severe, uptight manner and her stunning beauty ("I love Russians! Comrade, I've been fascinated by your five-year plan for the last 15 years"), and he sets about wooing her, despite her disbelief in love (it's merely a "chemical reaction," she dourly informs him). Romance, jealousy, and capitalistic frivolity ensue.

When this film was released in 1939, it was advertised as "Garbo laughs," as it was her first and only comedy. The film, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, is amusing not only for its story line, but also for its dated look at early Communism (Ninotchka keeps a photo of a stern-looking Lenin by her bedside, although she feels uncomfortable doing so in a room that costs 2,000 francs a night, the price of a cow back home). The satirical image of the young Communist fighting against corrupt Western ways seems somewhat idealistic today but nonetheless provided levity during the shaky political times of the film's release. Viewers may be jarred by the casual "Heil Hitler" greeting of a couple at the train station, but overall this film holds up as one of Lubitsch's masterpieces and a lighter glimpse of the mysterious Garbo. --Jenny Brown

Heaven Can Wait (Criterion Collection)

The last masterwork by Ernst Lubitsch--whose other gems include Trouble in Paradise, Lady Windermere's Fan, Ninotchka, and The Shop Around the Corner--Heaven Can Wait was nominated for best picture and director Oscars in its day but largely neglected thereafter. Partly it's a matter of no one expecting a 1943 Fox movie featuring Don Ameche, the star of so many bland Technicolor musicals at that studio, to be a comedy of rare loveliness. Also, there's the confusion engendered by the existence of another film with the same title: the 1978 Warren Beatty movie that was the remake of a classic '40s comedy-fantasy--but Here Comes Mr. Jordan, not Heaven Can Wait. It's high time to get our priorities straight.

Following his demise, the aristocratic Henry Van Cleve (Ameche), having no hope of Paradise, betakes himself "where all his life so many people had told him to go." Hell, or at least its antechamber, would appear to be a luxury hotel in neoclassical mode, and--this is a Lubitsch movie, after all--His Satanic Excellency (Laird Cregar) is a perfect gentleman and the most gracious of hosts. To establish his credentials for spending eternity there, Henry begins to narrate a life which, though lacking any notable crimes, "has been one continuous misdemeanor."

Centered in a Fifth Avenue mansion left over from 19th-century New York, the film is Lubitsch and writing partner Samson Raphaelson's valentine to "an age that has vanished, when it was possible to live for the charm of living." Spanning more than half a century, it chronicles the high points of Henry's life so delicately that--in a variation on the strategies of Lubitsch-Raphaelson's risque '30s classics--it leaves some of them entirely offscreen, their emotional impact measured by what the characters feel and say about them afterward. We'll leave it to you to find out what they are. Suffice it to say that Ameche and Gene Tierney--as Martha, the love of Henry's life--give performances far subtler than anything else in their Fox contract-player careers, and there are sublime opportunities for those peerless character actors Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette, and Marjorie Main. --Richard T. Jameson

Newly deceased playboy Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche) presents himself to the outer offices of Hades where he asks a bemused Satan for permission to enter the gates of Hell. Though the Devil doubts Henry's sins will qualify him for eternal damnation, Henry proceeds to recount a lifetime spent wooing and pursuing women. Nominated for Academy Awards for Best Picture and Director, Heaven Can Wait is an enduring classic that showcases director Ernst Lubitsch's trademark blend of wit, urbanity, and grace.

Trouble in Paradise - Criterion Collection

Trouble in Paradise is the supreme example of "the Lubitsch touch," that mastery of comic timing, diamond-cutter precision, and Continental sophistication that made Ernst Lubitsch a household name and the real star of every movie he directed. A pair of prodigiously talented, utterly charming scoundrels (Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins) become personal assistants to an aristocratic Parisian widow (Kay Francis). Their target is her fortune, but she's such an elegant lady, and so agreeably smitten with her new right-hand man, that he's tempted to pursue a secondary objective. Marshall, Hopkins, and Francis aren't remembered as major stars, but in this enchanted moment they are sublime. Likewise the peerlessly pixilated Edward Everett Horton and Charlie Ruggles as the widow's stuffed-shirt suitors. Trouble in Paradise is one of the best comedies ever made. There's not a line, word, or pause that doesn't belong exactly where it is, when it is, as it is. --Richard T. Jameson

When thief Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) meets his true love in pick-pocket Lily (Miriam Hopkins), they embark on a scam to rob lovely perfume company executive Mariette Colet (Kay Francis). But when Gaston becomes romantically entangles with Mme. Colet, their larcenous ruse is jeopardized and Gaston is forced to choose between two beautiful women. Legendary director Ernst Lubitsch's masterful touch is in full flower Trouble in Paradise, a pinnacle of the sophisticated romantic comedy, loaded with sparkling dialogue, witty innuendo, and elegant comic invention.

Lubitsch in Berlin (The Doll/Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin/The Oyster Princess/I Don't Want to be a Man/Sumurun/Anna Boleyn/The Wildcat) (5pc)

The Eyes of the Mummy

The Marriage Circle

Ernst Lubitsch's first American comedy masterpiece, the film that kept him in the States. Reeling from the difficulties encountered on his first American film, "Rosita," Lubitsch was ready to return to his native Germany until Warner Brothers, looking for an identity other than Rin Tin Tin, offered the director a chance to make his own unique films. In "The Marriage Circle," Lubitsch's influential silent comedy effortlessly follows the love and lust, flirtations and phoniness among several upper-crust citizens of Vienna. In Lubitsch's deft hands, "The Marriage Circle" continues the tradition of manners comedy and shows the "touch" the director was famous for. Lubitsch knew that in an atmosphere of hushed whispers and discretion, a kiss can carry quite an erotic charge. To see "The Marriage Circle" in this glistening print derived from the original negative, with an appropriately lilting score by the Mont Alto Orchestra, is to fall in love with the movies--and Ernst Lubitsch--all over again.