Griffith of Europe” because of his flair for making large-scale historical spectacles but with a refreshingly modern approach to sexuality, including Carmen ( Gypsy Blood), Madame DuBarry ( Passion), Anna Boleyn ( Deception), and Das Weib des Pharao ( The Wife of Pharaoh). In Germany he had become known as “the D. Lubitsch (1892–1947), a native of Berlin, was imported from Germany to Hollywood by Mary Pickford in 1922. Lubitsch’s talent and originality are stupefying.” Yet today Lubitsch is no longer the familiar name to moviegoers that he once was. In the words of one of his actors, David Niven, Lubitsch was “the masters’ master.” Renoir, another great European émigré director, went so far as to say of Lubitsch, “He invented the modern Hollywood.” Welles declared in 1964 that Lubitsch “is a giant.
The director of supremely stylish classics including Trouble in Paradise, Ninotchka, and The Shop Around the Corner, Lubitsch was revered in his day by such other leading filmmakers as Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Max Ophüls, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Preston Sturges. That way I never allow myself to write one sentence that I would be ashamed to show to my great friend, Ernst Lubitsch.” Lighting a cigar – in another homage to Lubitsch, who was rarely found without his Upmann – Wilder told an interviewer in 1989, “I made that sign. The rectangular gilt frame, with its suggestion of faded elegance, had a modernist shape of roughly Panavision proportions, like the splendid later films Wilder directed while emulating his mentor, including works of varied public reception such as The Apartment, Avanti!, and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. The lettering was elegant old-fashioned cursive, slanted to the right and shaded at its left edge with baroque curlicue. Saul Steinberg, the New Yorker cartoonist, designed the sign expressly for Wilder. “How would Lubitsch do it?” read the sign on the wall of Billy Wilder’s modest working writer’s office on Little Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. This man was so strong that when he was asked by Hollywood to work there, he not only didn’t lose his Berlin style, but he converted the Hollywood industry to his own way of expression. His films were loaded with a kind of wit which was specifically the essence of the intellectual Berlin in those days. Lubitsch was a great example of this ironic approach to the big problems of life. In this short Renaissance, the Jews, not only of Germany but also of the surrounding countries, brought to this capital a certain spirit which was probably the best expression of the time. Berlin, before Hitler, was blossoming with talents.
It is what happened to Germany after the defeat of 1918. To maintain the admirable balance of nature, God provides to the defeated nations the gift of Art. Excerpted from McBride’s new critical study, How Did Lubitsch Do It? (Columbia University Press, June 2018), with the kind permission of the author.
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