The Lubitsch Touch

If all the art and literature of the twentieth century, a century that took itself so seriously (though its record for slaughter is hard to match), were dropped into a dumpster, it wouldn’t be worth one work by Michelangelo or Botticelli.  Do you mind if I say that?

Here in our own nervous century we swim in a sea of cultural trash, illuminated by video games that excite the shooters, by pornography that has changed the shape of the human body (it's hairless now, as in fifth-century Greece and the Italian Renaissance; the dicks, even in quiescence, dwarf their predecessors; the breasts, which were out of control for a while, have again become natural), and by the preachings of the evangelists of Success, who promise us transformations (regard their tweets) beyond even the come shots that conclude the ritual sequence of postures in the videos, the actress licking her lips in anticipation.

And yet we ourselves are disembodied, and function with avatars like Mardi Gras masks on sticks.  We are discouraged from actual sex, and urged to cultivate narcissism and the internet, which are strangely aligned.  And indeed, one has learned to fear women who kick-box, or have tattoos.  

Beauty, that royal danger, that puritan's foe, is out of style. Our movie stars exhibit only a serviceable regularity of feature, often not even that, and appear in morality tales as predictable as the postures of the porn stars.

Action films have dwindled into displays of animation; even James Bond has become a cartoon.  And a film by Quentin Tarantino or Tim Burton can ruin the evening.

Love is out of style.  "Alliances" are in style.  Business plans are in style.  Brad Pitt made an entire film about the success of a business plan.  So elevating.  But that's where we are.  People fall in love with business plans.

One wonders what one does like about cinemah, and why one wants to make films, and when I’m in that mood I always think of Ernst Lubitsch.  Now, nobody can make a film like Lubitsch, let’s get that straight, but one can be inspired by him to make something as light as a soufflé, as subtle as a secret, as funny as a fart.

If only.

My favorite Lubitsch movie, Trouble in Paradise, is about a master thief who, in a Venice hotel (Grand Canal Venice, not LA Venice), robs someone in another room.  Then, resuming his pose as a baron, he hosts a dinner in his own suite for a countess he plans to seduce.  “And you see that moon, waiter?  I want to see that moon in the champagne.”  The waiter writes it down: “Moon in champagne.”  When the lady arrives, she and Gaston (his name is Gaston) pick each other’s pockets, discover that they’re both thieves, and fall in love.  And we fall in love with them falling in love.

But don’t expect a “cool” hero.  Suave, yes.  Charming, wow.  But not cool.  “Cool” is eminently a Puritan virtue.  (See Catholics and Puritans.)  Max Weber tells us that during the English Civil War the Puritans, because of their unemotional determination, were able to ride in strict formation, in cool formation, toward the undisciplined Cavaliers, Musketeer types who relied on gallantry and beer.

Henry James says of Daisy Miller’s first reaction to Winterbourne that she “had never seen anything so cool”—the first instance I know of the modern usage, and if I hear it much more I’m going to lose mine.  The attitude is one of detachment and distance, and becomes virulent in the fifties, Elvis and Marlon sneering at it all.  They are outsiders; the first line of Camus’s L'Etranger (The Outsider) is “Mother died today.  Or maybe it was yesterday.”

The opposite thing is best exemplified by the courtier John Denham, who in that same Civil War pleaded for the life of George Wither, a Puritan, “on the ground that, so long as Wither lived, he himself could not be accounted the worst poet in England.”

Gaston is not cool; he is operatic.  His every speech is animated by passion, and he is splendidly overplayed by Herbert Marshall, who lost a leg in World War I, which has to be disguised in the wide shots.  He was nevertheless an accomplished ladies’ man, and along with Peter Lorre and George Sanders, he’s my favorite actor.

 "Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored...

I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck."

A Paris radio news report on one of Gaston’s spectacular thefts is followed by a commercial for Colet Perfume—“Cleopatra was a famous tantalizer, But she did it with her little atomizer!”—and now we’re on Madame Colet herself, the young widow who owns the company and refuses to cut salaries in spite of the Depression (we’re in 1932).  Such a smooth transition.

At the opera Gaston steals her jeweled purse (we never see these thefts happen; action for Lubitsch is vulgar), and when she offers a reward for the purse larger than he could get by selling it, he simply returns it—and plans to steal her money.  But they fall in love.  And we fall in love with them falling in love.  So now he loves two women.  And that’s the plot.

