Ernst Lubitsch

• Born: January 28, 1892
• Birthplace: Berlin, Germany
• Died: November 30, 1947
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

German-born film director and producer

An important filmmaker in Germany, Lubitsch immigrated to the United States to become famous for directing sophisticated and witty comedies.

Areas of achievement: Entertainment; theater

Early Life

Ernst Lubitsch (urnst LEW-bihch) was born in Berlin, Germany, the only child of Simon Lubitsch, a successful tailor, and his wife. Lubitsch helped in his father’s shop while he attended the Sophien-Gymnasium, where he performed in school plays, often acting the roles of old men. His father found Lubitsch totally unsuited to work on the shop floor, so he made him the bookkeeper. At sixteen, the boy determined to become an actor. During the day, he kept his father’s books; at night, he played low comedy in vaudeville, cabarets, and music halls. Though he rejected his father’s men’s clothing business, it obviously had an effect upon him. In his films, his characters are always elegantly dressed. In 1911, at age nineteen, Lubitsch was accepted as an apprentice at the Deutsches Theater on the Schumannstrasse, with the famous Max Reinhardt as mentor. He traveled abroad with Reinhardt’s company, playing small roles in classic plays.

His theater work paid very little, so in 1912 he sought additional income by working at the Bioscope film studios in Berlin as a handyman. There he discovered his true medium. In 1913, he began acting in films and rapidly became the foremost screen comedian in Germany. From 1914 to 1919, Lubitsch both directed and acted in twenty-seven short films, playing Meyer, a comic Yiddish clerk (drawing, in part, upon his own clumsiness and inadequacies in his father’s shop). His character fit the sly, greedy stereotype and, several decades later, would have been considered anti-Semitic and grossly offensive, but, at the time, broad ethnic humor was perfectly acceptable and extremely popular. This was a generation before Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.

From 1919 on, Lubitsch moved largely from acting to directing. He directed fourteen features, trying his hand at every genre; foremost among the films of this period are 1919’s satirical Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess) and the historical epics 1919’s Madam DuBarry (Passion in the United States) and 1920’s Sumurun (One Arabian Night in the United States). In 1923, his reputation was such that he was invited to Hollywood to direct Rosita, a grand-scale costume drama featuring the major star Mary Pickford. Thereafter, all his pictures were made in America, and soon other prominent German directors were following him to Hollywood.

Life’s Work

Lubitsch’s career reached its height during his years in California, as did his personal life. In 1922, on his second trip to America, he married Helene Kraus. Their marriage ended in 1930. In 1933, he became a naturalized American citizen. In 1935, he was married again, to Vivian Gaye. That marriage ended in divorce in 1944 but produced a daughter, Nicola.

After filming Rosita, Lubitsch continued to direct silent pictures, including The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927), starring Ramón Novarro and Norma Shearer. During this period, he directed other silent-film stars—among them Pola Negri, Clara Bow, and John Barrymore. In these years, he also began to produce films. The Love Parade (1929) and Monte Carlo (1930) were his first talking pictures. He immediately introduced innovations in filming. He freed the camera from its static position by filming scenes for which the dialogue was dubbed in later. The Love Parade and Monte Carlo were among early Paramount musicals featuring Maurice Chevalier and/or Jeanette MacDonald. Their best remembered pairing would come in 1934 in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s The Merry Widow. Lubitsch treated their musical numbers not as set pieces but as a natural part of the plot.

During the next two decades, Lubitsch directed a succession of critically and commercially successful films: Trouble in Paradise (1932), Ninotchka (1939), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), To Be or Not to Be (1942), Heaven Can Wait (1943), and Cluny Brown (1946). One of his few dramatic films during this period, Broken Lullaby (1932), was especially admired for its skillful camera use but failed to achieve the success of his comedies. Some of the biggest Hollywood stars of the period between World War I and World War II were happy to work with him: Lionel Barrymore, Miriam Hopkins, Herbert Marshall, Kay Francis, Charles Laughton, Gary Cooper, Fredric March, and Marlene Dietrich.

Early in the shooting of That Lady in Ermine(1948) with Betty Grable, Lubitsch suffered a heart attack. Otto Preminger was called in to complete the filming. On November 30, 1947, Lubitsch suffered another, and this time fatal, attack. Although Preminger had done the bulk of the work on the film, as a tribute to the great director, Lubitsch receives sole credit on the screen.

Significance

Lubitsch’s comedies usually feature clever, sophisticated dialogue, but he is a master of the visual effect that may express a key point, or even the entire theme of the picture, without a spoken word. In 1932, Paramount released If I Had a Million, an omnibus film made up of eight sketches directed by seven different directors. Lubitsch directed the two shortest sketches, “The Street Walker” and “The Clerk.” The premise is that a rich man who thinks he is about to die decides to give a million dollars each to eight people whose names he randomly selects from the telephone directory. In a five-minute, almost wordless sequence, Laughton plays a timid clerk who, upon realizing that he is a millionaire, walks through four different doors, each taking him one rung higher up the company ladder. He finally reaches the pinnacle. He says not a word to the president, Mr. Brown, but gives him what is called a raspberry. In “The Street Walker,” upon receiving her million dollars, Wynne Gibson as the courtesan goes directly to the finest hotel in the city and takes the best room. She goes to bed in her underwear, then sits up and thinks for a moment. With a look of sheer pleasure, she removes her stockings and draws the covers back over her. She will not be going out again tonight.

Lubitsch’s comedies exist in a whimsical world of his own creation. For example, in backward Marshovia, setting for The Merry Widow, a trial is solemnly conducted after the judge orders the onlookers to remove their goats from the courtroom. Next, the ladder that the accused, Chevalier, used to climb the widow Sonia’s wall is presented as evidence, and the guard dog that was bribed with salami is called as a witness. No one in the courtroom bats an eye. These scenes represent the comic legacy of Lubitsch.

Bibliography

Barnes, Peter. To Be or Not to Be. London: British Film Institute, 2002. A detailed study of Lubitsch’s 1942 film, preceded by brief biographical information and a cursory review of the director’s career.

Paul, William. Ernst Lubitsch’s American Comedy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Emphasizes the sexuality as well as the sociological and stylistic significance of Lubitsch’s comedies.

Poague, Leland A. The Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch. Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1978. Analyzes thirteen of Lubitsch’s films from the point of view of his auteurism—that is, the director’s vision as expressed in his work.

Thomas, Lawrence B. The MGM Years. New York: Columbia House, 1971. Survey of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musicals from 1929 to 1971. Briefly treats The Merry Widow and Lubitsch, but more extensively its stars, Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald.

Weinberg, Herman G. The Lubitsch Touch: A Critical Study. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968. The author is Lubitsch’s unofficial biographer. The first half of the book is an extended definition of the “Lubitsch touch.” The second half is a mélange of excerpts from the screenplay of Ninotchka, interviews with collaborators, tributes, and a brief reminiscence by his daughter.