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.
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.
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.
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.”
"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.
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 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.
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!”
“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.
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).
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.
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.