It moves incredibly fast.  I’ve watched it and watched it and watched it to figure out how it moves so fast.  The credit sequence of The Outlaw Josey Wales moves fast; I’m scarcely a Clint Eastwood guy but I must say it’s a tight little film in itself.  Trouble in Paradise, though, is a whole movie.

Partly it's that Lubitsch delights in ellipsis, which of course is always good for the budget.  I can think of three of his films in which scenes are played out in mime beyond glass.  In Trouble in Paradise a whole evening of seduction is done with voices over an Art Deco clock marking the hours.  Peter Lawford goes into a room to punch Charles Boyer (this is in Cluny Brown), and comes out having lent him money.

What any artist worth the name wants is to avoid Saying Things.  An artist wants to show you something, make you feel something, not Say Something.  If you’re experiencing a piece of art that’s trying to Tell You Something, you’re in the wrong hands.  And yet, who can avoid it?  In Shakespeare the characters, even the speeches, have lives of their own—they Say Things—but Shakespeare himself is nowhere to be found.  We others, however, speak with our own voices, and commit the sin of Saying Things.

What did Lubitsch Say?  He said, there’s no Mr. Perfect or Ms. Right.  He said, if your wife sleeps with somebody else it’s no big deal.  He said, why make an enemy?  He said (or rather the little boy in Heaven Can Wait said), if you want to win a girl you have to have lots of beetles.  He said sex, he said alcohol, he said big cigars, all with the utmost refinement.  And he said the over-refinement of being in love, from which all sweet ironies spring. 

In 1917 he made a short based on a Strauss operetta: A Berlin bon viveur who goes out drinking and dancing every night gets a subpoena to report to jail for a day "for disgraceful behavior". But when the cops come for him his wife's lover has to pretend to be him to save her reputation, and the lover does the time.  Meanwhile she disguises herself and goes to the party, and her husband picks her up!  Then the revelation, and from now on he takes her out drinking and dancing with him.

In Heaven Can Wait a rich young man falls in love with a woman and marries her, and continues to have the other women he wants.  He has it all.  Lubitsch loves to show people having it all—ain't it awful?  And when he's old and dying a beautiful nurse goes into his room and, well, closes the door.  As he tells the Devil (for he has not bothered to report to heaven) "Who could ask for a more beautiful death?"  And here, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, death imitates art: Lubitsch himself died in the arms of a call girl.

Interesting detail: his wife (the character's, not Lubitsch's) leaves him for her parents’ house is in Kansas, and these parents don’t speak to each other; their black servant conveys messages from one end of the breakfast table to the other, and with perfect humor and dignity.  You don’t get much of that in 1942, but that’s Lubitsch.

Clarence Muse

While we’re on the permissiveness that gives such taste to his sauce, he has a Wildean indulgence for embezzlers, and much in common with Wilde, whose people are always finding out that they're not "good"—loveable, but not good.  But this is where Lubitsch begins, not where he ends.  (In fact he made a silent version of Lady Windermere's Fan.)  They both loved everything about being a gentleman, except being a gentleman.

Something in him loves larceny.  In Ninotchka some Russian rubes come to Paris to sell jewels that had once belonged to the Grand-Duchess-in-exile, who's already in Paris, and who keeps a man (Melvyn Douglas), who calls on the boys: “Well, gentlemen, what about my proposition?”  “What proposition?”  “I just said, let's have some lunch!”  Cut to hookers and champagne, and the deal is developing.  In A Royal Scandal Catherine the Great (Tallulah Bankhead) confronts her embarrassed chancellor over his  embezzling: a little I can understand, she says, “but take it easy!”

We might have wished to say the same to our own chancellors, from Wall Street to Athens.

“Everybody and his Aunt Nellie,” as Audrey says in Charade, has a theory of “the Lubitsch touch,” and I have mine.  When Maurice Chevalier died, Lawrence Durrell described his appeal as “tender insolence,” and this says it.  Chevalier came to his Hollywood prominence in Lubitsch’s movies, and embodied the Lubitsch spirit, as did the screenwriter Samson Raphaelson.  I like to think that both of them took fire from Lubitsch.  Perhaps I’m oversimplifying.

Lubitsch's insolence pairs a superior tenderness with a daring attitude to pleasure.  In his own piece on Lubitsch, Peter Bogdanovich connects innocence to sophistication, and I like that; the true sophisticate is a naïf.

And oh, how Lubitsch was imitated!  He founded a whole genre, the screwball comedy.  Everybody tried to be Lubitsch.  His protégé Billy Wilder kept a sign up in his office: HOW WOULD LUBITSCH DO IT?

Pointless.  Wilder himself was too intellectual.  Everything in Jean-Luc Godard—the semiotics, the study of the image qua image, the postmodern mind split off from its referents—it's all there in Wilder.  And that’s the trouble.  Some Like It Hot is a gorgeous film, worth seeing just for Tony Curtis’s Cary Grant imitation.  But in much of Wilder's work the intellectual baggage is heavy.  Intellect is not refinement; intellect can be acquired.  (None of us know what we look like; these things are hidden from us; we can only appreciate them in others.)  And except for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which is all intellect, after Irma la Douce Wilder's films became crass.

Trouble in Paradise is a poem.  The effort is always to make poems.

I was about to say that To Be or Not to Be, about actors playing Nazis to escape Nazis, is my second-favorite Lubitsch, but then I thought of his The Merry Widow, another operetta (this one with sound), that's like drinking champagne—light, bubbly, intoxicating.  I hate decisions.   

In The Merry Widow Chevalier plays a womanizer-as-national-hero, and in his courtroom speech he pleads guilty: "Any man who can dance through life with hundreds of women, and is willing to walk through life with one—should be hanged!"  The peasants leap up and applaud.  On the other hand, To Be or Not to Be is a winter film; it gives me a cozy feeling that I also get in Some Like It Hot—a strange kind of warmth, I don’t know what it is, that can only happen in black-and white movies.

And it has Carole Lombard, my favorite actress along with Irene Dunne and Margaret Rutherford.  Beautiful as she was, Lombard never took herself seriously.  She said of her great love Clark Gable, “If his pee-pee was one inch shorter they’d be calling him the Queen of Hollywood.”

Sample dialogue with Jack Benny: “It’s becoming ridiculous the way you grab attention—whenever I start to tell a story you finish it, if I go on a diet you lose the weight, if I have a cold you cough, and if we should ever have a baby I’m not so sure I’d be the mother.”  “I’d be satisfied to be the father.”

A distaste for schmaltz is one of Lubitsch’s two great freedoms.  In-love-ness, OK, but you won’t find any of the sentimentalities that inform lesser filmmakers—childhood (invented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau), Christmas (invented by Charles Dickens) or America (invented by Frank Capra).

And he has a Shakespearian freedom from dogma that was singular in the last century: no Freud, no Marx.  Knowledge of psychoanalysis didn’t become general until the 50s, so he was able to spoof it in That Uncertain Feeling without being very deep about it. 

But Marx was the flavor of the 30s—all the kids were communists, real members of the Party, it was the thing, and of course in the 50s McCarthy ambushed them.  Stalin was a hero, Roosevelt was inaugurating revolutionary social programs, and even the future Nixonite John Ford made The Grapes of Wrath.  Not Lubitsch.  When Gaston confronts an outraged Trotskyite he ticks him off in Russian.  (Ah, how the super-hero has changed: for Lubitsch he was someone who followed opera, knew eighteenth-century furniture and spoke several languages.)

When the rubes in Ninotchka fail to make the deal, Ninotchka herself, an unsmiling puritan from the collective, comes to Paris and encounters Melvyn.  Love, baby.  “GARBO LAUGHS!” said the posters.  But the Countess blackmails her back to Moscow and to the Commissar, played, in an inspired piece of casting, by Bela Lugosi.

 Dracula in Lenin drag

To be a communist was to commit the sin of seriousness—bad manners.  But though Lubitsch presented himself as frivolous and easy-going—"the playboy," Graham Geene called him—he had the strength to resist, nay to mock, that whole zeitgeist.  Frank Capra was still selling a socialist vision in the Why We Fight series, and the Germans were attacking our Soviet allies, but even in wartime Lubitsch didn’t join the parade.

Peter Lawford (a young fool), at the outbreak of war: "I'm going to write another letter to The Times."  Boyer (indulging him): "Good!"  "No—no, I'll join the RAF!"  "Better!  Join the RAF!  Rise above The Times!"

Now look, Freud and Marx were brilliant men who gave their lives to trying to help people.  But enough!

And I love high spirits.  My own comic novels are inspired by P.G. Wodehouse.  I’ve wandered elsewhere, but I’d rather do comedy than anything else.  And in film, Lubitsch is the master.

You may, if you wish, leave comments here.

And in the spirit of Lubitsch,

Chocolate and Champagne

Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

Frankly, I forgive myself.

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Vladimir Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls

If it weren’t for Lolita we might never have heard of Nabokov, which would be a huge loss. Success is so often a matter of scandal.
 
I like P.G. Wodehouse best; no one else gets us so high. But when I descend into actual literature—an abrasive experience for my sensitive soul, but one that has allowed me to fiddle away my time unproductively—I cannot but acknowledge that the five great novels of the twentieth century are Ulysses, A la recherche, Gatsby, Under the Volcano and Lolita.

Nabokov's images fill me with awe; his phrases are tiny masterpieces; his sentences, galleries with their own exquisite shapes. But even in his most gorgeous stories he can be something of a stuffed shirt:

The snag with Vladimir Nabokov was
A dyspepsia almost as noisome as Waugh's.
Life offered neither
A very long breather
From constant unbearable irks.
Now I've wrung my enjoyment from both of these men
I need not be exposed to them ever again
But I suffer the scourge
Of a lingering urge
To pour Eno all over their works!
 
What gives Lolita that extra thing is the confrontation between a cultured European and the American vulgarity embodied by Lolita, with whom he is desperately in love. Then too, one cannot but feel that it's a portrait of Nabokov’s own passion. And passion delivers.

It’s shameless of me to say this—I know nothing of this man’s inner life—but  lust for young girls does emerge elsewhere in his work, and in Lolita he contributed the word “nymphet” to the English language. It's my intuition that his stuffed-shirtism, so at home after all in the 1950s, is a firewall against an unseemly urge. In one of his essays he opines that if the criminal could only write about the crime he wouldn’t have to commit it. Like Dostoyevsky, Lewis Carroll and J. D. Salinger, he converted the obsession into literature. Balthus did it in paint:

But no psychology can touch bottom, and VN would have agreed:

Nabokov was annoyed
By Freud,
Considered Eliot
Beneath yelling at
And Dali
Too far gone to rally;
Waugh regarded Eliot
As brelliot
But thought Picasso
Was an asso.

Nevertheless I will dare to say that his orientation was not a whim. Many people, for example, can be gay on a whim, myself included; but there are also people who can’t imagine any other way of doing it. The conclusion forces itself upon me that sexual preferences are hardwired. One might be grateful if one’s wiring isn't too inconvenient, though there’s nothing terribly convenient about heterosexuality; it can be as big a p. in the a. as the other thing.

It’s OK to like little boys if you’re a king, like Henry II or James I or William III (of William and Mary); or if you’re an aristocrat, like the Earl of Rochester (the Johnny Depp film about him was dreary, so unlike the merry Earl) or Lord Byron; or if you’re a famous novelist like Thomas Mann, or a celebrity poet like W.H. Auden:

Said the Queen to the King, we do frown on
Your choosing our page to go down on
When you meet on the stairs—
And it does give him airs
If you will do the job with your crown on!

But if you’re an average Joe they’ll throw you in the can with gorillas who are as repelled by the vice as church-goers, and will pick on you.

Ditto for little girls: in the literary world you’re somewhat protected. When he publishes his poems in a book Leonard Cohen can say, “The fifteen-year-old girls I wanted when I was fifteen, I have them now. I advise you all to become rich and famous.” But in the popular eye, like Polanski or Woody Allen, you have to watch it. Woody's mentor in Love and Death tells him, “I have come to the conclusion that the best thing is blonde twelve-year-old girls. Two of them, whenever possible.”

Had Nabokov proceeded to his PhD,
Would he have to shake his polymathic rattles at me?
Had Woody Allen only finished his BA,
Where'd his undergradjut exercises be today?

In Lolita Humbert makes his own list: “Marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces. Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds. After all, Dante fell madly in love with Beatrice when she was nine, a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled, in a crimson frock, and this was in 1274, in Florence, at a private feast in the merry month of May. And when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve…”

He might have mentioned Juliet, who was thirteen when she married Romeo, Edgar Poe, who married his cousin when she was thirteen, and that other southerner Jerry Lee Lewis, who married his cousin of thirteen—though Nabokov may not have been following Jerry Lee's career. (If a boy from Alabama marries a girl from Louisiana, are they still cousins?)

Poe
Is slow.
The diction is inflated
And the angst is overrated.

Indeed, one thinks of Margaret Mead and Alfred Kinsey, who tell us that there’s nothing inherently wrong with sex with the young, that it’s the adult hysteria that does the damage.

One thinks also of the pedophile priests in the Catholic Church—of the sheer number of them! Were Mead and Kinsey inspecting us as a tribe they might conclude that it was the norm.

It is a convention in our time to go on TV and say you were abused as a child. If you’re a politician in the Bible Belt, you oppose same-sex marriage and you get caught using a male escort service, you go on TV and say you were abused as a child. The etiology may be dubious, but it works with the public. 

In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which I've just seen, the heroine was abused as a child, the victim was abused as a child, the villain was abused as a child—it explains everything!

As for my own case (I can hear you asking), I’m a narcissist with a taste for older women. Now that I’ve reached a certain age there are no older women, and the guy in the mirror isn’t looking that good. But one presses on. (See In Praise of Older Women.)

Ours is a period of neo-Victorianism. Freud, whatever his ultimate merits, freed us, not only from nineteenth-century prudishness, but from the Christian prohibition that dates from Saint Paul. Freud’s influence took wide hold in the fifties and sixties, just as the birth-control pill was freeing us from the anxiety of getting “caught,” as people used to say, and penicillin was freeing us from the horrors of syphilis and gonorrhea. Oh, we had much too good a time! Then herpes and AIDS, stark parallels to the old scourges, pushed us back toward something more sentimental.

Lolita was written in the early fifties, another dryness of atmosphere, and by his own account Nabokov’s wife stopped him from burning the manuscript. Here is Humbert hating himself even as he possesses his dream:

I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her—after  fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred—I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever—for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation)—and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again—and "oh, no," Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure—all would be shattered.

This, Nabokov insists, is not his remorse but Humbert's: "He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere." 

Harold Bloom introduces his study of Shakespeare, whom he regards as a god (and in his Gnostic parlance he means it), by arguing that Shakespeare was anti-Semitic, that we’ve been misreading The Merchant of Venice for four hundred years. “There’s a price for loving Shakespeare,” he says. Arthur Koestler once remarked that if he threw out his anti-Semitic books he’d be deprived of half his library. It's rather sad. In Moby Dick Ishmael, whose lover is a South-Sea islander, regards the whale's whiteness as the same mark of superiority that gives "the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe." What shall we do with these texts?

Dostoyevsky was an anti-Semitic child-rapist and a hypocrite, who lied even to himself. The only erotic moment in Crime and Punishment is when ten-year-old Polina, step-sister to the Hallmark-Card heroine, comes down some stairs and kisses Raskalnikov. But any such enjoyment is pinned on the child-raping villain of the piece, whom we are encouraged to hate. Dostoyevsky himself was a loathsome man; one wouldn’t have wanted to meet him. But he is the greatest novelist in human memory, and there is no book as passionate, as thrilling or as psychologically intimate as Crime and Punishment.

“The great artists of the world are never Puritans,” said H.L. Mencken, “and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man—that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.”

Martin Amis, a writer of astounding mediocrity, is a better embodiment of our time. He is the son of Kingsley Amis, whose first novel was a hit, after which he collapsed into a lower-middle-class philistinism that dismayed his readers—but there he was, the author of Lucky Jim. And there was Martin—and he was a writer too!—sustaining his career on the same book.

Kingsley Amis
Is justly famous,
And his first book scored it!
But it’s one thing to attract attention, and another to reward it.

When Junior speaks of Nabokov he says, “you would need to venture to the very fringes of literature—Lewis Carroll, William Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade—to find an equivalent emphasis: an emphasis on activities we rightly and eternally hold to be unforgivable.”

Good little man. Straight from the Y.

And English literature—we must have the courage to face it—is dead.

Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. No brains but an intellectual snob.

“I was beastly but never coarse. A high-class sort of heel.”

The Light Touch on Amazon Prime

The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean

The Devil's Pleasure Garden